This Boy's Life

"It’s cloudy but there’s not people running around with blood coming out of their eyes so its fine.” Interviewing Rufus Wainwright is something akin to having a dream come true. Ask him even the simplest question, in this case is it raining in Manchester, and he’ll head off on an entertaining, often surreal, path while you sit back and let the tape roll.

So, how’s the tour going? (Press play and record, put feet up). “As a performer, you’re only as good as your last show so every evening becomes a validation and a testament to where you are in your life. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster and a beating at times but I really can’t complain. The English, Irish and Scottish audiences really come to the plate and help me through the show because I am quite sensitive you know. It definitely is Rufus world when I go on stage and they go with it. Before this I did the Keane tour for about a month and that went well, but now I’m back in my egg shall we say.”
His live shows are apparently as unpredictably entertaining as he is in conversation. “I don’t know what happens," he says. "I tend to shoot from the hip. Anything that has happened that day in the news or is famous in that particular town is fair game. I was in Nottingham last night and walked on stage and said, ‘It’s good to be in Robin Hood’s hood’ off the top of my head. It’s those moments when you’re not thinking and can channel the comedians of yesteryear to help you that I live for as a performer.”
On the other hand, interviewing Rufus Wainwright is a nightmare. We’re not the first to realise that he makes spectacularly good copy and he’s been everywhere of late, usually revealing yet another scandalous skeleton from his closet. You begin to worry that there might be nothing left to ask him. “There are so many different facets that I find that usually an interviewer will be more obsessed with one or the other – whether it’s the family or the gay thing or the drugs or the politics or the song writing or the fact that I look like a model," he admits. "There’s like a library to choose from and I just go along with it. Sometimes I think it’s my job to steer it towards the music and the matter in hand which is selling records. That is always an area that I have had difficulty in and hope to focus more on. My fame kind of precedes me but doesn’t translate into album sales. I don’t know how it’s done but if you could put the word out that would be great.”
Was he frustrated by those album sales?
“It’s not so much frustrating that they didn’t do as well, more that other artists sell so much more than I do who are just as well known. I know that I’ll get there in the end and that people will have to pass through my alley at some point to get some sense of what was going on musically in my era. I’m a huge fan of dead composers so I know how to set a musical trap down the line of history. I’m sure be I’ll be OK but it would be nice to get that recognition now.”
He would certainly seem to be reaping the rewards at last. Want Two is another success, critically at least, a companion piece to Want One that plunges the listener into a world of opulent excess, a portrait of the artist as a young gay man about town. “These two records are very much the encapsulation of the end of an era for me," he says. "They represent the end of my 20s and the end of that project that involved my love of opera and pop and celebrity and decadence, bringing them all together into one big wallop. For me personally I would really like to concentrate now on the simple aspect of what I do and the intensity of the songwriting. I’m feeling a lot like Alfred Hitchcock these days after he made his big Hollywood extravaganzas. I want to sit down and make my own Psycho. I’d like some records like that under my belt. In terms of my theatrical leanings I’d like to move that over to the stage where that belongs but I think people would like to get to the core of who I am at this point.
“I have always wanted to make big luscious records but strategically it was better to do that first rather than last. I will always be able to make a solo piano record and that will always be on the cards, whereas working with big orchestras and great musicians will not. I’m very proud of that legacy and now it’s time to focus on the pureness.”
Does he look at these last two records almost as the product of a different person?
“I look at them as the flower of a seed that was planted during my first album," he says. "When I made it I was laying down the gauntlet in terms of not being afraid of big production. I am offering a fantasy world to the listener and I really built on that over the course of the next four albums. I think that Want Two especially is a good final expression of that.”
Right, that’s the music – how about that list of topics he gave earlier? Is he a political person? “I’ve sort of been forced into it just by being gay in general. Living in America you’ve got no choice but to be political. It’s really not our fault, it was sort of brought into the fray by the Republicans themselves. I don’t plan on being a political songwriter in the true sense like Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan, but it has become the key to the situation we’re in.”
Does he feel part of a community under attack? “I’m just sick of it being tolerated in the mainstream. Even recently with the death of the Pope when you watch CNN or the BBC people are saying things like, 'Well he hated homosexuality and women’s rights but that’s the way that God wants it’ and nobody raises an eyebrow. I’m sick of that, I don’t accept that point of view anymore.” Yet, as ever with Rufus Wainwright, there’s a slight twist in the tail. “There is something sexy about it being covered up. I pine for the days when it was what carnation you wore but on the other hand the cat’s out of the bag now and there’s no going back.”

Want Two is out now on Dreamworks. Rufus Wainright plays Vicar St Dublin on May 17.