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One of the more revealing cliches of fantastical fiction is the rubbish dump world. It’s a cliché within a cliché – the mono-habitat single biome planet – and though there’s little logic why such dumping grounds would come to exist, their usefulness is clear for storytellers. They provide layered environments, full of anachronistic tech and retrofitting opportunities, accidents and innovations, suggestions of an ancient future, as well as plentiful underdogs and overlords. In a deeper sense, the attraction to rubbish dump worlds may lie with one decisive factor – they are not fiction. This is physically true, given how the West uses the so-called developing world, from electronic waste dumps in Ghana to the shipbreaking ports of India and Pakistan. It is also culturally true. Our prevailing view of the past, seeing distant pinnacles from our own lofty position, is the result of historical astigmatism. An alternative sharper view is that it’s all junk, colossal piles of it from earlier epochs and our own, through which we constantly sift and recycle for our daily needs. We don’t have to imagine the rubbish dump world. We already live in it.

In one of his periodic, frequently hilarious, appearances on the Late Show With David Letterman, Tom Waits talked with self-deprecating charm about how he could get no recognition from his children other than “they seem to like me as a driver… I take the turns really fast”. And despite his best efforts, hanging around conspicuously in music shops, no recognition came from the music-loving public. Yet when he drove his kids to the landfill, “Twelve guys surrounded my car… Everybody knows me at the dump.”

Listening back to Waits’ Island trilogy of Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years, I was reminded that I was essentially one of those guys at the dump. Listening to them a second time, I realised I’d never left. Neither has Tom Waits. Simply because, in his music and persona at least and with the greatest respect, Tom Waits is the dump. The story of the Island trilogy is how he transformed, from a degenerated piano man of a New York City damned to forever repeat a single autumn night in 1955, to a very different creature indeed – a clattering magnetised bionic man pulling in detritus from every landfill from Fresh Kills to Laogang. Where once Waits had dealt in self-conscious standoffish cool and the plausible deniability of irony, now he was dilapidated and inflammatory and misanthropic, no longer smoking in doorways with collar up, newsboy hat down, amidst the drowning neon, but instead marauding through the streets of every port, a junkbot-golem, mechanical and rhematic, pulling himself in a hundred unanticipated and brilliant directions at once. How had this happened?