The Tom Waits Winter Warmer For the Wounded and Wasted… Join us for an evening of words, flickering pictures, scratched discs and unspooled cassettes, celebrating this most mercurial of American artists in the company of his biographer Barney Hoskyns and photographer and artist Eva Vermandel, hosted by author Travis Elborough
Doors: 7pm [event begins at 7.30pm]
Tickets: £8
“They say that I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with. And they say that like it’s a bad thing.” -Tom Waits
This month it will be 74 years since the singer-songwriter and actor Tom Waits was born in a taxi cab outside a hospital in Pomona, California, on 7 December 1949. Join us for an evening of words, flickering pictures, scratched discs and unspooled cassettes, celebrating this most mercurial of American artists in the company of his biographer Barney Hoskyns and photographer and artist Eva Vermandel, hosted by Travis Elborough.
Barney Hoskyns is the author of Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, a career-spanning survey of one of rock's great enigmas and a book hailed as the definitive account of this shape-shifting survivor's highs, lows, ones-for-the-road and on-the-wagon ongoing legacy. Co-founder and editorial director of online rock-journalism library Rock's Backpages and former US correspondent for MOJO, Hoskyns is one of the finest music writers of his generation and his many acclaimed books include Across the Great Divide: The Band & America (1993), Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, & the Sound of Los Angeles (1996) and Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons (2005).
Eva Vermandel's works are held in the collections of the V&A, London; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. She published her first monograph Splinter in 2013 with Hatje Cantz. Concurrently with her artistic practice, Vermandel undertakes commissions as an editorial portrait photographer and it was in this capacity that she came to photograph Tom Waits on 23 July 2004 at the Little Amsterdam Restaurant, Petaluma, California.
Described by The Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’, Travis Elborough is an award-winning author, whose books include Atlas of Vanishing Places and The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World, in which he also appeared.
Barney Hoskyns
Eva Vermandel [Image credit: Kalpesh Lathigra]