Worth his Wait in gold

IT IS more than 20 years since Tom Waits last performed in Ireland.

He is so cherished here, however, that he was met with a standing ovation the moment he walked on stage at the Rat Cellar, the large marquee erected in the Phoenix Park for the visit of his Glitter and Doom tour to Dublin. Waits grinned inanely, revelling in the adulation.

Then he got down to business. Waits’s singing has always been more of a croak than a croon, no more coherent with age. Even on a track like Rain Dogs, one could barely decipher what he was singing as “I want to dance with the Rose of Tralee”, but the audience cheered with gusto anyway.