Song of the Day # 276 Tindersticks

 

'My letters sit on your window-sill
Yellowed by the sun
Written that time our love was in its prime
They just ran off my pen, my pen is broken now
Couldn't eat a thing, couldn't sit next to you.'

 

As a ridiculously compulsive record buyer, I have some pretty stupid conversations with myself. 'You've bought too many albums this month. You need to wait 'til payday before getting this.' I know I'll get them anyway. For someone like me my record collection is always an unfinished house, just one brick away from completion. Who am I fooling?

 

I'll have the album this song comes from at some point over the next few months. It's a double and there's a copy in the record shop directly opposite to where I'm sitting now at the window of my flat. That costs £35 pounds which I won't be paying. Discogs means you can find a price that your skin and wallet are more comfortable with.

 

 

 

Probably, the way you feel about Tindersticks, if you ever think about them at all, (and I imagine those that do are in a fairly sizeable minority now), depends on what you think of their singer and main man Stuart Staples. Pitching himself midway between Scott Walker and Nick Cave, without the slightly otherworldly, godlike attributes of either. A suited bloke from Nottingham with a highly mannered voice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  Self-depreciating, because he really has to be. He's a very British equivalent to these American and Australian icons I mentioned who chose to spend most of their careers here for some reason known mostly to themselves, who have let our rain seep into their work and characterise it. Staples offers something slightly more modest, recognisable and attainable for the rest of us mere mortals.

 

I've got this on cd but that's not enough now I listen almost exclusively to records again. I'll own the vinyl version at some point in the next few months. It's a good album, remarkably consistent for a double, a relentlessly focussed meditation on failure, played out to lush, thoughtful orchestration. A series of short stories about what the wear and tear of life and relationships can do to us unless we keep an eye on it and don't let the darkness creep up on us. As the Nineties, when this came out, was pretty much a decade of consistent failure on my part in most respects, it's as good a way for me to remember them by as any I can think of. It comes from a time when lovers used to write letters to each other. I've got a few of my own in a lower drawer on my desk to my left. I won't be reading them any time soon. Listening to the Tindersticks once in a while will do. A very British record. They understand the grind, don't look away while they catalogue it, and meanwhile there's enough colour and humour in the mix to make them a pleasure to listen to while they go about things.