"Well, it's only been 23 years!" exclaims Tom Waits conversationally as he takes his seat at the piano for the more intimate section of his concert in Edinburgh last Sunday. "Oh, you know, the usual." is his well-timed response to the imagined question from the audience hanging in the air. Waits was 30 minutes late taking to the stage as is, I have been led to believe, standard practice where he is concerned. Well, what's another 30 minutes on top of all those years going to hurt?

As we waited for the big entrance, the random array of elderly loud hailers adorning the back of the stage croaked out some carefully selected music to set the mood. Tom Waits took to the stage, his arms reaching out on either side to acknowledge the welcome, he then raised his upturned hands slowly in front of him, fingers dancing, indicating to his audience he wanted the noise level to increase further and the crowd was happy to oblige. The concert opened with a brilliant opening medley of Lucinda and Ain’t Going Down To The Well which segued back and forth between the songs. Waits stood on a raised circular platform, more like a drum riser, fringed with light bulbs and kicked up a cloud of white powder each time he stamped down one of his black booted feet to emphasise a beat. It was a simple but very effective theatrical effect. The stage was atmospherically lit in bordello red and lurid green for much of the set and the spotlights trained on Waits threw long spindly shadows.

After a little more comedic milking of the applause the band broke into Rain Dogs and I was struck at the manner in which Waits carries himself on stage. It's like watching an amalgam of Chaplin's tramp and the sort of deranged, wild-haired old drunk you might encounter pan handling for loose change in any city centre. Waits no longer drinks or smokes but he inhabits his stage persona like a well worn pair of jeans.

The Waits back catalogue is a treasure chest from which just pulling twenty songs at random would generally produce a two-hour live set to blow away most other touring acts. Stylistically the songs cover vaudevillian Weimar-era cabaret, melancholy piano lounge ballads, Beat-inspired spoken-word numbers, twisted blues and tortured gospel alongside a great deal else in between. The band were simply brilliant, sounding like they had been playing together for years in darkened clubs. The Spanish guitar breaks performed by Omar Torrez which punctuated Hoist That Rag were a delight. Here's the full band line up:

Patrick Warren - keyboards
Omar Torrez - guitars
Vincent Henry - horns
Casey Waits - drums and percussion
Seth Ford-Young - bass
Sullivan Waits - congas and clarinet

Snippets of useless trivia are dispensed during the evening, almost all of which exist only in the travelling circus of Waits's playful imagination. They included a graphic description of how the legs and hips of a male Praying Mantis will continue to grind out their copulating rhythm even after the female Mantis has devoured his entire head and most of the torso during mating. Astronauts returning from the Moon report that it smells of fireworks ("That's where they all go!") and a new law which forbids forcing a monkey to smoke cigarettes has "ruined everything" for Tom Waits. We were also helpfully informed that a weasel came from the same family as a mink so it was perfectly acceptable to approach a woman wearing a mink scarf and say "You have a really nice weasel" and that you should tell her that Tom said it was OK.

It would be difficult to choose highlights from the night here but if pushed I'd go for the either the dramatic opening medley or the cemetery blues of Dirt in the Ground. The show, pre-encore, closed with Tom getting an unexpected glitter shower during Make it Rain. Now, close to a hundred pounds is a lot of money (for most people) to pay to see a concert. You need to be pretty committed as a fan of the performing artist in question to stump up that sort of cash. This is before you factor in all of the hoop jumping and DNA profiling required for the anti ticket touting campaign. The audience at the Edinburgh Playhouse were genuinely dedicated Tom Waits aficionados but their major flaw, in the eyes of this reviewer, was their reticence and politeness. The Innocent When You Dream sing-a-long was more of a mumble-a-long. I am in no way disassociating myself from my fellow audience members. We all piss at the same trough. But you were left feeling that a more raucous, a more exuberant audience may have wrung just a little extra from the encore to what was a special evening's entertainment. The possibility of a second encore seemed to hang enticingly in the air for a couple of minutes before the house lights went up. The gut feeling that the audience had been considered before being denied has, I'm sure, no basis in fact but it was inescapable at the time.

Waits's music and the theatrical persona that has built up around him for the last 35 years appeals most to those who have gone through their time here on earth expecting just a little more out of life than it has delivered, and can accept at least a portion of the blame for themselves. It is this acceptance and self knowledge which turns the character of Waits's shambling tramp into a messianic travelling hobo. U.S. Vogue's Mick Brown has written that Waits uses his vignettes as "platforms for wry and truthful observations about the cavity of desperation and disillusionment beneath the bravura of American life.". There is plenty of desperation and disillusionment right here in the U.K. and as such Waits is assured an audience on this side of the Atlantic for a long time to come.

Set List

Lucinda/Ain't goin' down to the well [Video on You Tube to give you an idea of it all]
Rain dogs
Falling down
On the other side of the world
I'll shoot the moon
Cemetery polka
Get behind the mule
Cold cold ground
Circus / Table top Joe
Jesus gonna be here
Picture in a frame
Invitation to the blues
House where nobody lives
Innocent when you dream
Lie to me
Hoist that rag
Bottom of the world
Hang down your head
Green grass
Way down in the hole
Dirt in the ground
Make it rain
Encore
Goin' out west
All the world is green
[Set list found at The Eyeball Kid]

Listen to NPR podcast of the full Tom Waits gig from Atlanta, GA 5th July, 2008
Photo of Tom found at Cows Are Just Food, and the original is at Zoometter's Flickr account. I assume he is onstage in Milan.