Last week I was lucky enough to see Tom Waits do his strange and lovely thing, in Dublin, where he played a couple of gigs in his Glitter and Doom tour.
It was brilliant. Part blues, part vaudeville, part Coney Island freak show. He played for two and a half hours. It didn't get boring. In fact it was crucial that the show was that long: his world is so strange that you need to be drawn into it, half-willing, half-afraid. There were a few too many of his deranged Weill-like stompers for my liking, and much of the time he sounded as if he was barking rather than singing. But that voice isn't an accident (though he can make it sound like a car crash), it's a finely calibrated instrument, and when he uses it to move you, as he did during a session at the piano, you don't stand a chance. If his voice was a film it would be The Elephant Man; nobody walks the line between the grotesque and the beautiful like Waits. During a hair-tingling rendition of Tom Traubert's Blues, he sounded 200 years old, wasted and wounded, aching with regret and anguish. Other highlights, for me, included Cold, Cold Ground, and an encore of Time, for which I was right at the front, gazing up in wonder at the commitment of the man to his songs and his singing.
