ON the cover Tom Waits peers from beneath a bowler hat, looking every enticing inch the ageing scallywag.

The spinner of skewed baroque tales offers up 17 tracks on a concert album that really works for being live: as the ultimate showman, Waits needs the audience as much as, from the whooping delight expressed here, they need him. Perhaps nothing will win over the non-converted, but fans will delight in that acid gargle voice, a raw foghorn sound that is strangely touching, as on the lovely Trampled Rose, where the in-time clapping of the audience adds to the song, as it does too on the stand-out Make It Rain.

But there are many beautifully flawed gems here, including Singapore, Get Behind The Mule and the exquisitely tender Fannin Street. A top band adds to the rasping blues and junkyard jazz feel. A second disc, entitled Tom’s Tales, has Waits talking and reeling off odd facts from his own encyclopaedia; wacky-pedia perhaps.