A Little Night Music: Tindersticks and Claire Denis

Paris, 1995: Nottingham band Tindersticks are playing a show, French filmmaker Claire Denis is in the audience, and she wants to meet them. The venue is either La Cigalle (so remembers Tindersticks’ singer Stuart Staples) or Le Bataclan (recalls Denis), but one thing which is indisputable is that this night in Paris marks the beginning of what will become an intensely creative fifteen year collaboration between band and director.

As Staples tells The Skinny, “We really weren’t expecting to have such a long relationship.” Claire Denis had made three films at this point (1988’s Chocolat, 1990’s No Fear No Die and 1994’s I Can’t Sleep) and she adored Tindersticks’ second album, from 1995 (which we’ll call Tindersticks 2, though it's technically only known as ‘Tindersticks’ second album’), with its sixteen crepuscular, sensual vignettes of what sounds like a backstreet in a warm European city as autumn draws in. With shades of Serge Gainsbourg’s autumnal wistfulness and carnality on 1971’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, of the fading concert halls in Vienna that Leonard Cohen sang about on 1988’s I’m Your Man, it is a British indie album which sounds as if it grew out of a completely different landscape to the one which was in thrall to the swagger and primary colours of Britpop at the time.

Tindersticks formed in Nottingham around 1991 and have released eight albums (not including the Denis soundtracks and various other projects), the most recent being 2010’s Falling Down a Mountain. The band are currently coming to the end of making their ninth album. That night in Paris, Denis asked the band if she might use tracks from Tindersticks 2 for her forthcoming film, Nénette et Boni, the story of an estranged teenage brother and sister reuniting in Marseille when she falls pregnant. The band obliged, and in fact ended up writing an album’s worth of new instrumentals for the film; a further five soundtracks (including solo work by Stuart Staples and former member Dickon Hinchliffe) followed between 1996 and 2009. Claire Denis’ reputation has grown steadily since her début, and she is now regarded as one of Europe’s finest living filmmakers, thanks to films such as Beau Travail (2000), an intense portrait of jealousy between foreign legionnaires in the Djibouti desert, based on Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd, and 35 Shots of Rum (2008), a delicate glimpse into the life of a father and daughter living on Paris’ outskirts. The universe of her films is a deeply intimate one, full of tactile camerawork and desire communicated only through looks and touches.

On 16 October, Tindersticks will play live selections from their six soundtracks for Claire Denis alongside footage from the films at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, and will then continue to tour the show throughout the UK. A beautifully packaged box set of the soundtracks, with an essay by Michael Hill and full-colour booklet showing stills from Denis’ films (Claire Denis Soundtracks: 1996 – 2009) is also available. The idea of bringing together Denis’ images with the music Tindersticks wrote especially for them in a live performance setting had different sources.

As Tindersticks’ keyboardist and pianist David Boulter tells us, the band were approached by the programmer of the San Francisco Film Festival about the prospect of providing live accompaniment to an old silent film, but “we decided we didn’t want to just play live music over a silent film, we wanted to do something different. It grew into an idea, of making something more like a show, like a concert.”

Staples recalls the development of the band’s soundtrack for Denis’ most recent film, White Material (2009) also being a catalyst: “We had a feeling about playing live music with images from the film, purely just from White Material. But then the idea kind of grew and it seemed a shame to limit it to one film.” The live show is not merely an opportunity to showcase either Tindersticks’ music or Denis’ films but, as Staples says, an event which “crosses different zones: sometimes we step back and it’s more about pure cinema, then we’ll come forward and it’s more a musical performance.”

Staples emphasises that Denis herself “was very much involved as we put the show together and tried to find a shape for it. She’d tell us if she needed more context [in the images] or if this or that needed to happen.” The show’s first UK outing took place at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in late April 2011, and garnered widespread acclaim, being described in The Times as “a display of cool, eerie grandeur ... no one does tense, brooding noir atmosphere like Tindersticks.” The hush which descended over the hall as an image of actress Alice Houri’s long hair floating in a swimming pool (from Nénette et Boni) appeared on a cinema screen, and the band launched into the airy, seductive Ma Soeur, made the Queen Elizabeth Hall seem very, very far away from the frenzy of royal wedding preparations taking place outside. 

Tindersticks’ process of building a new Denis soundtrack generally begins with the filmmaker sending them a script (translated into English), and they will often see rough parts of the film as it is being shot. Boulter sees similarities between band and filmmaker’s methods of working: “In Claire’s films, it’s not so important to tell the story as beginning, middle and end, and similarly making music doesn’t have to make sense like that: it doesn’t have to be based around verse, chorus, verse, it can be led by feeling and emotion. In Claire’s films you get these shots of colours and movements, instead of just the structure of a story, which makes it closer to a pure artform.”

Indeed, as Staples points out, “the decisions Claire makes in the editing process can affect how we feel and react to the film, but equally what we do can affect her decisions in the editing.” One particular example of this reciprocal process of influence is the song Trouble Every Day, which Staples wrote for Denis’ 2001 film of the same name. The film, acclaimed and maligned in equal measure, was a violent departure for Denis, starring Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo as individuals who rip apart their lovers’ flesh. Trouble Every Day is the only new track with vocals provided by Tindersticks for a Denis film, and the director initially had no intention of opening the film with a song, but Staples’ composition affected her so deeply that it went on to influence the whole editing process of the film.

Staples also speaks of the influence some of Denis’ films have had on his songwriting; at the live show, the band play the song Friday Night from Staples’ first solo record, Lucky Dog Recordings 03-04, with footage from Denis’ film Vendredi Soir (2002), a portrait of two strangers spending one night together during the Paris transport strikes of winter 1995. Dickon Hinchliffe, who wrote that film’s score, is no longer with the band, but Staples’ Friday Night, inspired by the film, brings a new, unexpected dimension to the images. Similarly, the song The Other Side of the World, from Tindersticks 2008 album, The Hungry Saw, was inspired by Denis’ film The Intruder (2004), for which Staples composed the score alone.

Generally, the band view each project with Denis as a new venture, but occasionally a piece of music which hasn’t yet reached its potential will form the basis of a soundtrack. The opening sequence to 35 Shots of Rum features a gentle melodica track which Boulter had written but never used for his and Staples’ side project of songs for children (featuring Jarvis Cocker and Stuart Murdoch among others), Songs for the Young at Heart (2007). During filming of Nénette et Boni, Denis would play Tindersticks’ songs My Sister and Tiny Tears to her actors as the cameras rolled, to set the exact atmosphere for each scene. Tiny Tears, one of the band’s best-loved songs (which also featured prominently in an episode in the first season of The Sopranos), first appeared on Tindersticks 2, but both Boulter and Staples feel that the song did not find its true form until they re-recorded it for Nénette et Boni. The scene in which Vincent Gallo and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi (sister of Mrs Sarkozy) dance to the orchestral swell of Tiny Tears in the flour-dusted backroom of a bakery is surely one of the loveliest, most unusual moments in French cinema of the 1990s.

Non-musical sounds are often a source of inspiration for the band’s soundtracks. As Staples says of 2009’s White Material, the tense story of a group of Europeans in an unnamed African country, unwilling to leave despite the growing threat of civil war, “The first sound I had was a wine glass being tapped by a Lucky Cat, and that formed the basis of the soundtrack, it’s all the way through it.”

Boulter also highlights how much that particular soundtrack’s development centred around the use of a musical instrument which was so old it was barely playable: “I had an old harmonium that was falling to pieces which reflected this decaying of the old [colonial] power. It made me think of how the first Europeans who came to Africa were missionaries who would carry instruments like this harmonium with them and play religious songs to people, and the instrument is now so old that it’s falling apart.” Much of the music in Trouble Every Day is based around the common sounds of a hotel; as Boulter says, “We always try to use some of the source sounds from the film in the music, like trains or a coffee percolator. There’s so little dialogue in Claire’s films that these sounds can help you through the film […] The sound of footsteps moving down a corridor is a way of getting down that corridor yourself when you’re watching the film.”

After fifteen years of working together, do Tindersticks see more projects with Claire Denis on the horizon? Boulter says, “We’ve been on a long journey with Claire and it feels like we’re putting a full stop under a certain part of our work. If we were going to do a score now with Claire, it would have to be something completely different.” Though a line has now been drawn under this particular era of their creative relationship, both Boulter and Staples are still sure that, though they have no projects lined up with Denis at the moment, anything might happen in the future.

As Boulter emphasises, “Claire’s always got fresh ideas, she phones Stuart every three or four months, saying she might be planning a musical or a sci-fi.” A foray into either genre would certainly be something of a departure for Denis. As the curtains open on the show in Edinburgh on 16 October, there will be quiet, there will be darkness, and an atmosphere of the sort of hushed intimacy which is all too hard to find in a live show these days. Tindersticks’ timelessly sensual music, with the stunning, unmistakable films of Claire Denis bring live music and cinema together in a performance event which feels wholly original, as if we are witnessing something fleeting and precious.