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I was eight years old when I experienced my first Tom Waits song. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before.

Granted, at the age of eight, that wasn’t saying a lot, but the statement continues to apply to this day.

I can’t recall what went through my head when first listening to ‘Telephone Call From Istanbul’, a rhythmically buoyant song that seemed to be about broken glass, blue donkeys and never trusting a man in a blue trench coat. All I know is that I was open-mouthed, and nothing musical was ever the same again. Especially for my long-suffering mother, who would have to deal with me imitating Waits’ possessed, wolf-like howls whenever I entered a room.

Even now, she refers to Waits as the sound 'Woooouh!' as opposed to his birth name - both as a reference to my insufferable childhood antics but also, I suspect, to the fact that listening to a Tom Waits record is, for her, the equivalent of that scene from The Pink Panther Strikes Back when Herbert Lom dons the clawed gauntlet and goes to town on the chalkboard. Some apples do fall far from the tree.

Years later, I wandered about in my then-favourite music store, on a mission: I was looking to buy my first Tom Waits album.

At the time, I didn’t know his discography like the back of my hand and was searching for the album that featured ‘Telephone Call From Istanbul’. To my distress, I couldn’t find it and settled on the only record they had, ‘Rain Dogs’, not realising in the moment that it was the best buy I was ever going to make.

Rain Dogs Island

I mainlined the album again and again, completely drunk on Waits' gravelly growls, his ominous whispers, the carnivalesque musical accompaniments that enriched the stories of one-armed dwarves, millionaires shoveling coal and protagonists falling out of windows with confetti in their hair.

I couldn’t make my teenage peers get on board with my first full-on entry point into Waits’ discography. They just looked at me funny, as though I’d boorishly plonked a huge, whiskey-glazed hog roast onto the kids' birthday party table instead of a chocolate cake and yelled ‘TUCK IN!’

Regardless, I couldn't get enough. ‘Rain Dogs’ felt weird, abstract, wickedly funny and downright beautiful. Every listen widened my eyes further, leaving me bewildered at how romantic ballads, theatrical polkas, wild rumpas, jazz and poetry could crosspollinate so perfectly. It defied all characterisation, and I loved the album more because I couldn't describe its effect.

Sure, it didn’t contain ‘Telephone Call From Istan