Grammy Award-winning American musician, composer, songwriter and actor Tom Waits will co-host a special radio show with Iggy Pop. Echoing their famous joint appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, the two-hour programme will see the pair pump the Confidential Jukebox full of nickels and dimes and spin some of their favourite tracks to one another. The show will air on Iggy’s regular BBC Radio 6 Music slot at 4pm UK time on Sunday 3rd December and is accessible globally.
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In between records, the pair share stories, including how Tom once hitched a ride with Eden Ahbez, the songwriter who composed ‘Nature Boy, and how Iggy once came across Captain Beefheart eating breakfast in L.A. but was wise enough not to disturb him.
Personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Waits’ spectacular middle-period albums, released on Island Records between 1983 and 1993, have been newly remastered from the original tapes and are available now on vinyl and CD via Island/UMe.
Waits’ transformative creative breakthrough, Swordfishtrombones (1983), its sprawling and superb sequel, Rain Dogs (1985), and the trilogy-completing, tragi-comic stage musical, Franks Wild Years (1987) were reissued on 8th September, 40 years to the day that Swordfishtrombones was released into the wild, ushering in a new and critically acclaimed musical era for Waits and his longtime songwriting and production partner, Brennan. The Grammy-winning apocalyptic stomp of Bone Machine (1992) and the innovatory musical fable, The Black Rider (1993) (Waits with Robert Wilson and William S. Burroughs) followed on 6th October.
These critically acclaimed works are a monument to an artist’s ability to break through into new creative territory. Waits not only shifted gears, he deliberately ground them departing from his ‘70’s era noir romanticism and traditional Tin Pan Alley songwriting to 80’s era abstract orchestrator, fiercely inventive sound sculptor and miner of the subconscious, while still retaining his innate lyricism, melodic sophistication and humanity.
Waist is also celebrated for his acting work and has appeared in films, including Down By Law (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Seven Psychopaths (2012) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
BBC Radio 6 Music is the UK’s biggest digital-only radio station with 2.8 million weekly listeners.