Music

From his home in Prague, founder David Boulter talks about bringing the band into the light

Amy Liptrot | Wednesday 21 March, 2012 15:24

Tindersticks are a decidedly late-night band—all bar room loss and swooning lovers—so it is strange to speak to founder member and organ player David Boulter in the bright light of morning. David is at home in Prague, just returned from London after the cancellation of the band’s four Soho Theatre shows due to singer Stuart Staples’s laryngitis. They are disappointed—“it was quite a lot of intense work building up to this”—but could clearly not go ahead without Staples’s distinctive voice in good condition and will reschedule the gigs for later in the year. “After a year of recording the album it feels like a release to go out there and play it,” he says.

The shows, and upcoming tour, will be be centred around new album “The Something Rain”. “It’s the first thing in a long time that we’re really happy with,” says Boulter, “and it’s the first album we’ve made that feels really complete and that everybody had a desire and passion about making. We’re excited to play that.”

The Something Rain keeps the essence of Tindersticks sound but with added experimentation and urgency. For example, “Come Inside” is the band at the at their melodic, romantic best, including unexpected elements like a bell refrain played by David and a seductive saxaphone.

“We reached a point, maybe 10 years ago, with the old Tindersticks where we felt like we’d become a bit bored of each other and stopped for a while,” he explains. “This is the third album since we started again—the first two kind of felt like a continuation of Tindersticks but this felt like something new, it felt exciting. I think that approach was to do with looking for new sounds and a new feel.

“We had a few personal losses in friends and family at that time, and although it was a very sad time it felt like a positive reaction in a way of making us celebrate those people’s lives by doing something we felt proud of.”

The death of Lhasa, the French-Canadian singer who had worked with Tindersticks on duets, coincided with the time they started working on The Something Rain, just before Christmas 2010. David says: “It felt like—although not always people that we knew personally—there was like a phone call or email every week saying ‘did you know so and so passed away?’ And then, my father passed away. There was a lot of death around us at a time when we were feeling a positive feeling of doing something fresh. So it was a weird mixture which obviously affected the album.”

Opening track “Chocolate” bravely does not feature Staples’s voice, but rather a spoken-word story written and read by David. Although the explicit and shocking end to the story didn’t actually happen, he says it’s ‘true to a point’. “It’s sort of like a condensed view of my life in Nottingham for 10 years—the monotony of going out and looking for adventure but not really finding it.

“My father passing away made me reflect on my past. I left Nottingham in 1990, I was 25 at the time, and after 10 years of being in Nottingham it felt like I was always waiting for something to happen, for some excitement, and I suppose in my kind if twisted way writing Chocolate was a way for me to express that kind of feeling of waiting for a shock or for something to jump out at me in some way.”

Although elements of David’s ideas have been used by the band over the years (for example he wrote the lyrics of “My Sister” on the second album, read by Stuart), this album marks his return into the beginning of the songwriting process.

David describes Tindersticks’ records as often starting on tour, writing in dressing rooms. “But this album was more like when we began, it started with me and Stuart sat in a room, just sharing ideas, and it grew out of that really. Then you slowly get other people involved and start building it up like that. I suppose we try to find a way of doing some thing new and also keeping it concise in terms of giving the whole album a feeling. I don’t think we ever like making individual tracks, we always have this bigger picture of a whole album.”

This return to the roots of the band has resulted in their strongest work in years and although they have devoted followers—the four shows at the 150-seat Soho Theatre sold out quickly—“The Something Rain” is an album that will inspire a new cohort of fans.

More information
www.tindersticks.co.uk

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