by LORRAINE CARPENTER

There's something about Tindersticks. Maybe it's their heart-shattering melodies, narrated in velvet by the band's inimitable singer Stuart Staples. Maybe it's Dickon Hinchliffe's exquisite arrangements, often slight but always stirring concoctions of brass and strings, informed by the cinematic grandeur of John Barry and Ennio Morricone. Or maybe it's their slow-boiling raucous swells, courtesy of Al Macaulay, David Boulter, Neil Fraser and Mark Colwill. Whatever the magic ingredient in the British sextet's soulful, suicide lounge, it's attracted a worldwide cult following over their decade-long career, an achievement they celebrated last year with a five-day Tindersticks festival in Brussels. And now, with the release of their latest album, Waiting for the Moon, featuring guest vocalist and part-time Montrealer Lhasa De Sela, Tindersticks are touring North America for the first time in six years. The Mirror spoke to Hinchliffe about their ongoing collaboration with French director Claire Denis, which began with her 1996 film Nénette et Boni.

Mirror: Before the first Denis film, did you feel that the band was headed towards soundtrack work?

Dickon Hinchliffe: Yeah, that's something we'd always been interested in and influenced by, so the process was really exciting for us. It's really different from making your own album when you have a responsibility to someone else's vision. It became almost a new form of expression in that we had to enter [Denis'] world and bring our own world with us. She's great to work with because she has a very natural feeling for music in cinema and she gets us involved in the very early stages of the films.

M: With Trouble Every Day [last year's shocking cannibal film starring Vincent Gallo], repeated viewings of the gruesome scenes must have been rough.

DH: Yeah, they're the type of scenes you only ever wanna see once. Maybe it was a measure of their power that we never really became numb to their effects. But one of the most disturbing scenes was left silent. Spooky horror music in film tends to beat you around the head, when smaller sounds and subtle music are often far more powerful.

With guests at Café Campus on Friday, August 1, 8pm, $20

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