With collaborations such as Hitchcock and Hermann, Leone and Morricone, and Spielberg and Williams, cinema historyis full of working relationships between top directors and musicians.

Over the course of 18 years and six movies, cult Nottingham band Tindersticks have enjoyed a similar relationship with arthouse film director Claire Denis.

Now the fruits of those labours have been released in a five-CD boxset, with four of the soundtracks receiving a commercial airing for the first time.

And the parent band is backing the release with a series of specially created shows, mixing Denis’ visuals with their own music.

“The idea for the show started at the San Francisco Film Festival,” says organist David Boulter, one of the band’s three founder members.

“The guy who runs the festival asked if we could make music for an old silent film. It was something we liked the idea of, but couldn’t find a film which inspired us at the time.

“We thought instead we should play one of our soundtracks live – it was something we’d not done before. It developed into the idea of playing it against a collage of scenes from the different films we had done to make it more of a retrospective of our work with Claire.”

Denis first approached the band backstage after a 1996 show to see if she could use some of their music in her latest film Nénette Et Boni.

“As soon as she got in touch we went to the video hire store and rented her first film Chocolat,” says Boulter.

“That was our first experience of her really. We later found out she had a vast history of working with people such as Wim Wenders and Jean-Luc Godard before she started working on her own films. We liked that it wasn’t someone new in the business, and that it was someone we could be inspired by.”

Denis had initially approached the band to see if she could use music from their eponymous second album – most specifically the track My Sister – having been inspired by the music as she was developing the script and playing the track on-set as she filmed certain scenes.

“We said we would be willing to do a soundtrack,” remembers Boulter.

“We gradually realised she wasn’t just a normal film maker. There wasn’t always a lot of story or dialogue in her films.

“She allowed us freedom to experiment with sounds, and develop along the way.

“Other directors would contact us, who always had the films finished, and would want something that sounded like Tindersticks. With Claire we became part of the film, almost like a character that weaves its way through the movie.

“She would send us daily rushes and small edits at the end of the week, so we could keep up with the way she was seeing the film. Sometimes the music shaped the editing, it was a very interesting way to do it.”

The soundtracks also mirrored Tindersticks’ development, frequently coming between album projects when the band was trying to find different ways to make music.

“They allowed us to explore different things without too much pressure, other than to fulfil what Claire wanted,” says Boulter.

The original band split briefly in 2003 following the album Waiting For The Moon, with both Dickon Hinchliffe and frontman Stuart A Staples providing solo soundtracks for Denis’s films Vendredi Soir and L’Intrus respectively. Staples, Boulter and guitarist Neil Fraser reformed the band in 2008 for The Hungry Saw album.

It is this new line-up which will be performing the Denis show, and playing a second set drawing on the best from the band’s extensive back catalogue, partly, as Boulter says, because they don’t play the UK that often. The band are currently working on their third album since the reunion.

“We always feel like we work in cycles of three albums,” admits Boulter.

“The first three albums were very big, double albums with lots of instrumentation and long songs. After the third [Curtains from 1997] we had a reaction against that and made three short albums.

“When we got back together we tried to achieve the best of both worlds – something not so long, but which had space so we could go wherever the music needed to go.

“I’ve no idea what’s beyond that – it feels like it’s approaching something different for us.”

* 8.30pm, tickets from £15, call 01273 709709