‘There was a time when artists were meant to be flawed’
Rufus Wainwright was described as the best songwriter in the world by Elton John. But, he tells Neil Mccormick, his career hasn’t been easy
‘Ihave to be very mindful singing my early songs,” says Rufus Wainwright. “The young Rufus was very different to who I am now. But he will haunt me and taunt me!” Next month, the 45-year-old musical polymath arrives in the UK for shows performing his 1998 debut album and 2001 follow-up, Poses. These are the albums that inspired Elton John to declare him as “the greatest songwriter on the planet at the moment”.
But they were made while a young Wainwright was first enthusiastically embracing a hedonistic gay lifestyle. Living in New York, he went through a period of rampant promiscuity and dangerous drug addiction, bingeing on meth until he went temporarily blind. Elton helped him to get into rehab in 2002 and he has stayed drug-free. But performing in New York last December, he says: “I suddenly became very insecure, sensitive, sad and nervous. The show ended up a lot edgier than usual. I was a troubled person in my 20s, and that ghost came back. For all the bravura and gorgeousness of youth, I’m happy to have left those days behind.”
Of course, it is not only Wainwright who has changed. The advent of the #Metoo era has led to censure for behaviour once considered unremarkable in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
“I think there was a time when artists were meant to be flawed, it was sort of expected to act out and have this kind of demonic quality,” he notes. “That idea served its time and now the tables have turned and artists are getting a lot of flak for what was once considered almost their job.”
His songwriting contemporary, Ryan Adams, is currently under a cloud for his alleged behaviour towards female fans (he has denied misconduct) and has cancelled a new album and tour. “I know Ryan and respect his work. I do know about 10 of his girlfriends, whatever that means! It’s tough. I’m no angel.”
Now, in an elegant Parisian restaurant, I ask a grizzled, greying Wainwright whether his career turned out the way his younger self had hoped. “I was dead set on establishing myself as a prominent songwriter, in the tradition of my dad. The higher adoration of pop fame never really came into the equation. But on a critical level, the respect I garnered from my peers and from other…”
Wainwright breaks out into ripe, infectious laughter. “I was going to say other geniuses!” he guffaws. “The respect I garnered from certain geniuses has been astounding!” he offers as a chuckling correction.
The eldest child of folk singersongwriters Loudon Wainwright III and Kate Mcgarrigle, and sibling to singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, Rufus was raised on music. “I felt the magnetism of it all, my mother taking me to see my dad in concert then breaking down in tears because he was singing songs about her. In retrospect, maybe I should have been more pained but I was quite pragmatic. I thought, ‘If I can make people cry, then maybe I can get a job on the stage!’”
The family have always written songs about each other. Ironically, given that Wainwright says he always knew he was gay, his arrival in the world was commemorated on his father’s 1975 breastfeeding song Rufus Is A Tit Man. “Aged five or six, I would be standing on the table at concerts screaming ‘Sing the tit song!’ at the top of my lungs. There’s a vision for you.” But there has been a more troubling side to this soap operatic public confessional. His parents divorced when Rufus was three. He lived with his mother in Montreal, and his father’s difficult relationships with his ex-wife and children have been chronicled over many songs. Rufus’s mournful Dinner At Eight evokes a sense of abandonment by his peripatetic father while calling for rapprochement. Martha’s splenetic Bloody Mother F------ A------ is a tirade against gender double standards that lets Loudon have it with both barrels. “When it comes to settling scores, I think Martha takes the cake. To me, that’s a song about what it feels like to be a woman in the music business but it all got saddled on our father. That is one area in which I separate myself from the rest of my family. I have never terrorised anyone with my songs.”
Kate Mcgarrigle died of cancer in 2010. “My mother was a troubled soul,” says Wainwright, recalling a pioneering musician who left behind a promising career in LA to raise her children in Canada. She later toured with Rufus and Martha in a Mcgarrigle family group.
“She was maybe a little too concerned with imbuing her children with ambitions she was never able to fulfil. But she gave me so much.”
Rufus describes his complicated relationship with his 72-year-old father as “in a good place. But we are also supremely aware of how delicate that is, and that we can’t f--- it up again ’cos there’s not much time left”. He rolls his eyes and laughs. “But parents, though! Jesus Christ!”
To further complicate the songwriting dynasty, Wainwright has an eight-year-old daughter, Viva Cohen Wainwright, whom he shares custody of in a co-parenting arrangement with childhood friend Lorca Cohen, daughter of Leonard Cohen. The death of the revered songwriter in 2016 hit Wainwright hard.
“As an admirer, there was a great loss to contend with, but he was my daughter’s grandfather and I had to be very mindful of what she was going through. Cos they all lived together and he was very present in her life. I consider myself fortunate to have known him and to have had moments where he kind of swept in and saved the day.
“After my mother passed away, he said, ‘Rufus, I want you know my [late] mother visits me more now than she ever did.’ He was intimating that as he was dying, she was returning to him. That was incredibly valuable information to get at that moment, when I thought I would never see her again. We had a great relationship and I miss him a lot.
“In the end, I do feel like he really accomplished everything he wanted to, in his material, his persona, his spiritual work. And he made a lot of money! He was also in pain near the end of his life and so that was finished. And so it was tragic and it was also triumphant.”
Growing up in a household filled with folk music gave Rufus “a sense of the timeless and universal power of song”. In his teens, he developed a fascination with classical music where “melody symbolised emotion in a very pure way.” His own style has audaciously blended the two forms, making him arguably the most melodically lush songwriter of his generation. But over the past decade he has gravitated towards classical work, composing two operas (Prima Donna and Hadrian) and setting Shakespearean sonnets to music. It has been seven years since his last albums of original songs, Out of the Game. However, a new album is promised next year. “This tour is setting the stage for the reemergence of Wainwright, who has come out of the opera cage and is ravenous!” he laughs.
Wainwright speaks with gravitas but is given to sudden bursts of animation, frequently followed by a throaty bubble of infectious laughter. He has always been unabashed about identifying as a gay artist, disdaining advice that it might be better for his career to masquerade as straight.
“Perhaps there is still a stigma attached and invisible shackles keeping me back. But looking at gay men in the arts throughout history, there is a sense that expressing what you needed was in itself a saving grace, as it was for Oscar Wilde. And by doing that, they constantly shattered expectations and broke barriers surrounding everybody.”
He married his long-time partner,
‘My mother was maybe too concerned with imbuing her children with ambitions she was never able to fulfil’
‘I was quite pragmatic. I thought, if I can make people cry, then maybe I can get a job on the stage’
German arts administrator Jörn Weisbrodt, in 2012. Yet he is wary of complacency when it comes to gay rights. “Being gay is still a major human rights issue on most of the planet. So while all of the advances in marriage equality and adoption are fantastic, I am very trepidatious in terms of really celebrating. I think we’re balancing on a needle in the Trump era.”
A sense of social peril seems to be a driving force behind his own return to the singer-songwriter arena. “I guess I am getting ready to fight, whether it’s for the environment or gay rights or women’s rights or just culture. It’s time to get out there and say what you believe in.”