The assembled material is divided into three acts. The first, ‘Brawlers’, is as gratuitous and gratifying as a mouthful of bloody steak, with the Crampsy shlockabilly of ‘Lie To Me’ incarcerated next to the politically explicit New York Times headlines of ‘Road To Peace’ next to the jailhouse rock of ‘2.19’, all which are characterised by chain-gang clang and deep throat vocals and Marc Ribot’s garrotting-wire guitar. ‘Bawlers’, by contrast, is laden with the kind of Wallace Beery movie laments that fall out of Tom’s pockets like beer change. You could keep going back to this stuff for years and still find new treasures, such as the malt liquor schmaltz of ‘You Can Never Hold Back Spring’ or Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’ or the nasty jazz of ‘Little Drop Of Poison’ from the barroom scene in ‘Shrek’.

The last act, ‘Bastards’, is the most uneven and yet the most intriguing. A reading of Bukowski’s ‘Nirvana’ bypasses the old goat’s dirty alco uncle routines for a rather lovely tale of roadside diner satori. Similarly, Jack Kerouac’s ‘Home I’ll Never Be’ and ‘On The Road’ prove that Waits’s Beats fetish tends to favour Hopper melancholia over boozed-up hophead speed-rap dispatches. Then there are characteristically macabre monologues like ‘First Kiss’ and the hilariously grim Tim Burton-ish bedtime tale ‘Children’s Story’.

It’s no mere grab-bag. ‘Orphans’, in its expansive and untidy way, is as complete a Tom Waits album as ‘Swordfishtrombones’, ‘Bone Machine’ or ‘Mule Variations’, in which the old prospector gets to don every last one of his various Halloween hats and Ed Gein masks. There are mouth-teeth-and-tongue beatbox routines, plucked National Guitar Ironweed laments, insane come-all-yez, mad bastardisations of the ballad form and bad-minded gospel tunes.

In other words, all the food groups are represented. Rare meat indeed.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.