Can you hear at the back? America's gravel-voiced champion of small-town lowlife kicks off a rare European tour in compelling style Tim Adams Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Tom Waits Theater des Westens, Berlin When tour managers used to book Tom Waits into the kind of hotel where people open doors for you, he would always cancel, and tell the cab driver to find him a place that had the name of an obscure American President: the Cleveland, say, or the Taft. A place where he could watch TV with the old men in the lobby, where the lift was always broken, and where the girl on the desk had stories to tell. He chooses the venues for his rare European tour dates with the same kind of principles in mind. The Theater des Westens in Berlin, where he performed last Tuesday, has the right kind of feel. Its classical portico is in the shadow of 'Zoo Station', the only part of West Berlin once policed by the East. The station, made infamous in the film Christiane F., has long sheltered Berlin's junkies and winos and prostitutes. The cavernous theatre is flanked by one-euro peep shows and a three-storey sex museum, catering to all tastes; Waits, California's answer to Kurt Weill, would have you believe he feels right at home. He arrives on stage as if straight from under the railway arches, in a maniac's shuffle, clutching at the pockets of his slept-in suit, tipping his hat, semaphoring like a drunk directing traffic, already yelling over the cacophony of his three-piece band. His opening exhortation, sung with the desperation of an old soak in a sandstorm, is: 'Make it Rain!' This repeated request is made with such vehemence in the following three minutes, and with such outraged plea bargaining ('She took all my money! And my best friend! You know the story! Here it comes again! Make it rain!') that it would be a churlish heaven that did not open. In many ways, this beginning - which makes you grin at its outlandish urgency - is simply a clearing of the throat for the litany of threats and promises that follow. Waits is using this brief tour - in which, on Tuesday, he will play his first London gig for 17 years - to showcase his latest CD Real Gone. The album is a crash of Latin and African rhythms and features Waits's frenzied forays into human beatboxing. In a recent interview he described his excitement at the discovery of this new vocal possibility: 'I would do it until my throat was raw - Ook, kakkk kakk - sweating, eyes all bugged out, hair sticking up, in the bathroom with a little four-track, singing in the microphone at night while everyone's asleep. It was like going back in time with the language where the sound came first and then slowly it shaped itself around items and experiences.' Watching him recreate that discovery is a somewhat alarming and vastly compelling spectacle. Particularly as he amplifies it with a giant bullhorn. And when his first guttural syllables form themselves into words it is, naturally, to scream another imperative: 'Don't go into that barn!' he implores, and it is fair to say the wildest of horses would not drag you anywhere in its vicinity. The landscape of Waits's songs has shifted since he first lived out of a car on Sunset Boulevard and wrote about carnival freaks and knackered drunks. It has a much dustier, small town quality. It sometimes makes you think of trying to fix old farm machinery. Except for some interludes from his Mule Variations, and the seductive blackboard-scrape of the theme from 'Alice', Waits does not delve much into his archive. The past is there, though, all the same, layered and sedimented in his voice, a geology of half-remembered hurts. Late-night anguish has sometimes been replaced by anger, ill-defined but directed somewhere towards the heart of America. If there is a theme to the evening, he announces it slyly as a kind of hopeless gospel: 'God's away on business...' he confides in his lairy fairground barker's rasp. 'It's a long trip,' he says, 'in fact he's been detained indefinitely...' In his absence, all manner of undesirables have taken over, some of them pirates intent of world domination: 'Hoist That Rag', in which a crazed captain rages at his crew, is a song that Waits and his men attack with the force of a dozen rum-crazed hearties, armed to the teeth with maracas. He does not have much time for simple lyricism these days, though he still loves to introduce a song. 'The male spider spends all night work ing on his web,' he drawls at one point, 'and when he has completed it, he uses an appendage, some say his leg - though I am not so sure - to strum it lightly. That sound is irresistible to the female spider. This,' he says, picking up a guitar 'is the male spider's chord.' More insistent now, though, is his demonic 'roll-up, roll-up' salesman's pitch. It is mostly irresistible. When he demands a little audience participation for his Coney Island anthem 'Tabletop Joe' his Anglo-German crowd yells back with one voice. The biggest cheer of a raucous night is reserved for Waits's own old piano which is wheeled on for his second encore (prior to its appearance you can only assume it has been propping up the bar, as the pianist has always maintained). He greets it like an old friend chanced upon at closing time, and plays two of his standards - 'Invitation to the Blues' and 'The House Where Nobody Lives' - that leave you with that feeling that Waits's music has always carried: the sense that he would love to keep playing it until dawn had broken and the city had been drunk dry.