Looking Out To Sea

I wrote this review during the Edinburgh Festival, in late August, but didn’t get round to posting it. In the interest of completeness I will be posting other stuff from this year’s festival and Fringe in the coming days. Enjoy.

I’m a huge Tom Waits fan. He’s probably the musician I listen to most, or the one I come back to most often when I’ve finished listening to a new artist intensively. Tom Waits is great. He’s also an old and well-established musician who doesn’t have to release and tour on an intensive schedule (ie, he works whenever he damn well feels like it). The last time he ‘toured’ the UK he played a single night in London.

So, like if you want to see the Beatles or the Stone Roses nowadays, you gotta see a tribute act. Which feels a bit unseemly, somehow; a bit cheap. But whatever it was, it was most definitely fun.

The show was quite short, but started at the suitably jazzy hour of midnight. The main man, Stewart D’Arrieta, is an Australian (does it seem to you that all tribute acts are Australian?) and sang and played the piano. He was backed by a two-man rhythm section and at a couple of points a woman came on for duets in ‘One From The Heart’ and backing vocals in ‘Hold On’.

The music covered was an even selection of Tom Waits’ career so far with the notable exceptions of his more experimental later stuff after he met Kathleen Brennan. That was probably more because he couldn’t do it justice with only piano, drums and bass. We bought a CD on the way out, recorded in studio, which used a wider range of instruments and had a greater variety of song accordingly — there’s some stuff that really needs guitar to reach full potential.

Mr D’Arrieta was dressed in the bar-fly jazz pianist get-up that you would associate with early Waits, from Closing Time and particularly Small Change. Between songs he recounted some of the apocryphal stories used at one time or another to explain some of the songs; and sometimes he broke out of character to explain the personal or cultural significance of the songs. I had never noticed the beauty of ‘Kentucky Avenue’ properly before he did this.

If you’re even slightly interested in Tom Waits’ music I recommend you see this show. Even at an hour long (probably curtailed for the sake of the festival) it was fantastic fun. Opening with ‘What’s He Building?’ was also a moment of genius.