Wizard of weirdness casts a wondrous spell
(Filed: 25/11/2004)


Andrew Perry reviews Tom Waits at the Carling Apollo, Hammersmith


Tom Waits, runs the gag, but England waits longer - 17 years, in fact, since
California's strangest troubadour last appeared here.

The frequently cited reason was that no theatre suitable in size and
ambience could be found on these shores. Spurning the West End's thespian
palaces, this one-off show was finally announced, with almost exhilarating
perversity, at one of the capital's least commodious all-seaters. Ticket
prices exceeded even those charged by Brian Wilson and the Rolling Stones
last summer. Still, it sold out in minutes.

"I missed you, too, bud," Waits drawled with mock dryness, when a heckler
alerted him to the length of his absence. "You're looking good." He paused.
"There's three ages of man, y'see - young, middle-aged, and 'You're looking
good!' "

His fans may have gone grey waiting for him, but it was worth it in the end.
Dressed in a shabby black suit, the man marched zanily to the microphone and
struck up Hoist That Rag, a demented, reggae-tinged sea shanty from his
latest album, Real Gone.

"The sun is up," he sang, his throat already apparently in shreds, "the
world is flat - damn good address for a rat."

Such gutter-level surrealism is Waits's stock-in-trade. He started out in
the '70s, part piano-bar crooner, part Bruce Springsteen. His career really
got interesting with 1983's weird-out album Swordfishtrombones. Since that
time, when his spooky, gruff-voiced Americana was the epitome of hip, he has
been maddeningly elusive, appearing in more movies (Altman's Short Cuts,
Jarmusch, etc) than real-life concert halls.

Five years ago, he signed with LA punk-associated label, Anti-, and hit
another four-album purple patch, almost totally abandoning the instrument
that made him famous, the piano.

Since most of his Apollo set was drawn from his latter-day repertoire, Waits
was thus able to throw his whole self into his bizarre, freak-strewn
narratives, writhing, jerking, croaking and barking in ways that no other
man alive can. He shook the occasional maraca, and sometimes picked at an
electric guitar, but left the musical fireworks to guitarist Marc Ribot, who
quietly spirited up astonishingly inventive ideas in the background.

As a whole, the three-piece band were phenomenal. They could turn their hand
to any musical form - African, Latin and Caribbean rhythms, chain-gang
blues, jazz, vaudeville, hip hop-style human beatboxing, the so-called
"Cubist funk" of Real Gone - and make it sound extraordinary, other-worldly.
In the audience, Johnny Depp and Thom Yorke twitched in their seats, lapping
up every move, hanging on every gravelly lyric.

Waits himself was a mysterious, spellbinding presence, rarely addressing his
public directly. Between odd songs, he told improbable, absurdly tangential
stories, about a male spider playing a chord on his web to lure in the
female, about coffins being equipped with bells in case the inhabitants
hadn't really expired.

"That's where the phrase 'dead ringers' came from," he lied. Waits always
has preferred skewed mythology over soul-baring clarity, and he wasn't about
to change now.

During Eyeball Kid, he drew the crowd into a call-and-response routine, then
retreated behind a pump organ to add some head-scratchingly odd notes -
surely the most esoteric audience participation number in the history of
live performance.

Near the end, though, he turned protest singer, strumming an acoustic guitar
on Day After Tomorrow, in which a hopeless GI writes home from a war,
plainly Iraq, the poignancy all the more devastating for the surrounding
craziness.

For the encore, a piano was wheeled on, and Waits revisited his older self
via Invitation to the Blues, Johnsburg, Illinois, Come On Up the House and a
beautifully sad House Where Nobody Lives. Then he rose, plainly moved by the
ovation that greeted him, wiggled his fingers in the air as if to tickle our
tummies, and marched from view again.

You left feeling that, on this particular night, no one on earth had been
listening to better music. In that light, £65 admission was a bargain.