Picture: Rufus Wainwright (dressed as Verdi), Cherry Vanilla and Jorn Weisbrodt (dressed as Puccini).
Click here for the Rufus Wainwright: Prima Donna documentary trailer.
You might expect Rufus Wainwright to make an entrance - performers tend not to be shy and retiring - but even so. I am sitting at a table in the far corner of an echoey and almost empty restaurant near the studio in Southwark where he is rehearsing and, when he arrives, he calls out my name from the door. From the door! And once seated, he summons a waitress, not with a discreet hand signal but a full-throated 'Waitress!'. Not exactly self-conscious then.
Likeable though.And indecently talented; indeed Elton John has called him the greatest living singer-songwriter in the world. He has style, too. Not only has he worked with the Berliner Ensemble, but also Lou Reed, David Byrne and Sting.
As to his genre, well, record stores file him under 'baroque pop' or 'popera', categories in which his seems to be the only name.And while that doesn't quite nail it, as a definition of his work, it does give a suggestion of his operatic range, his nuanced phrasing, his wry lyrics. He has been described as one part Morrissey, one part Mahler, but you could equally say he has a jazz voice, a rich baritone that can soar powerfully one moment, fall back into a slurred croon the next.
If you haven't heard him, I recommend you start with Grey Gardens from 2001, or Going to a Town, which he wrote in 2007, or Zebulon from his eighth and latest album All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. (That latter one includes the line:'My mother's in the hospital, my sister's at the opera, I'm in love again, but let's not talk about it, there's so much to tell you').All of these songs are haunting, melancholic and tender. Probably best not to start with his opera, Prima Donna, though.You need to get used to him a bit before you tackle that.
Wainwright may not sound like a conventional pop star, but he does dress like one: a jacket with blue piping, a threadbare shirt and bright green checked trousers. On stage he has been known to wear lederhosen. His thick, black hair is pushed up off his brow and his sideburns are long.The only sign he might be nearer 40 than 30 is his three or four-day stubble. It is frosting a little.
As to his back-story, well, let us say he has texture.There was the near fatal addiction to crystal meth that left him temporarily blind.And the time he was raped in Hyde Park, aged 14.And when he was a baby his mother once absent-mindedly left him behind at a party.As a child growing up in Montreal he was not only precocious but also, according to his mother,'eccentric', always 'sashaying around the home'. He would gather his cousins and make them perform Tosca, with him in the lead.At boarding school he wore a cape and pearls.Though he wasn't religious, he loved lighting candles because he was, he reckoned, a Virgin Mary groupie.
He is the son of two successful folk-rock singers. His mother, who died earlier this year, was Kate McGarrigle. His father is Loudon Wainwright III.They divorced when Wainwright was three, but not before Loudon had written a song about his son: Rufus is a Tit Man. No wonder Wainwright's own songs tend to be autobiographical. His Dinner At Eight explores his feelings toward the father who abandoned him. It's strong stuff. He sometimes cries when he plays it on stage.
His sister Martha, meanwhile, is also a successful recording artist, which has led to some sibling rivalry between them in the past. Her autobiographical songs tend to be more aggressive, identifying their parents' divorce as a bitter moment in their lives.The family sometimes jokingly call themselves the Von Trapps, but theirs is music with a dark side. No emotional territory seems to be off limits.
On his new album,Wainwright has recorded a gorgeous and affecting song called simply Martha. It was written when their mother was dying and is about Martha not returning her brother's calls.'Yeah,' he says now,' that song was written in the depths. I was in Berlin in March. I love Berlin, but not in March, and my mother was in the hospital in Canada and there was talk that she wouldn't make it. The song just came out. It was good to have one positive by-product from all that misery.'
What did Martha make of it? 'She loved it, in the end. But when I first told her about the song she was somewhat furious. She was like: "Great, here I am pregnant and my mother is dying and you are going after me." But this has happened before with all of us.When it came to using elements of your personal life in your work my mother was the master, or the mistress.There were three or four songs she wrote about my father, songs about failed love.
'So we had to contend with that, Martha and I. Martha was the sharpest knife in the drawer though, when it came to writing autobiographical songs.I was the most ornate.'At this point, mention should be made of the strange laugh with which Wainwright tends to punctuate his passages of thought. It is like a mad, adenoidal donkey bray,'hyah! hyah! hyah!', and coming from one with such a sweetly melodic singing voice, it rather catches you unawares. Is it a nervous laugh? I don't think so.
Though he has expressive eyes - sometimes bulging, sometimes heavy-lidded, sometimes accompanied by an arched brow - he has a tendency to talk in profile, rather than looking directly at you. But a lack of confidence or self-esteem is not something you would associate with the singer. High campery and raging egomania, yes, but not insecurity.
Playing back my tape of the interview I realise (with an amused shake of the head) that at one point he refers to 'my own moments of genius' in an entirely unironic way. But fair enough.We were talking about genius in music at the time, in relation to Verdi, his hero. (For the premiere of his opera, by the way, he dressed as Verdi - full beard, top hat and cane - while his boyfriend, theatre producer Jörn Weisbrodt, went as Puccini.)
On the subject of Verdi he now tells me something that perhaps ought to fall in the category of 'too much information', except that I can't help feeling it sheds a useful psychological light on our man.'A few months before my mother died I rented the room in Vienna where Verdi died,'he says. He and Weisbrodt slept in the very same bed that Verdi died in.
For the record, it should be noted that Wainwright reckons he never came out of the closet as such, because he was born in the living room.
'Flaming', is how he describes himself. He recently caused a stir by 'outing' the least gay rap singer in the world, the muscle-bound, former gangster 50 Cent.'Feel free to call me anytime, 50 Cent,' he said in an interview.'Oh the furore!' he says now.'I got in so much trouble for that! He wasn't too pleased. I just think he's cute,that's all.And I've been thinking of trying my hand at rap. I've been recording snippets on my BlackBerry.'
Rap? Opera? Is there anything the lad won't turn his hand to? Well, no, is the answer. He's also written and performed songs for the soundtracks of Shrek, Moulin Rouge and Brokeback Mountain, and such is his obsession with Judy Garland that he recreated her legendary 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall - an audacious conceit. 'You know the question: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Answer: "Practise"? Well, in my case, I got there by not practising. I didn't finish my music degree.And when I got into the pop world I decided not to conform because I figured that the point of being an artist was that you shouldn't be like anyone else.'
Unless it's Verdi.Which brings us, via Jungian psychology, back to the death of his mother. For Wainwright, it meant a race against time because he was desperate for her to see his opera before she died. Prima Donna is about a day in the life of an opera singer - loosely based on Maria Callas - and had originally been commissioned by the Met in New York. But then came a hitch: they wanted the libretto in English; he wanted to do it in French (he's bilingual). Unable to wait for this stand-off to be resolved, he decided to have the premiere in England instead, at the Manchester Festival last year.
There were, he says, tears, walkouts, much throwing of scores and 'about 5,000' threats to quit. Luckily, his mother was able to see the finished opera before she died, and she adored it.'Which,' he says,'was obviously a relief to both of us.'
Dedicated to his art as he was, Monet famously painted his wife as she lay dying. I ask Wainwright if, as his mother was dying, he found himself standing back and thinking 'I must tap into this intensely emotional experience creatively'? 'I guess so. I think my mother more than anyone knew the importance of inspiration. If it was occurring, you had to use it. I felt blessed that I was able to be with her in the final month. She very much led the way for all of us and it was a lesson in grace and nobility. It's funny because, on the one hand, she didn't really want to hear me practising my new album, because it was making her sad [the album is an elegy to his dying mother]. She knew she wouldn't be around when I was touring it. It was like: "This is the album he's going to be performing when I'm dead." So she very gently asked me not to play so much.'It is a touching comment: a son's desire to win his dying mother's approval coupled with an endearing lack of self-awareness.
The show went on though.'Every little action became a song or a quote and she just made us concentrate on her death. It was her finale. In the end she had a wonderful death.We were all there on the final day, my father and my sister and me, and we were singing for her and there was talk that we could be in this free-form position for a while.One of the nurses said this could go on for days and we had already exhausted the back catalogue. So after a whole day of playing we were getting a bit tired and began to pack up.Then Kate breathed a little. differently, more heavily.
'It was like she was saying: "Hold on, don't go yet, I'm going to end this show now." So we took our coats off again and then she died, with everyone around and perfect lighting. She had a knack for the dramatic.'
I ask him why he thinks it might be that so many gay men have had very close relationships with their mothers, as opposed to their fathers - his friend Elton John being another striking example. In Wainwright's case, there seems to have been an almost Oedipal aspect to the relationship. 'Yeah, I think we take the cake, Kate and I.
'I know in my case there was this kind of romantic aspect to it, where you can have all the trappings of a male-female relationship, without the sex. I imagine anyone would want that. You want to know the other side, so I imagine that is what it stems from. But we were in love with each other's talent, that was it. And I think that applies to everyone in my family, for all the sibling rivalry.'
Something else he has in common with Elton John is rehab. Indeed, it was Sir Elton who got him straightened out by arranging for him to enter Hazelden, the addiction treatment centre in Minnesota. After completing a month of therapy, Wainwright went to the Met to see a production of Richard Strauss's opera Elektra. It was a revelation to him because he realised he could still find opera transcendent and uplifting, even without drugs.
Even among addicts, crystal meth has a terrible reputation.What was its appeal for him?'Well,I have pretty much done every drug,' he says,'and I am of the opinion that there is something to be learnt and experienced in pretty much every one of them, apart from crystal meth. Once ingested it totally works against who you are as a person. It takes every taboo and insecurity and prejudice and flips it around, making that who you are. It is pretty demonic in that sense. It might have worked if Hitler had given it to his troops at the end of the war, to keep them fighting on for a lost cause, but other than that I can't see that it is very useful.
'I felt I was going mad, it was partly the drugs, partly the exhaustion from being awake for days because of the drugs. But now I am in a much more challenging period in which I have to do it on my own, and do it well, and that's tough.'His mobile rings.He apologises and takes the call then, afterwards, says: 'That was Jörn. I don't think I would have been able to handle half the stuff I have had to handle this past year without him. I never thought of myself as the marrying kind until lately. I know I can be nihilistic, but I also now know it takes commitment and boring domestic stuff like emptying the dishwasher to make a relationship work.'Domestic indeed.Their favourite television programme at the moment is The Real Housewives of Orange County.
Nearly all of Wainwright's music is tinged with a certain ennui, yet in person he seems a cheerful soul, what is that about, does he suppose? 'I don't know, as you get older I think you become a composite of all the different versions of yourself. I was a pretty happy kid until my teen years, which were tough.When I was 13, I was abused, actually and also mentally, because of my sexuality, which my parents found difficult to cope with. I struggled with it and then drugs and alcohol got me out of it for a while. I could be pretty morose then and I still probably can be. I do sometimes wonder why in public I am this happy guy who wants everyone to love him, but then when I go to the piano this dark, Mahler side of me comes out.'
We talk about his writing process. Though he reads and writes music, he tends to transfer a tune in his head straight on to the keyboard, rather than onto a sheet of paper.'Then I go back with my assistant and work out the proper value of the notes and the time signatures.' Zebulon came to him when walking back through Montreal one night after visiting his mother in hospital. By the time he got home it was finished.'April Fools came to me when I was in the bath. I stood up naked and sang it. Songs come to me at odd times.The only thing they have in common is that, when they do come, the moment has to be theatrical.' Like mother, like son.
