Rufus Wainwright

2/8/2005 - Sydney, AU, Australia - Kabaret

It is so easy to hate Rufus Wainwright. And surely Wainwright, who confessed to once briefly having an irrational hatred of Jeff Buckley born of artistic jealousy, would understand. After all, there’s just too much to complain about with this Canadian singer/songwriter.

You could forgive his raffish good looks and shock of hair made to be thrown back flamboyantly as he laughs. (One female friend, there with a bunch of straight boys, called Wainwright the straight man’s gay man.) You could forgive his amusing patter and campy throwaways such as how his foray onto Manly beach earlier in the day wearing pink swimmers with tassels and a big red hat had scared the locals more than any shark sighting.

You could forgive his facility with the piano (particularly as his guitar playing is much more rudimentary) and at a pinch forgive him a voice which can soar, roar and cuddle up next to you and ask for a hug, as it did in the slow burning torch song In My Arms. And, if you had to, you could forgive him a songwriting ability which pulls in references from Nina Simone and Cole Porter to Elton John, Puccini and Mozart and does it with grace and often spectacular results.

But no way could you forgive him for having all of them at the one time. That’s just unfair. Criminally so.
Holding court in the charmingly intimate surrounds of this hole-under-the-wall room, Wainwright offered us the elegiac Pretty Things, which you can imagine a Michael Feinstein type covering as a modern standard in a decade or three. With only a guitar he took a sceptical look at the charms of the West Coast life in California while nonetheless filling the joyful song with that state’s fabled sunniness and optimism. And in Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk he straddled Broadway, Fire Island and the Brill Building.

He trumped those however with The Art Teacher, a virtual Douglas Sirk ‘50s melodrama in song – not just because of its storyline of a woman who looks back on a wealthy but bloodless life and remembers her crush on her high school art teacher “and never have I loved since then”, but because it is a song which while suffused with colour is built from constrained passion and emotional tension.

I could tell you about how he bled his song about Jeff Buckley, Memphis Skyline, into a gorgeous version of a song now associated with Buckley, Hallelujah. Or how when he sings he rolls into songs like a man sneaking up on seduction, simultaneously reclining languidly and gripping you. Or how he makes Want a lullaby for the spirit.

I could but I fear I may already have painted him as some marvellously talented joy of a writer and performer you should make it a point to discover .Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Rufus Wainwright plays at the Basement on Monday and Tuesday.