TOM WAITS, EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE, 28TH JULY 2008

The Tom Waits of 2008 has ventured far from the conventional balladry his career began with in the early Seventies, and deep into the forest of weird, faux-experimental fairground music. Tonight he appears as a dishevelled hobo, complete with Tourettes spasms and ticks, standing in a circus ring. Birds have eaten his breadcrumb trail. There’s no way back out of the woods.

The Glitter and Doom Tour, its UK dates limited to two nights in Edinburgh Playhouse, costs £102.50 a ticket, and punters are required to show photo i.d on arrival. We were offered unsolicited advice on the unsuitability of ours after we had been let in, which I suppose is all part of the service for such a high ticket price. Waits takes the stage, the set resembling a carnival in a junkyard, forty minutes late, just as the slow handclap started, and then orchestrates the ebb and flow of applause. He stamps his feet. Pre-positioned dust rises in a cloud. He sings, all the lyrics rendered incomprehensible by the growl that grows more guttural with the years. The band clump their clownish reels, a square’s idea of weird. Every shift in mood, every gesture Waits makes, is shadowed by superbly slick and subtle lighting changes. But everything is calculated and pre-ordained. This isn’t a gig. It’s a theatre piece. And Waits and his band are actors, playing the role of a band in an American Gothic fantasy. During Eyeball Kid Waits puts on a shiny hat which reflects the light. There’s a standing ovation. The Edinburgh Fringe starts next week. At The Standing Order pub there’s a guy called Mr Methane who can fart the national anthem. These people need to get out more.

The band leave. Waits sits at the piano. He tells a funny story about something that supposedly happened last time he was in Edinburgh, but like a visiting hack American comic who hasn’t done his local research, maintains it involved swallowing a ‘bullfrog’ in someone’s ‘yard’. Everyone laughs. He dismisses requests, - “Those are all requests, but they’re your requests” – and even though we appreciate he’s in character as a grouchy genius, a little humility wouldn’t go amiss at these prices. Waits plays Innocent When You Dream and hands the chorus over to the crowd, the one moment in the evening when something genuine seemed to happen, before the band, now augmented by his son Sullivan on bongos, return for a closing set of more rootsy, less contrived material. His son? Tom Waits could have a son, sure, but would the shaking hobo-clown-huckster, and could the hobo-clown-huckster’s son afford sneakers? What is it we are watching exactly? The artifice of Waits’ latter-day act makes it difficult to respond to emotionally, as you never feel you’re reaching anything real, but now it’s being compromised by inappropriate footwear. At least make the boy pretend to have a club foot or something.

Nonetheless, the crowd are ecstatic. Was it an example of the West End musical effect, where high prices mean the audience have already invested so heavily, both financially and emotionally, in the event that it can’t fail? Or, like the medicine show shysters of old, whose schtick Waits’ has appropriated, is the old devil just a master salesman?