Tom Waits: Sound Circus, London

THE OBVIOUS question about Tom Waits — is he, or is he not, a phoney? — ought to be perfectly clear, yet was never quite resolved for me at London's Sound Circus on Sunday. The difficulty stems from his self-made image, which seems so much second-nature it's become his whole artistic stance. Waits is the coolest cat on the block. In his beat clothes, and with his racial slur of a voice, almost like Satchmo's sometimes, he contrives both to look and sound as though he were a stewbum halfway into a meths trip.