I’ll eventually get around to writing a proper review of what will almost inevitably end up as My Favourite Gig of 2008. Yes, I know it’s only August and I shouldn’t be writing the rest of my year off already, but this was a Tom Waits concert, Goddamn it! It’d take something pretty spectacular to knock it off pole position. I suppose a surprise birthday festival in my living room might do the trick, but only so long as the organisers manage to get Jimi, Janis, Kurt & Elvis as the headliners. Even then I’d probably be late in writing a review.

Anyhow, what follows is a setlist for Tom Waits’ 24th July gig at Le Grand Rex in Paris courtesy of the fansite The Eyeball Kid. What follows that is my first attempt at online gig reconstruction. Various public-spirited people have uploaded bits of the gig to YouTube, so I thought it might be fairly public-spirited of me to present it all in some kind of sequential order. I don’t know if I’m the only person to think of doing this, but if I’m not then maybe some other public-spirited person can put all the various efforts into some kind of a sequential order, too.

I could only find a dozen songs from the night, and resisted the temptation to splice in material from other ‘Glitter and Doom’ tour dates. If other tracks turn up then I’ll add them as and when. The songs in bold on the playlist are the ones that have been captured by cameraphone. Unsuprisingly, the sound and picture quality can vary quite dramatically, but I suppose that’s kind of apt. It really was one of those you had to be there nights.

Lucinda/Ain’t Going Down To The Well
Raindogs / Russian Dance
Falling Down
All The World Is Green
I’ll Shoot The Moon
Cemetery Polka
Cold Cold Ground
Eyeball Kid
Way Down In The Hole
The Briar And The Rose
You Can Never Hold Back Spring
Lucky Day (aborted)
Tom Traubert’s Blues
Innocent When You Dream
Lie To Me
Hoist That Rag
Bottom Of The World
November
Hang Down Your Head
Get Behind The Mule
Dirt In The Ground
Make It Rain

Chocolate Jesus
Trampled Rose
Come On Up To The House

Lucinda/Ain’t Going Down To The Well from videodharma:


Raindogs & Russian Dance from Stunneddotorg:


Falling Down from videodharma:

All The World Is Green from Ragged Words:

Eyeball Kid (featuring the mirror-encrusted Glitterball Hat!) from Mr Percy:

The Briar and the Rose from lorusinaqua:

You Can Never Hold Back Spring from Rockerparis:

Tom Traubert’s Blues from Stunneddotorg:

Lie To Me from Rockerparis:

Hoist That Rag from lorusinaqua:

Make It Rain & Trampled Rose from Rockerparis:

Trampled Rose from Rockerparis:

Thanks to the various Raindogs who contributed clips. Maybe next time he plays I’ll have a decent cameraphone.

I’ve never been a design nut, architecture addict or buildingophile, but when I first saw Le Grand Rex in Paris I was reduced to the state of a lovesick puppy.

It was years’ ago (don’t ask how many), during my first trip to Paris. I was staying at a far-from-swanky hotel just a few far-from-swanky streets from Gare du Nord station and, on the first day, went for a reasonably long walk. As someone who only started travelling abroad when I was all grown-up and could afford to pay for it myself, I was doing then what I still do now: getting intentionally lost as whilst immersing myself in the alien ambiance of it all.

I can’t remember the specifics of the route, possibly because the route was far from specific. I headed in a vaguely southerly direction on the basis that I was pretty certain that the ‘Nord‘ in Gare du Nord meant ‘north’. By my standards, that’s about as sophisticated as it’s ever likely to get. Anyway, at some point I must have ended up wandering down the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière because, when I reached the point where it intersects with Boulevard Poissonnière, I saw it:

It stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t need to be a design nut, an architecture addict or a buildingophile to know that I was looking at one Goddamned sexy building. For one thing, it couldn’t have looked more outrageously French if it tried. It was so quintessentially cool, so effortlessly elegant and so proudly Parisian that I half expected it to light up a Citannes, raise a pair of eyebrows and shrug. I was captivated. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I might even have fallen in love.

The fact it was very obviously a cinema probably had a lot to do with it. I’ve been embroiled in a long-term and occasionally tempestuous love affair with the cinema for most of my life. ever since I first saw Star Wars at the Birmingham Gaumont at the tender age of seven. The Gaumont – in case you don’t already know – was a grand, two-tiered, Art Deco picture palace that once boasted the largest screen in Europe. I spent many a Saturday afternoon there, feeding my growing celluloid addiction by greedily devouring movies, often indiscriminately. I can still remember the walnut panelled foyer, the huge velvet curtains and the ladies selling ice cream in the aisle. There was something almost sacred and ritualistic about it all. It will always be one of my favourite places in the world.

The Gaumont, like so many of its kith and kin, was closed in 1983 and bulldozed out of existence in 1986. Others didn’t even last that long. Located a mere ten minutes’ walk from my family home, the magnificent Kingstanding Odeon might have been a serious rival for my affections if it wasn’t for the inconvenient fact that it was turned into a bingo hall eight years before I was born. As you drive through the suburbs you’ll often catch a glimpse of other, long-abandoned cinemas, now nothing more than fossilized remains of splendour. In Birmingham, they are a thing of the past. In this part of the world ornate picture palaces and movie temples are about as rare as rocking horse shit.

But not in Paris, it seems. As I looked at Le Grand Rex I was reminded of those Saturday afternoons at the Gaumont. The buildings, after all, were of similar age: the Parisian cinema first opened its doors in December 1932, some 18 months after its Brummie counterpart. Like the Gaumont, the facade of Le Grand Rex was bold and classically Art Deco, while the Haussmann-endorsed pan coupe corners gave it a distinctly Parisian flavour. And while the Gaumont once had the largest screen in Europe, Le Grande Rex was (and still is) the current holder of that title.

Inside, the scale of the main auditorium – 2,800 seats with two balcony levels – left me in the same state of awe I felt as a child. The baroque decor, the otherworldly elegance and the vaulted ceiling festooned with stars transported me to another place and another state of mind, somewhere that I thought no longer existed. This was somewhere special, somewhere sacred, somewhere timeless. This was something else.

I can’t think of a better place in the world to see a Tom Waits concert.

I’m off to see Tom Waits at the Grand Rex in Paris in a few weeks time and, needless to say, I’m rather excited. It’s won’t be the first time I’ve seen him live. In fact, I saw him at the very same venue 8 years’ ago.

Here’s something from the archives:

He’d given two encores – and the house lights had long since come up – but the audience were still on their feet and making an awful lot of noise thirty minutes after Tom Waits had left the stage of the Grand Rex Theatre in Paris. After forty-five minutes, and much to the relief of the bewildered theatre staff, the numbers had dwindled: most had accepted that he wasn’t coming back and reluctantly made their way to the exits. There was a stubborn, hardcore element, though, who carried on whooping and roaring, undeterred by reason and the pleas of the theatre manager to “Go home!”

I know – I was one of them.

The Grand Rex is lavish art-deco monument steeped in history doused in the spirit of Toulous-Lautrec - in other words, the perfect place to see a Tom Waits concert. Upon entering the theatre there was a buzz in the air – the kind you read about in the archive pages of rock magazines, of those legendary gigs that always seemed to happen before you were born. You’re reluctant to let your expectations fly, though, because that’s a high-risk game… you’ve waited thirteen years’ for this and if your wings catch fire that’s quite a fall.

The lights dimmed, the drum-roll started… the crowd erupted. The drum kept rolling – he was taking his time. The crowd went silent, staring at the stage: “What’s he building in there?”

People were still being ushered to their seats when he entered through a side door to the downstairs seating area. There was a very, very loud roar. The spotlight followed him up to the stage as he threw fistfuls of glitter at the frenzied audience while growling into his bullhorn: “Ladeez and gentlemen – Harry’s Harbour Bizarre is proud to present, under the Big Top tonight, Human Oddities. That’s right, you’ll see The Three Headed Baby, you’ll see Hitler’s Brain, see Lea Graff the German midget who sat in J.P. Morgan’s lap…”

And I knew right then that this was one of those nights I’d be telling your grandkids about.

Here’s a pet theory of mine, make of it what you will: great concerts – like great movies and even (ahem) great comics – are made up of moments, little epiphanies that that transcend the clutter of our lives and take us to a different place. John Wayne walking off into the sunset at the end of ‘The Searchers’, that’s one. Judge Dredd punching Judge Fear in the face while saying “Gaze into the fist of Dredd”, that’s another. As you get older, these moments are fewer and farther between – maybe because there’s more clutter to transcend than there used to be. With concerts, you’re lucky to find a single moment that light’s your candle, fill’s your bucket and stays with you forever.

Well, Monday night was full of them:

Joining in on the chorus sing-a-long to Innocent When You Dream, Waits looks up from his piano and just says “Beautiful”… his deliciously surreal between-song anecdotes (anyone whose seen the film “Big Time” or listened to the album “Nighthawks at the Diner” knows what I’m talking about here) … The Glitterball Hat he wears during Eyeball Kid (a great visual effect for the fraction of the cost of a light bulb at a Pink Floyd concert)… the theatre turning into an ornate moshpit for ’16 Shells… The Bolshoi Ballet Anecdote…

(Explaining then ban on flash photography at the gig, Waits’ told the audience of his early career as a member of the Bolshoi Ballet. He was at the top of a human pyramid when someone in the audience took a photo. “My career,” he explained, “was over in a flash.”)

Lots of moments, but I particularly enjoyed The Piano Incident. During A Little Rain – a delicate lament from Bone Machine – there’s some screeching feedback as a piano string snaps. “Come on Bob, fix it! You’re on salary!” he yells to a hapless roadie, before adding: “You’re on salary for a minute.” As poor “Bob” tries to fix the piano string, Waits hammers out a staccato tune on the piano whilst ad-libbing a song-slash-running commentary. Then he turns to the audience and says: “That’s a fresh song… straight outta the oven…”

Like his recent album Mule Variations, the set-list touched most of the bases of Waits career. He played plenty of stuff from the Island era, with the classic Raindogs being surprisingly well represented (including the eponymous track, Tango ‘til They’re Sore, Jockey Full Of Bourbon and a, frankly, jaw-dropping rendition of Gun Street Girl). The only Asylum era song was a faultless rendition of Invitation To The Blues, while there were plenty of tracks played from his more recent albums.

As I (reluctantly) left the theatre, I kept thinking of another one of those moments. An English guy in the audience tried to heckle Waits: “Why didn’tcha play the UK?” This was not a smart thing to do as Waits doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He snarled at the heckler “Y’know, I have these embarrassing family members who keep following me around”, and that led seamlessly into Cementary Polka, a song about embarrassing family members.

As I left the theatre I thought to myself: “If only that guy had rephrased his heckle. Instead of “Why didn’tcha play the UK?” he should have asked “When are you going to play the UK?”

If I got a straight answer to that one I’d be booking my ticket now.