COOL VARIATIONS

At the start of the 80s Tom Waits felt trapped. Hemmed in by the persona he’d created over the previous decade, his salvation came with the album Swordfishtrombones, an artistic volte-face that celebrates its 40th birthday this month. Wesley Doyle looks at its creation – via an album-byalbum run-through of what led up to it – and reassesses the peerless work that followed

In 1979 Tom Waits told Melody Maker that he was working on a screenplay called, Why is the Dream so much Sweeter than the Taste? “It’s about a guy who’s a success at being a failure, and a guy who’s a failure at being a success.” He’d spent the preceding decade creating a body of work that positioned him as the poet laureate of Hollywood’s disenfranchised; a Skid Row barfly who sang of life on the margins and the romance that could be found there, no matter how tawdry.

But over the course of seven albums, the life Waits sang about began to seep into his own. The self-mythologising culminated in an alter-ego that became artistically restrictive, and personally destructive. Waits was looking for a way out and he found it in a creative and romantic partnership that has informed his work ever since.

The first fruits of that relationship formed the album Swordfishtrombones, originally released in September 1983. It’s a jumble of waltzes, polkas, ballads and rancheras, underpinned by clanking junk-shop percussion and archaic instrumentation, all topped off with Waits’ reverse-engineered voice – he sounded old in his twenties, so his style has never really dated. The record saved his career and set him up as one of the most respected, critically acclaimed musicians of the past 50 years.

Trying to pin Waits down is a pointless task. His entire 80s output and beyond sounds more the product of a foundry than a recording studio. He’s made wrongfooting his audience an artform, which has given him an integrity that’s hard to come by.