Tom Waits

Bone Machine
Island, 1992

When an album opens with something called 'Earth Died Screaming', and it sounds like a homeless man playing glockenspiel on a skeleton's rib cage, you know you're in for an interesting ride. The story behind it is even stranger than the result. Inspired by pygmy 'stick orchestras', the noise simulating a pile of chalky bones was made when the singer gathered a collection of strangers in the car park outside his studio and had them knock together lengths of 2 x 4. It was recorded on a prototype of an extremely early keyboard sampler, the Chamberlain 2000, made circa 1960, which ran in part on a bicycle chain.

Like that of Dylan or Bowie, Tom Waits' audience spans a wide range of ages – but an even wider range of subcultures. He began performing in the 1970s as a vagabond, gravel-throated lounge singer who told romantic stories about drunks and hookers. Then, in the early 1980s, after dumping his manager, producer and record label (or perhaps the other way around), he reinvented himself with the colourful and carnivalesque Swordfishtrombones, the first of a three-part trilogy and the best of his albums so far. On the cover, he posed as a blush-soaked dandy, wearing suspenders and leopard-skin gloves tucked into his belt.

Bone Machine was Waits' first studio album of the 1990s, after five years spent working in film and theatre. It marked the third, most experimental phase of his career. He described it, to the few journalists he would talk to, as a collection of songs about death, suicide and the end of the world, strung together like vertebrae. One of the unusual instruments used on the album was the Conundrum, a spinning wheel with various types of metal custom-made for Waits by a motorcycle mechanic down the road. But bleak as it is, Bone Machine holds its share of jokes. Its very blackest moment, 'Dirt In The Ground', was inspired by a pick-up line his friend used to ply on girls in hotel lobbies: "Babe, why don’t you come up to my room? After all, one day we're all going to be just..."