CityLife

Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright
Apollo
April 22, 2010

Just like Marmite, you either love Rufus Wainwright or hate him, and his new show does nothing to try and convert the non-believers.

The melodramatic torch-singer, playing solo with just a black grand piano, splits his set into two – the first half the whole of his new album, a kind of requiem for his recently deceased mother, and the second a collection of his more familiar tunes.

But it’s not the songs themselves that could further alienate the doubters – but the presentation in that first half of All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu, which Rufus calls a song cycle.

He comes on wearing a black gown with black feather boa and plunging ruched neckline looking like Nosferatu in drag to absolutely no applause – because the audience has been told not to clap. 

Neither are they allowed to show their appreciation between songs nor when Rufus finishes the ‘cycle’, as his departure – very, very slowly - from the stage is part of the performance. Only once he’s off the stage can the claps begin.

In that first half Rufus doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, but theatrically sips water from a glass occasionally and looks and sounds intense against a strange video backdrop featuring a human eye opening and closing.

It all sounds very weird, and it is, and I can well understand why some people would want to throw rotten eggs at the perpetrator of it.

But I’ve got to stand up as someone who ‘gets’ Rufus and sees, despite the weirdness, why this is neither pompous nor arrogant but drama so dark and miserable it’s hypnotic and beautiful in equal measure.

This isn’t Rufus taking himself too seriously – he’s just creating art, and like that other great Canadian Neil Young, he always does it on his own terms.

Don’t believe that he’s got no sense of humour. After the break he bounces on stage like a slightly trendier Nick Clegg and smiles and jokes with the audience about Yorkshire tea and MAN-CHEST-HAIR (geddit?), even mocking his own occasional mistakes.

But even if he came on with a basket of fruit on his head and regularly screwed up it couldn’t distract anyone with a soul from appreciating the gorgeous songs that followed and the brilliance of their performance.

Beauty Mark, Nobody’s Off The Hook and Matinee Idol set the nerves tingling, while the spellbinding Memphis Skyline sank the meathook into the gut before The Art Teacher and Little Sister rhapsodized the audience into a Rufus reverie.

However nothing could match Going To A Town, one of the subtlest yet most haunting protest songs – both politically and sexually - of all time, which Rufus played accompanied by Radio 2 DJ Mark Radcliffe on drums.

That constituted the encore along with Poses and The Walking Song, penned by his mother Kate McGarrigle, to complete a show that just had genius stamped all over it.

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