Fractionals

So when I don't have much else to say and am acutely conscious I haven't updated in a little while, I tend to throw on a music video. This one, for Tindersticks' "Can We Start Again?" is a favourite of mine recently for a bunch of reasons. I've been thinking about Tindersticks, and Simple Pleasure specifically, because two friends have had bafflingly (to me) negative reactions to that album, which is not only one of my favourites but I thought a pretty palatable start with the band. I mean, some of the comments made me think I would have been better off getting them going with the second self-titled record, but that seems pretty counter-intuitive. And in any case, Tindersticks come close enough to summarising (or exemplifying) a lot of the tendancies in my listening life these days that I'm not sure how to react when someone is nonplussed or downright put off by them (not that I hold it against either friend, mind you).

The video is one of the rare cases where I didn't actually love the song until I saw it; it helped me make sense of the song in a way I just wasn't before, and it's now a highlight of the album for me. Maybe it's the conflation of Girl and Film (after all, everybody I know fictionalizes their crushes), or the way the opening shot of movie ratings reminds me of "This Is Hardcore" (one of the greatest music videos ever made). But I think it's also the way the band is sitting in the theatre looking at the footage of the procession of women the other band members intone softly behind Stuart Staples' rich vibrato. The avidity mixed with (poorly hidden) pain, boredom, or in Staples case a rich mix of anxiety and fear is palpable, and I love how Staples isn't singing when we first see him gazing up at the image, mouth slightly ajar. At one point he breathes in and almost licks his lips; I can't decide if he's staring at the breasts taking up most of the cinema screen at the time, or if he's nerving himself up to assay the attempt at reconciliation the song depicts. Or both.

The first line he sings along to is "If you were here now," and crucially it's also the first line where he's answered by his (female) backing vocalists: "You couldn't change / you wouldn't understand." He doesn't attempt to ignore the fact that they might be right (he almost seems excited as he sings "but it's so ugly now," about the two of them), but he keeps protesting: "Are you ready now?" "Hey, I'm ready now." And yet it's only the females that start up the repetition of "Can we start again, we start again?" They're not asking if they're allowed to, but if it's possible. Staples' lurch forward in his seat at "and I'll show you how" is almost menacing in context, and yet the song, and his demeanour in the video, are almost sweet. By the end of the song, it sounds as if he's convinced them (and it is them, not her); they sing "wheel's turning round" and he sings it back, relieved. But the thing about Tindersticks, a band that maybe more than any other embodies the quasi-bullshit heterosexual male fear that Man can only be bad for, only soil, Woman, is that they probably shouldn't trust Staples. By the time Simple Pleasure gets to "Can We Start Again"'s dark inverse, "I Know That Loving," he can only respond to their wounded recitation of all the things they don't have with Staples ("Like feet that have never been walked on / Hands that never held no blame / Eyes that have never cried angry tears / A face that never felt that shame") with an anguished "I know that, I know that" and then a closing, faux fatalistic "Well that's my heart / It's calling out your name." The closing, even more shattering (in context) "CF GF" has him pledging "I won't make you cry / Tell you lies / Never say goodbye" over and over, the way liars do.

I've wandered a bit far afield, but I guess the point is that the real reason I love the video for "Can We Start Again?" is because you can see two crucial things: That Staples (or rather, his character, to be fair) is or is trying to be a good guy, that like most he's not setting out to hurt anybody, and certainly not his girl. And that he's going to fail miserably, in part because he thinks he's doomed to. The closing image, of a woman from the neck down in a laundromat, appearing to be loitering, a man (probably not Staples) walks past, she may look after him; maybe she doesn't fall for it after all.



PS. It's interesting to note that Six By Seven's great "Ready For You Now" is probably the perfect inverse of "Can We Start Again."