Rufus Wainwright

In my more experimentally-minded younger days, and actually right up until my wife fell pregnant with our first child, I used to read an excellent music magazine called The Wire. The Wire is the benchmark for esoteric music, broadly covering everything from jazz to electronica, and tends to steer clear of anything that might feasibly count as 'chart bothering', although they have courted controversy among their readership by featuring artists like Radiohead who are only loosely experimental (but which help an independent publication shift a few extra copies and reach a wider audience; not a bad thing really). Anyway, the final page used to be given over to either a music journalist or artist to describe their own personal musical epiphany. I think I've had my own, and his name is Rufus Wainwright.

I first heard Wainwright's name in a review of Hal Wilner's Leonard Cohen tribute concert, where Rufus performed alongside Nick Cave, who happens to be one of my favourite singers, and other cult and uncompromising artists. I first heard Wainwright's voice on an intentionally-negative Christmas album given away free with Mojo magazine (the track 'Blue Christmas'). I was interested, but not committed. The next time Wainwright reached these ears was on a duet with (groan) Dido on the Bridget Jones : Edge Of Reason soundtrack, which was uneasy listening since I can't stand Dido.

A year or so later, one bank holiday in 2006, we bought some CDs in an HMV sale and Michelle bought a double CD collection of Wainwright's Want albums, which she stuck in the CD player on the way home from town. I say this from the perspective of someone whose ears have been pricked by many sounds over the years, but I had never heard anything like Want One's opener 'Oh What A World' in my life before. More specifically, I had never before had a singer's voice captivate me so completely before. I can imagine that I must have sat there with my mouth slack-jawed, unable to focus on anything but that voice.

That I even listened beyond the first bar is indicative of how different my music taste is these days. Wainwright's music, while by turns plangent and strident, introverted and extroverted, includes a heavy dose of theatre and drama, as if he was schooled in the vaudevillian musicals of Broadway in his adopted home of Manhattan. As children, my sister and I were dragged along to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in our native Stratford-upon-Avon for a performance of a musical (usually My Fair Lady or Oklahoma or some such) by the local amateur dramatics society, and I hated absolutely everything about musicals. To find myself suddenly attracted to Wainwright's songs given my early disregard for many of those 'stage' elements was therefore rather surprising.

But attracted I was and hooked on Wainwright's distinctive approach to songs I became. Wainwright's songs are filled with a beauty and grace, a downtrodden wretchedness and sudden flashes of humour, occasionally all at once. I can't quite fathom precisely what it is that so appeals; the voice and arrangements are a given, while the rest I attribute to Wainwright's status as a resident of New York. For some reason, I got it into my head while reading The Catcher In The Rye that the well-to-do but reckless Holden Caufield was Rufus Wainwright; I'm not sure what he'd make of that, but there was something in JD Sallis' depiction of a Park Avenue prince wandering freely around Manhattan that songs like '14th Street', 'I Don't Know What It Is' and 'Millbrook' and so many other songs brought to life. Certainly, given his residency of Gramercy Park and the Wainwright lineage back to first Governor of New Amsterdam Peter Stuyvesant, he isn’t so far from a prince after all. They couldn't be further apart, but between Interpol, whose music my wife also got me into around the same time and who are also based in New York, these two very different musical propositions vividly colour my aural recollections of a visit to Manhattan.

In spite of how incredible this voice was to me, some part of me, jaded by the music industry's constant digital tampering with vocals made me think somewhat negatively that the voice I was hearing had somehow been staged or embellished. My mouth went dry again after listening to the cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Chelsea Hotel No 2' from Hal Wilner's tribute (available as a bonus track on Want Two) when, after enjoying the song to its conclusion, an audience struck up with rapturous applause and I realised that Wainwright was simply a wonderfully gifted singer whose performances are undiminished outside a studio setting. If I was hooked before 'Chelsea Hotel No 2', after listening to that I was well and truly smitten.

Quite rightly, Wainwright's clear sexuality – he claims he was never in the closet but was born in the living room – doesn't affect my enjoyment of his music at all. Just as well, as after seeing him lip-sync his way through his own version of the Judy Garland song 'Get Happy', replete with lippy, hat and high heels, a more narrow-minded individual might have balked at the prospect. But it is who he is and it informs the music he makes and I love the music. Sexual preference doesn't even come into it, as it quite rightly shouldn’t.

We caught Wainwright live in concert on 25th June at Oxford's New Theatre, a setting far more suited to his particular brand of music than Glastonbury was a few days before. I have, I fear used the term 'incredible' rather too freely in relation to previous concerts since this particular, perfect performance knocked any preceding – and I'm sure future – concert into sharp relief. I have never in my life been so rapt nor I have applauded so rapturously as I did on that night, and unless I'm privileged enough to see him perform again, I can't think of any other artist or concert that could top it.

Wainwright is a great showman with a sense of humour (like his cross-dressing lip-synching above or donning lederhosen for the entire duration of the concert's second half) and doesn't take himself too seriously, even when he ballses up one of his own songs like he did on Oxford’s 'Nobody's Off The Hook' or his and sister Martha's spine-tingling cover of Cohen's 'Hallelujah' from the weekend's Glastonbury set. He’s also refreshingly self-deprecating but at the same time brimming with confident energy. Switching between guitars and piano, Wainwright is a clear front man, but his band of seven musicians are all talented in their own right, lending his songs the appropriate gravity and colour.

Another surprising aspect of the concert was the length – they came on at about 8.15 and didn't leave the stage until nearly 11.00, although in true theatrical style they did have an interlude, and in that time crammed in almost 25 songs. The set included every track from the latest album Release The Stars (which is itself refreshing, implying that the artist firmly believes in the validity of his most recent work, rather than throwing in a couple of new tracks into a set of mostly old material), selections from the Rufus back catalogue, three Judy Garland covers and a mic-less take on 'Mackushla' made famous at the start of the last century by John McCormack. Highlights were many, as were surprises such as the performance of 'Complainte De La Butte' from the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge delivered in perfect French. (Well, I assume perfect French as I can’t personally recall much from my GCSE days apart from ‘Je voudrais un sandwich au jambon’; ironic, since I don’t eat meat any more. A trip to France today would be a hungry one.)

During a conversation around my sister's kitchen table, I found myself gushing about how excellent Rufus Wainwright is. I don’t tend to try and force my musical tastes onto anyone, and most people know better than to try and foist theirs on me. But I truly think that a voice this incredible deserves to be heard by more people (although my contribution to the ‘Listen to Rufus’ campaign pales into insignificance compared to a recent performance of lead single from Release The Stars, ‘Going To A Town’ on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross’).

My sister said that they’d been discussing music in their local pub with some friends one evening, and that as a group they were trying to decide whether they thought Rufus was any good. One of their friends asserted that for her Wainwright was a bit like Marmite – you either love it or hate it. What can I say? I hated that brown gloopy yeast spread as a kid (I once picked up what I thought was a jam sandwich at a party when I was four only to discover it was actually Marmite, prompting me to very nearly be sick) and despite people saying that it is not possible to switch from hating the stuff to loving it I learned to love it in my mid-twenties. If Rufus Wainwright is at all like Marmite then I can only suggest you listen to 'Chelsea Hotel No 2' on Want Two, and see if you aren't converted yourself.

Taste and Decency

Should I perhaps be concerned that my wife is reading a book called The Adulterer's Club? Should she in fact be more concerned that I have just finished reading Lolita, a book that made my stomach turn with disgust and one that I feared my fellow commuters would consider me a shameful pervert for reading? (To clarify, I was reading this as part of The Independent's 'Banned Books' series which also includes A Clockwork Orange and Kafka's Metamorphosis.)

Reading is the great past-time of the commuting public, second only to sleeping and reading a newspaper. Not sleeping and reading a newspaper at the same time (although many a commuter can be seen dozing off while reading the news), as that is surely beyond even the most talented multi-tasking female, but I'd say that the order would be reading a book, then reading a newspaper and finally soundly sleeping. One of those distasteful free London newspapers recently said that the favourite distraction of commuters was gazing at an attractive fellow commuter, but that seems impossible when people’s eyes are either buried in some reading material or tightly shut.

People's reading habits - if the literary preferences of the people on the trains I take can be considered a fair representation of the general public – broadly mirrors people's listening habits. It's the usual pedestrian, big-name rubbish that you see time after time. I'm pleased that people take an interest in reading (and listening to music for that matter), but it does concern me that people gravitate time after time to the kind of books that you see increasingly advertised on posters and billboards – bankable authors capable of shifting many a thousand copy for the publishers. The synergies and similarities between publishing houses and record companies are now so entwined that it makes complete sense for a company like HMV to own Waterstone's; hence, given my opinions on the increased commoditisation by the publishers and record companies of our tastes via the outlets that force it further into our eyes and ears, it may not surprise you to hear that the recent announcement from HMV that its profits for the year to end April had halved actually brought a wry smile to this face.

I was, however, bitterly disappointed to hear that small music retailer Fopp had gone bust. Aside from Other Music in Manhattan, to me Fopp was the best music retailer in the world. Over the past ten years I have probably bought 50 CDs and books from various branches of this innovative retailer, but spent hardly any money because you could pick up back catalogue CDs for a fiver. Even though it was a chain (albeit a small one), branches of Fopp had the feel of a small independent music shop, like Rough Trade in Covent Garden, and it felt like it was a secret only known to absolute music connoisseurs. Unfortunately that was probably its undoing in the end because not enough people knew about it. Fopp RIP.

I don't feel superior by reading classic, confrontational, risqué or indeed just plain unusual literature on the train; I just feel like an individual with a predilection for variety and the obscure. I don't feel smug by listening to leftfield music on my iPod; I just feel like this is the only tangible way I can express a sense of individuality in a world that increasingly respects convenient homogeneity over the interesting. Still there's no escape from corporate branding here either – our tastes are branded 'alternative' and my fellow individualists and I are herded together under this convenient descriptor. But give me Bret Easton Ellis over Harlan Coben or Vince Flynn any day; Nick Cave over James Morrison and you'll make me happy.

Further observation of commuting behaviour would actually reveal that the next most popular habit among the proportion of the populace who either by choice or necessity are forced to take a train from home to work, would not be reading or sleeping, but acting self-centred and obnoxious. I'm a considerate and polite commuter myself; I'll let people off the tube before I try to board, and I'll graciously allow others to alight before me rather than leaving them sat in their seats waiting for a break in the queue of people heading through the doors and onto the platform.

Oh how beatific my life would be if only people offered me the same level of courtesy and respect!

Even in spite of an expanding waistline, I am of slight build. This isn't a problem for me, in fact I actually quite like the way I was made. However, this slim frame tends to mean that fat men tend to gravitate to the vacant seat next to me. It's the only way I can explain the way such rotund individuals will take up a quarter of my seat or hog the arm rest as if it's their God-given right to more space on account of their sizeable backsides. It seems I am not alone in this as my travelling friend Paul (who I'm sure would not mind me saying that he's a bit larger than I) was yesterday recounting a situation where a huge fatty took the window seat next to his and wedged his large bulk into the seat, and in so doing displaced Paul so that he was left clinging on to his own seat by one solitary buttock. When Paul then wedged an elbow into his tubby chair sharer's ribs – both to anchor his precarious body to the chair and to make the point that the other chap was taking up too much room – the fatty looked at Paul as if to say 'What's your problem pal?'

As if sharing your seat with another person larger that yourself wasn't bad enough, the experience can be rendered far worse if, for example, it's a blazing hot summer's day and said individual cannot control their sweating or body odour. That's happened to me once or twice and each time I've felt physically sick. The other day on the tube I sat next to someone who had this really overpowering sweet odour which, after a few minutes of plundering the olfactory memory banks in order to identify what the smell reminded me of, turned out to be the smell of McDonald's BBQ sauce for McNuggets. Lovin' it indeed, but perhaps a touch too much.

The other day a guy sidled up to my seated self, gestured at the vacant seat and emitted a small grunt. This virtually non-existent communication was intended as an enquiry over whether the seat was in fact taken. I shook my head and returned to my musings. I just knew he was going to be an arrogant bastard. Everything about his manner up to that point suggested it. So, he flopped himself down, immediately knocked my elbow off the arm rest, dumped his Costa sandwich on the tray, pulled out his mobile and proceeded to have the loudest, expletive- and sexual reference-filled conversation I've probably ever heard on a midday train. He signed off with a 'ciao' as if the nineties never happened and then ploughed into his sandwich with the table manners of a hog in the woods.

This being one of Mr Branson's always clean trains, a woman came along the train asking if anyone had any rubbish. The man next to me, now sated, picked up his empty sandwich carton and thrust it toward the woman without such a thing as a word of thanks. I really don’t think a bit of politeness would have gone amiss here, but this was clearly a man with a huge arrogance problem.

I recently happened to be catching a later train than my regular evening one. I think it was during half-term because the train was quite empty at first. It still got busy, but five minutes before the train departed there were still empty seats, which never happens during term time. I was sat by the rear doors of the carriage and the seat next to me was empty. Sitting there reading my book idly, waiting for the doors to close and the trip home to commence (I never seem able to relax fully until those doors close and we're on our way) I became dimly aware of the smell of cigarette smoke drifting into the train. I looked out of the window and there on the platform was a guy of about my age smoking. This was clearly before the smoking ban made station platforms marginally more bearable, and whilst it was annoying, it happened quite a lot before July 1 so I didn't think anything of it. The guy stubbed out his fag and walked onto the train behind where I was sitting.

As soon as he boarded I realised this guy was a really heavy smoker. I've never been able to describe it very well, but you know when you go into the house of a family where everyone smokes and has done for generations? The way that everything has that saturated smell? Well, this guy smelt like that and the odour was so strong that I could smell it even from where I was sitting. The smell of old smoke was threaded through his clothes as if the tailor making his suit had poured the contents of an ashtray between the actual suit fabric and the lining before sewing it up. As he got on, and I looked around at the empty seats around me I said to myself 'Please don't sit next to me,' and so of course he did. It took all my willpower not to gag when he sat down, taking the arm rest, naturally, and enveloped me with his nicotine reek. It wouldn't have been so bad, but he then fell asleep and as the train wobbled along his head, facing me, mouth open and snoring away, kept edging ever closer to my shoulder; simultaneously his knee kept moving across to touch mine, prompting me to smack it back onto his side of the seat with my own which then prompted him to snap his head back upright, giving me approximately a minute of comfort before his head started to loll sideward and his knees parted again.

In order to get from Milton Keynes to Wimbledon, like I needed to last week for what was supposed to be the men’s quarter finals, the train traveller has several options. You could, for example, drive down the M1 to Luton Airport Parkway and pick up a direct First Capital Connect service direct to Wimbledon. However, that line is exceptionally busy and unless you’re very lucky a seat is hard to come by even on an early train. Another option would be to go all the way into London, cross the city by tube and pick up a train from Waterloo to Wimbledon. Except that the Northern Line is my least favourite deep line and I never feel totally safe down there since July 7 2005. The third option only seems to come up occasionally, which is to take a train from Milton Keynes to Watford Junction, change there for a train to Clapham Junction, and from there pick up a train to Wimbledon. (An aside on Clapham Junction before we proceed if I may. On the outside edges of one of the platforms as you come in, there is a sign proclaiming the station to be the busiest in Britain. Whilst this may be true, it does feel somewhat disingenuous to advertise commotion and congestion so proudly. Bigger may indeed be better according to the Americans, but spend ten minutes fighting your way off one of the scores of platforms at Clapham Junction and that signage would perhaps serve better as a warning rather than a boast.)

In any case, with the prospect of not having to take the tube and instead gracefully cutting out most of central London overground, the Watford / Clapham route was the one I settled on that day. In many ways, after taking a seat on the train at Watford I wish I had just stayed on the Euston-bound train from Milton Keynes and taken the tube after all. Not because it was delayed or anything like that, but once again because of annoying fellow passengers. Specifically, an English man and his Spanish wife who boarded at the same time as me and were evidently on their way to Gatwick. I have deduced their respective nationalities on account of them talking so loudly.

She was one of life’s panickers, he one of life’s laid back sloths. She was sat next to me, across the aisle from the luggage rack onto which they’d dumped a couple of suitcases, and he was across the aisle in a seat in front of the luggage racks. This seating arrangement was arrived at after a couple of minutes of faffing about because she was worried that someone would try and steal their bags. He wasn’t bothered about it, but she was, and this was the first of many occasions on such a brief journey where her panicking prevailed over his sloth-like ways. They were both about ten years older than I and it dismays me when I see people with considerably more life experience than I just fall to pieces when faced with a slightly out-of-the-ordinary experience.

She then proceeded to worry that the suitcases would be over the weight limits the airline had put in place, so she made her husband stand at the luggage rack and re-distribute their clothes and shoes between the two bags, then test them by holding one in each hand to see if he’d been able to even them up any. She then dived into one of the bags and pulled out loads of magazines which she then thrust into a shopping bag so as to further reduce the weight of one of the bags. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. She was practically biting her nails with worry.

The next panic came in the form of the price of the tickets. The bag repacking incident now thankfully behind them, she enquired of her husband how much they’d paid for the tickets. He looked at the tickets and responded that it had cost them £13, and they both made little sounds that conveyed they were quite impressed with that price. However, she being inclined to worry, she asked if he’d got a receipt, and she asked to see it. He produced this from his pocket and she once again started to get all fidgety. It turned out that the tickets had in fact cost £16. Honestly, you’d have thought that someone had surreptitiously overcharged them by about a million pounds rather than just £3 by the way she went into a spiral of nervousness, urging her husband to phone the bank or find a guard and ask him what they’d actually paid. I started to feel quite panicked myself by the whole thing and was relieved when a guard came down the train and advised them not to worry, they had indeed paid £13. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole carriage (‘This is carriage 2 of 4’, the computerised female announcer kept needlessly pointing out to us all) hadn’t let out a collective cheer at the prospect of the nervous woman calming down at last.

But it still wasn’t over, for she realised that she needed to make a payment to her recently applied-for store card (clearly sold at point of sale by an eager cashier offering her 10% off if she took an account card), but that she hadn’t activated it. Panic levels rose once again into the red. She pulled out the paperwork, drummed agitatedly on the tray while she sat in a call queue and then at last! she got through and within seconds had activated the card. However, in so doing she advised the entire carriage of every single one of her personal details – date of birth, name, address, mobile number, even PIN, even the fact that she always used the same PIN – revealing finally that she wasn’t just one of life’s panicky sorts, but also one of the most stupid.

If you are fond of observing human tastes and behaviour, as I have discovered since writing these pieces that I am, travelling by train allows you to see all sorts of interesting things. That said, when people like the Spanish woman above, the heavy smoker, the arrogant chauvinist, or Paul’s fat friend are sat anywhere near you it does rather amaze you that such exaggerated personalities actually exist in this world. And when it really starts to irritate you, in spite of feeling good about using public transport and doing your bit for the environment, the solitude of sitting in traffic does present a certain appeal. Then again, I'd have nothing to write about then.