Tindersticks

From October 2011

There's a time and a place for everything.

Last night at the Usher Hall the gentleman seated in front of me spent the entire evening touching his girlfriend's cheek, nibbling her ear or staring down towards her breasts. From my vantage point I was unable to tell if they were worth looking at so frequently and it was all a little bit off-putting but, ironically, if the ear-nibbler had looked up at the large screen on stage he would have seen plenty of female flesh plus a whole lot more besides.

This was my second visit to the Usher Hall within a fortnight but a decidedly different affair to the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Tindersticks are a hard-to-define outfit from Nottingham; I've seen them twice before at the Queens Hall and it still doesn't make them any easier to categorize - somewhere between jazz, soul and chamber quartet. Last night the band were performing scores that they have composed for the films of French director Claire Denis with whom they have been collaborating for the last 15 years.

I took me a while to work out that we weren't getting the full films, instead the action chopped and changed with scenes from six of Denis's works while Tindersticks provided the music. It made for a fantastic advert for her films - there's not one I wouldn't want to see. The score worked especially well for 35 rhums, accurately describing the movement of a train, and the one with the horses riding over the snow covered landscape (L'intrus?) was spectacular.

A short interval and then as near to a knees-up as you get with Tindersticks, a band so painfully shy you wonder how they ever get it together to appear on stage. A mumbled thank you from singer Stuart A. Staples and that was it. No encore obviously. Fabulous.