Mick Hartley

What the Times oddly call "arts personalities" (Andrew Marr? Matthew Parris?) reveal the "heritage classics they secretly can’t stand". More often than not this reveals more about the chooser than the choice. Andrew Marr hates jazz; Matthew Parris hates the Beatles. Nicky Haslam, interior designer, hates Monty Python, especially Life of Brian - "I hate sacrilege" - oh, and the Goons and Charlie Chaplin too.

Some – Jeremy Deller on Oasis – seem hardly worth the effort: does anyone rate Oasis that highly anyway?

Others, of course, are absolutely right. Jude Kelly on Rubens….and Stewart Lee, I was pleased to see, on Tom Waits:

There’s a sticker on the front of Tom Waits’s new album from a review of the acclaimed £100-a-ticket Glitter and Doom tour, reading: “ ‘The greatest entertainer on Planet Earth’ — The Guardian”. This beats even the Evening Standard’s “Russell Brand is the closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce” in the crazy quote stakes. For here Waits is just an actor pedalling a watered-down, glammed-up, version of the genuinely avant-garde artists that he’s co-opted, such as Captain Beefheart, but in a vaudevillian form that places his invented persona in inverted commas and ensures, rather than marginal cult status, commissions from arts houses and the adulation of thrill-seeking squares who’d be scared by the real thing.

And the extra disc of “Tom’s quixotic ruminations” is a load of precisely rehearsed, E-grade, fake improvised comedy riffs and prewar Catskills stand-up schtick, given the flavour of art by being underscored by piano doodles.

Well yes. As I put it here (writing about Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour show), "I just can't get past that absurdly mannered beat-style hard-drinking croak. It's that old deep male voice thing again, but played the other way, as a mark of outsider hip". It's not so much Beefheart to my ears – though no doubt Beefheart figures somewhere – as Charles Bukowski. It's a totally manufactured persona. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose: Dylan himself in a way is a totally manufactured persona, or was when he first arrived in New York in the early Sixties, and maybe that fellow-feeling was part of the reason that Dylan played Waits so much (and had him as a regular corrrespondent) on Theme Time Radio Hour. And there's no doubt that Waits can write a decent turn of phrase. But whereas Dylan grew into, or out of, or through, his Woody Guthrie style persona, for me Tom Waits never comes close.