Tindersticks — Curtains (1997)

Reflected on: 2026-01-29

Why This Album Has Held Me Captive

Curtains is one of those rare albums that functions as emotional architecture—it doesn’t just soundtrack feelings, it creates the room where those feelings can exist.

For me as a teenager discovering it in Lisbon with its own melancholic beauty and faded grandeur, this album felt like a secret transmission meant specifically for me.

What makes Curtains endure is its refusal to offer easy comfort. Stuart Staples’ baritone doesn’t reassure—it confesses, it admits failure, it sits with me in the dark. The orchestration doesn’t uplift—it weighs, it drapes, it envelops.

This is music that treats melancholy not as a problem to solve but as a state worth inhabiting with dignity and attention.

The album also trusts my intelligence. It moves through radically different moods and textures—string-drenched ballads, organ-driven gospel shadows, jazzy noir instrumentals—without explaining itself. It assumes I can follow emotional logic rather than needing structural predictability.

For me as a young listener building my identity, that trust mattered deeply.

Six People in a Room with Secrets

The Core Lineup (1997)

Stuart Staples - Vocals, guitar (the wounded prophet) Dickon Hinchliffe - Violin, strings, keyboards (the orchestral architect) Neil Fraser - Guitar (texture over solos) David Boulter - Organ, keyboards (the church and the dive bar) Mark Colwill - Bass (the anchor in choppy waters) Alasdair Macaulay - Drums, percussion (restraint as an art form)

Where They Came From

Tindersticks emerged from Nottingham in the early 90s, initially called Asphalt Ribbons—a more post-punk, desperate sound.

The transformation into Tindersticks came when they discovered two things simultaneously:

Stuart’s voice as an instrument - That deep, cracked baritone wasn’t a limitation; it was the center of gravity. Think Lee Hazlewood, Leonard Cohen, but more vulnerable.

Dickon Hinchliffe’s string arrangements - Trained in classical violin, Dickon brought an almost cinematic sensibility. He didn’t use strings as decoration—he used them structurally, like Ennio Morricone scoring Sergio Leone’s deserts, but for the interior emotional deserts of failing relationships.

Recording at Abbey Road (1996-97)

By their third album, the band was at a crossroads. Their first two albums were critically adored but commercially marginal.

Curtains was recorded at Abbey Road Studios—yes, that Abbey Road, the same rooms where The Beatles made their masterpieces—but Tindersticks weren’t interested in classic pop grandeur.

The production approach:

Ian Caple produced and engineered (he’d also worked with Tricky and Kate Bush). He understood how to capture intimacy in large spaces—close-mic’d vocals swimming in orchestral vastness.

Live strings, live everything - They recorded with string sections, brass, organ, all performed live in the room. You can hear the air moving, the wood creaking. Digital perfection wasn’t the goal; captured moments were.

No demos, no safety nets - The band would often work out arrangements in the studio itself. “A Night In” (the 8+ minute closing epic) evolved during recording, with Dickon adding string parts that responded emotionally to what Stuart sang, rather than following a predetermined score.

The Melancholic Range: Different Shades of Sadness

What makes Curtains so texturally rich is how it refuses a single mode of melancholy:

“Another Night In” - Opens with Salvation Army brass and funereal organ, like a New Orleans jazz funeral for a relationship

“Rented Rooms” - Sparse, almost dub-spacious, with echoing guitar and Stuart’s voice as the only warmth

“Don’t Look Down” - Driving, almost krautrock-influenced rhythm section beneath swooning strings

“Ballad of Tindersticks” - Meta-commentary on their own limitations, delivered with self-aware humor

“Bathtime” - Seductive and sinister, film-noir atmosphere thick enough to choke on

“A Night In” - The centerpiece: 8 minutes that move from whispered confession to full orchestral catharsis without ever raising its voice

The Creative Tension: Dickon & Stuart

The creative engine was the push-pull between Dickon’s formal training (conservatory-educated, could arrange for 20-piece ensembles) and Stuart’s instinctive, untrained approach (lyrics written on scraps, voice that couldn’t hide anything).

Dickon would write string parts that were almost too beautiful—lush, swooning, romantic.

Stuart would sing about emotional paralysis, infidelity, self-loathing.

The tension between the gorgeous surface and the ugly content created the album’s gravitational pull.

By 2006, this tension would literally split the band—Dickon left to score films (he’d go on to work on Hunger, Shame, Mistress America), removing the orchestral scaffolding entirely. Post-Dickon Tindersticks are a different band—groovier, more direct, less cinematically wounded.

The Rhythm Section’s Secret

While everyone focused on strings and Staples’ voice, Mark Colwill’s bass and Alasdair Macaulay’s drums provided something crucial: patience.

They didn’t rush. They didn’t fill space.

They created rhythmic melancholy—think how “Don’t Look Down” drives forward while somehow sounding resigned, or how “Fast One” (the chaotic instrumental) lets the drums finally explode after an album of restraint.

David Boulter’s organ and keyboards added the ecclesiastical and the seedy—church and brothel existing in the same chord voicings.

Why It Connected in Lisbon

Portugal in the late 90s—post-dictatorship, post-colonial, caught between tradition and modernity—had its own relationship with beautiful sadness.

Saudade (that untranslatable Portuguese longing) and Tindersticks’ melancholy aren’t the same, but they recognize each other.

The album’s cinematic quality resonated with Portuguese cinema’s own introspective traditions (Oliveira, Monteiro). And Lisbon itself—with its faded tiles, its hills, its light that makes everything look like a memory—is a Curtains city.

Seeing them live - in Coliseu dos recreios was transcendent.

Tindersticks concerts are anti-spectacle: low lights, no rock posturing, just six people (plus string quartet) creating this immersive emotional weather. Stuart Staples barely moves. The power comes from stillness, from accumulated detail, from trusting the audience to lean in rather than be blasted back.

The Album’s Place in History

Curtains sits in a lineage of orchestral melancholy that includes:

Scott Walker’s late-60s solo work (especially Scott 4)
Lee Hazlewood (the male voice as wounded instrument)
Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call (came out same year, 1997—something in the water)
Portishead’s Dummy (that trip-hop noir atmosphere)
Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks (Dickon studied these religiously)

It influenced a generation of bands trying to be emotionally direct without being soft: The National (especially Boxer), The Low Anthem, later Beach House, even Julia Jacklin’s approach to vulnerability.

Final Thought

Curtains endures because it doesn’t lie to me.

It doesn’t promise redemption, catharsis, or healing. It offers something rarer: companionship in complexity. It says, “This is what it feels like to be alive and disappointed and still somehow moved by beauty.”

For me as a teenager—caught between who I was and who I’d become—that honesty mattered more than any anthem.

And decades later, buying the vinyl in London, I’m not chasing nostalgia. I’m re-affirming a truth the album taught me: that sadness, when treated with craft and seriousness and strings, becomes something worth keeping.

Originally discovered in teenage years in Lisbon Vinyl purchased in London, 2026 Still sounds like home

Tindersticks - Curtains