Tindersticks are delighted to announce UK tour dates in October, in conjunction with Music Beyond Mainstream to celebrate the band’s long awaited release of Claire Denis Film Scores 1996 – 2009.
The tour will mark the first time that Tindersticks have toured the UK in over a decade, tickets will go on sale 26th April and the dates are as follows:
16 Oct – Edinburgh, Usher Hall
17 Oct – Manchester, Bridgewater Hall
18 Oct – Liverpool, Philharmonic Hall
19 Oct – Basingstoke, The Anvil
22 Oct – Coventry, Warwick Arts Centre
24 Oct – York, The Barbican
25 Oct – Northampton, Royal & Derngate
26 Oct – Brighton, The Dome
28 Oct – Gateshead, The Sage
A boxed set collection featuring all 6 Claire Denis film scores, written and performed by Tindersticks over the last 15 years, will be available for the first time together on 5CD, 5x180gLP and download on Constellation Records. Released worldwide on April 26th and available for pre-order now. 4 of the 6 soundtracks have been previously unreleased including White Material. Housed in a custom window-cut slipcase, the box set also includes a 64pp perfect-bound booklet with 30pp of colour plates of film stills and an essay (in English and French) by renowned music writer Michael Hill (who has also contributed liner notes for collections by Lou Reed, Sam Cooke, The Replacements and others).
To accompany this extra special release of Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009, the band are performing a series of ambitious live concerts in cinematic settings, bringing together the music with film projections of the evocative images that inspired it. Set in motion by an invitation from the San Francisco Film Festival to perform in May 2011, the project has gathered interest and momentum and is launched with a live performance at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 26th April (19:30) in conjunction with the British Film Institute, and a special screening of Nenette et Boni at the BFI Southbank on the 27th April (18:30, NFT1), followed by an onstage Q&A with Claire Denis and Stuart A. Staples, to discuss their work together and artistic affinity.
Further performances are being scheduled across Europe in 2011.
Tindersticks have had a long and fruitful relationship with feted French film director Claire Denis. The scores are a celebration of a meeting of minds and the band’s unique and ongoing artistic collaboration with Denis; from her award-winning Nenette et Boni (1996) to her recently acclaimed White Material (2009), also including the beautifully observed 35 Shots of Rum (2008), the infamous Trouble Every Day (2001) and 2 solo soundtracks: Stuart A. Staples’ solo score for Denis’s lyrical and impressionistic The Intruder(2004) and Dickon Hinchliffe’s score for the sensual Vendredi Soir (2002).
The Tindersticks film scores stand faithfully alongside Claire Denis’s own critically acclaimed trajectory, in what is unarguably one of the most fertile, consistent and resonant creative relationships between a director and a group of musicians in contemporary cinema.
STUART STAPLES FROM TINDERSTICKS REMARKS…
“Sometime in Paris ‘95, I thought it was La Cigalle, she says it was the Bataclan, I’m not sure.
That is where we met anyway, one of those places, after a concert.
She was writing the screenplay for Nenette et Boni and something in our song ‘My Sister’ had clicked with her, she asked us if we would like to make the music for the film. We had film scoring pretensions, soundtrack music had always been a thing of David’s from when we met way back (though we could barely play, we had dreams).
It seemed the right next move for us, it fitted with the energy and flow of our band.
We had this thing about Miles Davis’ Lift to the Scaffold. Passing through Paris he stopped off at the studio with his band and recorded the score right there and then, in a day, watching the film for the first time and reacting musically.
‘Seemed like a good place to start.
I suppose the essence was there, that’s how we began, and after a few fumbling months we delivered the music for Nenette et Boni, nervously.
That’s how it all started, maybe we just got on, had some kind of understanding; we have never really talked about it. I was told she said in an interview that we understand her films before she does; maybe that’s true in some way, but I think she was just being gracious.
Approaching each film has always asked us to step into an unknown, stretch ourselves and do things we did not think we were able. At the end we always feel changed in some way. This has fed into all our other music and is a contributing factor to why we’re still struggling to catch our ideas after all these years, still frustrated and fascinated in equal measure.
Other people have asked us to score their films, but we always reached a point where we realised that the freedom and conversation Claire affords (and expects from) us is not there, and then it becomes something different, making music for a purpose (money?) – something we’re well aware we have never been very good at.” – Stuart Staples, January 2011
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
