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.