I’m not sure anyone really leaves any of these Don’t Look Back concerts, featuring bands performing entire albums in sequence, feeling disappointed.  You are not exactly going to moan about songs they didn’t play – it wasn’t on the album, so they didn’t play it.  Complaints about the running order would also be churlish.  Unless the band stages some sort of dirty protest, childishly smearing their meisterwerk over the walls, I reckon you’ll be alright.

Tindersticks’ Second is one of my all-time touchstones.  Emotionally rich to the point of extreme weepiness, lyrics of heartbroken helplessness strewn like broken dishes over a carpet of intricate orchestration.  Given the persistent rumours about whether or not Tindersticks actually existed as a band any more, I was bemused to see it listed as part of the Don’t Look Back series.  And then a bit excited.  Of course, I didn’t leave disappointed.

From the shrieking asymmetric violins of “El Diablo En El Ojo” to the closing descending piano lines of “Sleepy Song”, the album was delivered beautifully.  The band hadn’t defaulted on rehearsal duties for this undertaking – even given the paucity of recent live shows, it is doubtful how often some of these tracks have been played live in the last decade.  The two-piece brass and eleven piece string sections were well drilled, although I was surprised to see how many of the string parts Dickon Hinchcliffe plays himself.  Stuart Staples was reassuringly suave of appearance and cracked of voice, dispensing inaudible in-between song bonhomie in the manner of a chain-smoking funeral director.

 

While the orchestral lachrymose pieces – “A Night In”, “Tiny Tears” were as good as I could have hoped for, the slower pieces like “Seaweed” and “Cherry Blossoms” really came alive in the reverential hush of the Barbican.  There was very little deviation from the recorded versions – maybe the trumpet and violin duet introduction to “No More Affairs”, and the lack of female counterpart on “Travelling Light”, but somehow the songs felt imbued with even more emotional resonance – perhaps through my having acquired a few more years worth of regret and heartbreak, or just because I didn’t know if I’d hear them again like this, I’m not sure.

If this was to be the last Tindersticks performance – and the complete lack of any acknowledgement by Staples and Hinchcliffe of each others existence did not appear to bode well – they went out on a high with some choice encores.  The lurching “City Sickness”, naturally, followed by some curiosities including “Can Our Love” (with its glorious brief string interlude), “Buried Bones” (odd, in that this was another duet which had to be sung solo), and the funereal “Walking”.  We got the dark comedy of “My Sister” for a second time; “Well it took so long to rehearse”, may have been what he said.  I passed an old friend on the way out, who thought this encore was a bit superfluous, I’m not sure I agreed; I could probably have listened to Stuart Staples doing this a third time.  To finish, a quote from my favourite ever lyrics, where the blind girl describes what she sees to her brother:

“I can see little twinkly stars, like Christmas tree lights in faraway windows.  Rings of brightly coloured rocks floating around orange and mustard planets.  I can see huge tiger striped fishes chasing tiny blue and yellow dashes, all tails and fins and bubbles.”

I’d look at the grey house opposite, and close the curtains.