Rebellion was never going to be easy for the son of two liberal musicians, but Rufus Wainwright has risen to the challenge. John Robinson hears about the high life of the singer-songwriter
When he's in Stockholm, Rufus Wainwright will generally buy a piece of expensive amber jewellery for his mother, the French-Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. When he's in London, because his hotel is near Bond Street's many tailors, he'll check that his waist size remains a mere 28. As he is with his European touring regime, so it turns out the singer is in life. "As we have all read about," he grins wryly, "I am a creature of habit."
And such habits. Now touring in earnest with his new album, Want Two, Wainwright's marketplace activities have been heralded by what might first appear a highly unorthodox strategy: a series of confessional interviews on his life and extremely high times.
There has been revelatory material, certainly. How, as a young gay adolescent on a visit to London, Wainwright was raped, in Hyde Park, by an older man. How he became estranged from his father, the famed folk singer Loudon Wainwright III. How, under the influence of insane drugs, he drove drunk, went blind, ran into oncoming traffic and, on one occasion, briefly lost his mind.
The stuff of which rock'n'roll legends are made, certainly. What's more remarkable, perhaps, is the way the quality of Wainwright's material consistently outshines even the inflammatory stories that comprise his burgeoning legend. He has made impressive albums - high points include the great second album, Poses, and a terrific third, Want One - but, live, Wainwright reveals himself to be a bit of a virtuoso. At the piano, he's great, certainly. At crowd management, meanwhile, he truly excels. Charming show-off, self- aggrandising wit . . . You might attend for the songs, but you leave attached to the Wainwright charisma.
And finally, it seems, the world is beginning to catch on. Want Two is doing well in Europe ("although once the Germans get it, you're f***ed," he says), but it occasionally occurs to Wainwright that had he been a different kind of artist, had he concealed some sides of himself, his career might have taken off a while sooner.
"I've always been a habitual truthmonger," he says, sitting in a window seat in a members' club in London. "I'm unable to lie. And I do think that if perhaps I had started off my career with more of a Machiavellian, strategic sort of plan to hide my homosexuality, I think in retrospect it could have been crafted quite magnificently. Because I was a very handsome young person."
Instead, what followed was a string of highly-regarded if underperforming albums, which won him fans and staunch defenders; a recent Channel 4 documentary could comfortably wheel out Elton John, Sting and Neil Tennant to proclaim their long-held admiration.
Meanwhile, though not selling quite as many records as he would have liked, Wainwright threw himself into living the gilded gutter life. The doomed affairs and drowsy, drug-weary attitudes that appeared in his records were the stuff of his night-time peregrinations around New York's bohemian demi-monde.
"I was floating on this pink cloud for a long time," he says. "I represented a kind of lucky party charm for many people. I would have this entourage of folks, and we would show up and that would be the signal to begin the festivities. And it was fun for that time, but I think inevitably you have to pay the piper.
"Let me just say, I'm no angel, and I never will be," he continues. "I've always been a big fan of human flesh and the fruits of youth. And right now, especially in the gay world, there are the appropriate narcotics to go with that, be it crystal meth, GHB, ecstasy or whatever, which can fulfil that fantasy to your utmost desires.
"I think many gay men have this kind of built-in self-destruct button," he says. "After years of sexual frustration and really low-grade discrimination, it stores up somewhere, and some drugs can really release that - and it's fun, but it's also very frightening. So that's the kind of trap that I fell into."
Wainwright's ambitions for the summer of 2001 were for it to be "my space odyssey, my summer of love, my blossoming lotus". It turned out not to be the case: the effect his use of drugs was having on him took "a violent left turn", and he felt he no longer had any control over his situation.
In spectacular but ultimately sanity-threatening fashion, he went completely to pieces.
Before it was too late, though, after telephone conversations with Elton John, he decided to enter rehab, a point that one could sensibly say marked the beginning of the new Wainwright. His outlook changed by this personal wake-up call, and by the growing realisation that, in the wake of September 11th, artists now had to play for keeps, what took place in his music was a significant upping of his game.
"Want One and Want Two are both very much tied to the old Rufus," he says. "I had songs that I had written before the fall, during the fall and after the fall. They're the happy ending of a dark period. I wouldn't call it one of the darkest periods in show business, by any means. It was pretty light-hearted for a long time."
Having drawn a line under his past with the completion of Want Two, Wainwright is looking forward to a change in outlook for the songs that will eventually make up his next album. Socially and politically, he'd like to address a few more thorny issues. Instrumentally, he'd perhaps like to rein in some of the lavish arrangements that have characterised much of his work. Personally, he'd like to take inspiration from the lives of the great classical composers, who, he feels, only got better as they got older, as their mastery of their discipline grew.
"I think the next album that I make will be totally written on a blank page. It's going to be a whole other era. I'm excited about it. Like any great art, and through any great art's development, less is more; a more scaled-down Rufus Wainwright, a starker picture, is probably in order."
Even in love - often an area of Wainwright composition filled with inconsolable desolation - he seems to have undergone, fittingly, something of a change of heart. Before, he found it easy to predict the outcome of his relationships, and he found himself in "perpetual tragedy", an essential ingredient to much of his material. Having changed some aspects of his life, he finds others have changed, too.
"Romantically, I could actually successfully pull off a relationship now, because I'm more there. I've recently written a song about someone who I believed could really be, well, who could be the one. But now, a few days later, it looks like it's not going to be the case. And it's not a great tragedy. In another era, not too long ago, I would have been utterly dejected, and this would have confirmed that I was fated to this dark existence. Now it's like, life goes on."
Older and wiser, a blank page in front of him, it would seem that, as good as the old one was, the new Wainwright is starting to take shape. Perhaps this will prove to be the one who will take his place in the house of the enormously famous.
"I do have this sense that I am very qualified for the job," he smiles. "It's great to have untalented people who are famous. But it would be great to have talented people who are, too. Just to balance out the equation." ...
Rufus Wainwright is at Vicar Street, Dublin, on May 17th and the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on May 18th; Want Two is on Polydor
MEET THE WAINWRIGHTS
The Osbournes of roots music
Martha Wainwright, who at 29 is the youngest member of the family, has just released her eponymous first album, a confessional recording of country- and folk-tinged songs. When Rolling Stone magazine asked why it took her so long to release it she replied: "The bar is really, really f***ing high."
Martha knows her music will always be judged against her family's. And when your father, the folk legend Loudon Wainwright III, was hailed as "the new Bob Dylan", and Elton John calls your brother "the best songwriter on the planet", the comparisons can be intimidating.
She describes her mother, Kate McGarrigle, as her greatest support. "She is someone who never gave up on me as a singer or songwriter, even when maybe she had reason to," says Martha. "She was a lot more supportive of me than many parents would have been."
Martha has learned to cope with living in the shadow of her pretty and prodigiously talented brother. "He used to tell me that Kate wasn't my mother and that I was an alien." But her brother's success has been a useful spur, prompting her to pick up a guitar and enter the family business. She learned the craft by singing with him on stage and in the studio, and they seem close.
She has a more fractious relationship with her 58-year-old father, whom she has described as a man who wrote songs about his children instead of raising them. At concerts she sometimes introduces her visceral anthem Bloody Mother F***ing Asshole with the words: "This is a song about my dad."
Loudon, who has a tendency to play it for laughs on tracks such as I Wish I Was a Lesbian, has recorded 21 albums since 1970; his new CD is called Here Come the Choppers. Kate McGarrigle and her sister Anna have recorded about 10 LPs together, including La Vache Qui Pleure, from earlier in the year. The Wainwrights have always documented their frustrations, fears and family squabbles in song. The resulting soap opera is another reason why they are fascinating: they are a kind of Osbourne family for roots music fans.
When Loudon ran off to Europe with the performance artist Penny Arcade in the early 1970s, a pregnant McGarrigle poured her heartbreak into the song Go Leave. Loudon hit back with Rufus is a Tit Man, a ditty about his jealous feelings towards his infant son. "So put Rufus on the left one and put me right on the right," he sang. "And like Romulus and Remus we'll suck all night."
"It wasn't the Von Trapp family," Martha has said of her childhood. "But the issues I have with my mum and dad are much less than those most of my friends have with their parents, probably . . . because there are no secrets."
Martha's issues, like most aspects of her life, are rather less showy than her brother's. She admits she smokes and drinks too much, and her solo album can read like a chronicle of her insecurities and bouts of self-loathing. The scathing Bloody Mother F***ing Asshole, she says, can be interpreted as a self-administered slap in the face. "The song is about me convincing myself that I'm good enough" to write music.
Richard Jinman
Martha Wainwright, by Martha Wainwright, is on Drowned in Sound; Here Come the Choppers, by Loudon Wainwright, is on Evangeline; La Vache Qui Pleure, by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, is on Munich.