Tindersticks

IT USED to be easy to dismiss Tindersticks - to deride them as boho poseurs, as wannabe Nick Caves, as provincial boys who came to London and willingly sank into the capital’s romantic squalor. When the band’s first album appeared in October 1993, the whole ’Sticks schtick looked and sounded so contrived. Songs like 'Drunk Tank' and 'City Sickness' suggested a bunch of neophytes mooching about dank taverns and kidding themselves it would all pay off one day in a novel.