Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles (Book Talk & Signing)

Saturday 6th August

FREE ENTRY

Doors: 7pm

Talk Starts: 7:30pm

Through his new book Song Noir, author Alex Harvey explores the formative first decade of Tom Waits’ career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles; from his soft, folk inflected debut, Closing Time to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones. 

Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, he turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic; a vision of la as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

Using music, images and stories, Harvey will show how Waits absorbed LA’s wealth of cultural influences to combine the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, and explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes.

Alex Harvey is a producer and director of programmes including Panorama  and The Late Show  for the BBC. His later films include The Lives of Animals  (2002) and Enter the Jungle  (2014). Based in Los Angeles, he regularly writes on literature, film and music for London Review of Books  and LA Review of Books.