Tinder Match: An interview with Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples

I trust something fundamentally; that if I can feel something, I can find my way to the people to achieve it. In making an album, ideas tend to get finished in response to other ideas. We started with 22 things we really liked; you gradually put these things together and find a shape.”
If Stuart Staples sounds more like a sculptor than a musician, then it probably goes some way to explaining why Tindersticks’ output over more than 20 years feels more like an art piece that a collection of songs. Their latest, The Waiting Room, does nothing to buck that trend, in that it might be their most ambitious work to date. Judging by the smile on the frontman’s face when I proffer that very suggestion, that was the idea.
“I hope it’s more courageous,” he says, in that familiar baritone. “I think it’s the start of a new phase. One of the important things on this record is the fact that it’s our first five-piece album, with five voices that are balanced. There isn’t anybody doing three things on one track, it’s been honed down. I trust the space between us in that way.”
Space, in the non-intergalactic sense, is a word that comes up a lot in discussion of the new record. For a band that never ran from pushing boundaries, nor exploring themselves, the new album marks a new direction again. We’ve heard that before, of course — as recently as 2012’s The Something Rain — but some of the 11 tracks that make up their tenth LP signify a marked departure, never more obviously than on the beautiful centrepiece, ‘Hey Lucinda’.
“I broke out of a structure,” Stuart explains, “and that’s difficult in four-and-a-half minutes. It’s so easy to write duets as just, ‘He said, she said, come together in the chorus’. But once I got out of that, it became more fluid and more abstract — the music follows the singing, and the singing isn’t beholden to some odd restraints. I didn’t realise it needed something so radically different in approach for it to work. For it to reach where it is on this album, is to me a marker on how to best get a song across.”
As that last comment might suggest, the track was something of a long-term project for Stuart, but also a legitimate labour of love. The other voice is that of Lhasa De Sela, an occasional Tindersticks collaborator who passed away from cancer in 2010.
“When we recorded it, she was more helping me than anything else. I was working on it, and then we lost her. I put it away; I didn’t want to go there, because I found it difficult to listen to her singing anything at all. Five years passed, and I heard it in a different way. There was a moment of connection and conversation between us.”
Another of the album’s highlights sees Jehnny Beth come on board for a track called ‘We Are Dreamers’. The song, which mixes a typically dark sound with a potentially optimistic refrain, finds the Savages vocalist provide the perfect counterbalance to Stuart’s low tones — though he insists that ‘duet’ isn’t the right term this time.
“When I asked Jehnny to sing, it was more as a fellow dissenter, someone who won’t accept a certain reality. If I get bogged down in this reality that surrounds me… I mean, it’s so fucking heavy. How do you connect to ideas, and dream, if you’re so connected? You have to suspend that reality and shout – and that song was me shouting at myself. When I heard Jenny for the first time, I thought ‘that’s it. That’s what it needs.’”
Even if the song has a certain dichotomy, its video sends a clear message — though not through Stuart’s design. Instead, each track on The Waiting Room is paired with a visual interpretation by a short film director, in a collaborative effort with the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
“I was on the jury of the experimental section a few years ago,” explains the resident of nearby Limousin. “I had a notion of the short film world — people on their way to making feature films — but i didn’t realise the amount of energy, diversity and money, and people dedicating their lives to the art of short film. I was really struck by it. This idea came up, but I never thought there would be enough time between making music and needing a finished product. But when we decided on when we’d release, this gap suddenly appeared, where songs had enough form to start conversations with different filmmakers – some got music without words, others something closer to a finished product.”
Surely handing over work to be interpreted visually was a nervewracking experience?
“Well, the filmmakers had a very particular brief, and at the top of the list was that it shouldn’t be narrative. Rather, we wanted a counterpoint, and a space for the song to live. When there’s a landscape for the music, I think that’s when it’s strongest.”

The Waiting Room is out now on City Slang