Dickon and Dave Step Out....

Critics favourites for the last few years, Tindersticks have now dented the lower reaches of that bastion of popular taste, the UK Top 40, with 'Bathtime', the first single to be taken from their third album 'Curtains'. In 1994 they released one of the greatest albums ever made as their debut (and it was a double), which makes life a little difficult when they know they have to follow it up. 'The Tindersticks Second Album' didn't disappoint, with classics like 'A Night In', the duet 'Travelling Light' and the tragicomic story song 'My Sister' keeping the fans happy. 'Curtains' changes things a little. Cuban brass, snappier pop tunes and even bigger arrangements paint a slightly different picture, although the songs are still undoubtedly Tindersticks. The understated bleakness of 'Bearsuit', yet another story song ('Ballad of Tindersticks') and a string of damn good songs. We caught up with Dickon and Dave from the band while they were doing the promotional interviews for 'Curtains' and asked them a few questions.

How do you feel about having your first top 40 hit with 'Bathtime'?
Dave: "It feels quite good in a way, I don't think that any of us are really that bothered, but it's good that every new release we have goes slightly higher. Its' not something that's really all that important though."
Dickon: "I think it's good because of the type of song that it is - it was good we got there with 'Bathtime' rather than something more commercially viable. Obviously it shows people that you just don't have to be a chart band to sell records, which is good."
Dave: "'Bathtime' isn't as obvious as something like 'Tonight are you Trying to Fall in Love Again' which is more like our "usual" sound, but it is uptempo. 'Bathtime' was chosen because it was more adventurous, it was less typical of the band - I think it shows our abilities off well - the string arrangements, backing singers, etc"

Is it representative of 'Curtains' as a whole?
Dave: "I would say it's definitely a part of what the album is about. I don't think there is any one song that really represents what we do because I think the whole point is to do things in a different way that's stimulating to us and stimulating to those people that buy our music. We never really wanted to make one type of music, but hopefully everything we do sounds like us!"
Dickon: "I think it's representative just by nature of how adventurous it is. We threw caution to the wind and really piled stuff on it just to see where it went, and the album as a whole was probably made like that."

Why break Tindersticks tradition and title your third album, and why did you choose 'Curtains'?
Dave: "When we were doing the album it was quite an odd album to work on, and we had a joke working title of calling it 'The Last Tindersticks Album'. People would have thought we'd called it a day, but we were using it in a sense that it was the last one that had come out! 'Curtains' is a less obvious way of saying that. People can take it as a theatrical word, and a lot of people tie our music in with theatre, and it can be seen as an ending or a beginning - I mean curtains go up as well."

Is it a very different album then?
Dickon: "I think so. Calling it 'Curtains' was another way of saying it's the end of an era and the first three albums were like a trilogy and this is the final part. In terms of the way we approached the making of it, it was the last album we'll make in that manner. In the future we are going to be more minimal, more stripped down. There are six people in the band and we're going to try and make as much happen within that - we want to get a more intimate sound again."

Is it harder to record with such a large extended line-up?
Dickon: "Yeah, it was hard, especially since we gave ourselves a couple of weeks to do everything. Whilst we got a lot of the backing tracks and strings and brass done, it didn't leave us much time for us to experiment, then we had to spend another couple of weeks doing the more creative side. Jesus Allemand (brass arangements) was someone who we'd had recommended to us, and we'd wanted to use Cuban brass for a long time. We wanted to ake the arrangements farther than we had in the past."

Going back a year or so, you also managed to complete the soundtrack for French movie 'Nenette Et Boni'. What attracted you to that project?
Dave: "I think the thing that attracted us to it is that we met Claire Denis, the director, in Paris at one of our shows, and found she was a fan of ours. At that time she was writing a film and listening to our second album quite a bit. It was a really important album to her at the time, so we agreed to become involved with her film before we had really discussed it. She seemed to have very similar ideas about film making as we have about music making. It seemed very easy to work with someone in that way, whereas other directors would be very different, and she gave us the freedom to do what she wanted. I think the end result doesn't go as far as we had hoped but I don't think that anything ever can, but ti was a really good thing for us to do. In terms of doing another one, I'd really lilke to do it in a different way, but it's a case of finding that way."

It highlighted a lot of your instrumental work. When do you decide that one of your songs is going to be an instrumental?
Dave: :If I have a musical idea, and I'm playing it to Stuart, he thinks more about the idea in a musical sense, whereas if he's writing a song he thinks more about it in the vocal sense. So it can get to a point where you have this idea that's nearly finished and he hasn't even thought about words, so sometimes it never really comes up that it needs any vocals."

Finally, a brief word about the story song on the new album - 'Ballad of Tindersticks'. What do you think inspired Stuart to come with that tale- is it all true?
Dickon: "I think that everything he is taking about actually happened. I mean it's largely about the process of being in a band and your relationship to the music biz at large. That's really Stuart's version of events. It says what it is, it's a feeling you get when you're trying to work out your relationship to the music you're making and all the paraphernalia that surrounds it on the promotional side of things and how it affects you."

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