Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who’s achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous ‘jazzbo’ years in 1970s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years – by way of such shape-shifting ’80s albums as Swordfishtrombones – this exhaustive biography charts Waits’ life step-by-step and album-by-album.

Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is a outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer – the definitive account to date of Tom Waits’ life and work.

Can you remember first hearing Tom Waits’ voice, when and where?

It would have been the summer of 1975 most likely – an older boy at school had a copy of Nighthawks at the Diner. Having no real frames of reference for Waits’ “act” – knowing almost nothing about jazz or Jack Kerouac or anything of that kind – I couldn’t decide what the voice meant, but I knew there was something in it that I wanted.

When did you first think of writing a book about Tom Waits?

In 1991 I wrote a proposal for a book called Sucker On The Vine: Tom Waits in Tinseltown. I never showed it to anybody because pretty soon after I got stuck into my big LA book Waiting for the Sun (which mentioned Waits in two or three places).

And then, what made you eventually take the plunge?

A conversation with Andrew Corbin at Broadway Books in New York. I said, “Someone’s got to attempt a really penetrating book about this man.” Fortunately he agreed.

What was your access like to the musicians and people that surround or have surrounded Waits?

It pretty much depended on how close someone still was to Waits and his wife. Luckily there were enough people who’d either been cut off by them or weren’t going to be told whether or not they could speak with a biographer. But Tom and Kathleen didn’t make life easy, and there were people like Keith Richards who would have talked to me but for their intervention.

In a situation like this, what role do you think the biographer has? How did this process affect the way you think about approaching subjects?

I remain deeply ambivalent about the whole business of poking into someone’s life – and about the entire issue of the relationship (or lack of) between an artist’s work and his or her… “life”. But it’s a dirty job and I had to do it.

Did writing the book lead to any re-evaluations – was there any particular album or period that went up or down in your estimation?

The album I realized had been given unfairly short shrift over the years is 1977′s Foreign Affairs, which I actually think stands up better than its far more revered predecessor Small Change. I also think Heartattack and Vine is a classic, at least as good as Swordfishtrombones. Of the later albums, I still think Mule Variations is easily the best.

You made it to the Edinburgh gig of his most recent tour, ‘Glitter and Doom’. Where do you think he’s at now as an artist and performer?

Real Gone and Orphans suggested to me that Waits is stuck in a bit of a rut. The ‘Glitter and Doom’ tour was pretty great but I think he needs to find his way out of the barking dissonant corner he’s painted himself into. I’m fascinated by where he goes next. Part of me wishes he’d go back in the studio with Bones Howe and a 20-piece orchestra, but that’ll never happen!

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