Looking back, it’s a little disappointing that one of my most treasured musical moments took place in a city center branch of a well-known high street music chain. I could have at least been in some obscure independent backwater or smoky den. Still - talk about juxtaposition: a scruffy student in a brightly lit store, stickers all around imploring me, enticing with their offers and exclamations. On my head, cans with God knows how many varieties of dead hair, dead cells.

But when you’re listening to El Diablo en el ojo, from Tindersticks’ second album and, in the modern internet parlance, literally having your mind blown by the experience, you feel instantly transported.

That album was released on 3rd April 1995, so today “one band one day” will be celebrating the work of the moody, gloomy, orchestral, smoky lounge crooning, duetting, film-scoring, emotion-wringing Tindersticks.

The full running order is:

  1. Tindersticks First Album (1993)
  2. Tindersticks Second Album (1995)
  3. Curtains (1997)
  4. Simple Pleasure (1999)
  5. Can Our Love… (2001)
  6. Waiting for the Moon (2003)
  7. The Hungry Saw (2008)
  8. Falling Down a Mountain (2010)
  9. The Something Rain (2012)
  10. Across Six Leap Years (2013)

Technically I’ll be cheating a little, since I have already reviewed the last of these albums, but equally technically, although it’s a studio album it’s also a compilation of sorts as the band re-record songs that got lost along the way, which means according to my own rules (which I guess I can change on a whim anyway…) so I don’t absolutely have to review that album.

I’m looking forward to spending a day in the company of the band who have given me some of my most arresting musical moments. See if that optimism is founded in my Looking Back at Tindersticks Day post, coming soon.