Tom Waits – Nighthawks At The Diner (1975)

This is one I've long enjoyed as a performance, but never really listened to the individual songs in any depth.

The premise is that this is a small cabaret/jazz club performance just Tom and a small band, doing a live show, a few songs and lots of spiel and jokes between them.

This is only partly true. Certainly it was recorded as live, in front of a small invited audience in the Record Plant studio in Los Angeles, but in two sessions across four days.

Nevertheless, it's a massive tribute to the professionalism of Waits and his band that they did record a whole album in two days. It's clear that it is the pseudo-performance which is the thing here - it's hugely entertaining, Waits is a master raconteur, even if a number of the songs are fairly standard barroom ballads, delivered in his ubiquitous style.

But there are a couple of belters, too. There's a couple of spoken word narratives, Emotional Weather Report played for laughs and the beautiful Big Joe and Phantom 309 stand out among these, while of the songs, my favourites are the charming Better Off Without A Wife (Waits and Kathleen Brennan have been married for over 40 years, so I guess he rarely sings this now), and the drunken love song Nobody.

This isn't an album where the individual songs make it, it's the whole performance, and while Waits is the centre of attention, none of this would be possible without the fantastic band he assembled, whose jazz club soundtrack, and ability to switch the mood at a moment's notice turn this from a performance into an experience.

Link to full album

4* - a fantastic way to spend an hour