There are two great cover
versions of Leonard Cohen’s classic song Hallelujah. One is by Jeff
Buckley -
who died tragically in Memphis at the age of 30 - and the other is the one
featured on the sound track of the movie
Shrek 2, sung by the Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. Now aged
33, Wainwright has already outlived
Buckley by three years but it hasn’t been easy. His downward spiral into a
world of drugs and sexual promiscuity led
many to fear he might, like Buckley, not live to fulfill his great potential
and it was only when he woke up one morning
to find he had gone temporarily blind from a combination of drug and alcohol
abuse that he finally admitted he had a
problem. It was then that his good friend Elton John came to his rescue and
checked him into rehab.
But as I sit chatting with Rufus Wainwright backstage before his Electric Picnic gig, on a sunny afternoon in early September, all of that seems very far away. He looks fit and healthy - very handsome, in a disheveled kind of way - and is refreshingly unpretentious, dressed plainly in black and drinking a mug of tea.
“I like you sunglasses,” I
enthuse, hoping he might decide to take them off so that I can get a good
look at him.
“They’re very Jackie O.”
“O these old things,” he replies, “they’re actually falling apart.”
And it’s only then that I notice how they are precariously held together on
one side with a paper clip.
But still he keeps them on.
Initially, he starts to talk about his soon-to-be completed new album but I gently change the subject to his first, the stunning, eponymously entitled debut that catapulted him into the spotlight eight years ago. It is a bold and honest collection of songs, much of it inspired by the first love of his life, a guy he saw only by chance walking down the street where he lives in Manhattan.
"I waited months and months to speak to him," he recalls, admitting he's not very good at making the first move. "I am really very shy and extremely unassuming but we finally met and we ended up kissing. Over the next few months, Danny and I slept together a lot but we never actually had sex."
It became clear that Danny would never be able to fully reciprocate Wainwright's love because he wasn't sexually interested in men. "He definitely was in love with me, though," he assures me, "but, as you know, love really has nothing to do with sex. Instead, we just had a lot of weird, drug-induced cuddling time but I always knew he was straight. It was painful but, hey, I got a lot of songs out of it."
Sexual frustration can have its rewards and much of his debut album is a homage to this unrequited but clearly very thrilling love for a beautiful, unattainable man. It even includes Wainwright's completely new creation around a tired old title, the aptly named 'Danny Boy'.
I ask him if he is drawn to painful situations, such as falling for men who will never fully be able to return his love, because he knows that the inevitable heartbreak would be good for his creative process.
"Probably. One of the things that really worried me when I decided to remove myself from the usual partying involved with the pop world, was that without it I would be bereft of torturous experiences," he replies, laughing in his distinctive, charcoal-coloured giggle. "But now I find that I have only inherited much grander ones. Like real life."
Wainwright's descent into Manhattan's underground drug culture is well documented. Instant fame in his early twenties meant that he found himself embraced by the former Studio 54 set in New York where, for a while at least, he was happy to play the part of the beautiful and gifted new kid on the block. But soon, he fell into a routine of casual sex and crystal meth abuse that started to overtake everything else, including his work.
In the 'Nineties, crystal meth (its full name is methamphetamine) became the drug of choice on the New York gay scene and was frequently linked with sexual promiscuity.
"I was a little skinny then," he recalls, "and kinda green in colour, literally. But that look had its advantages because you could wear anything and wear anyone you liked."
Wainwright feels that a
combination of the media and fashion industries have turned that gaunt,
drugged-up look into
something sexy and desirable, naming Pete Doherty as a prominent example.
But crystal meth is extremely psychologically
addictive and the drug's long-term side effects can include anorexia,
insomnia, severe depression and even death from
organ failure. As a potent stimulant of the central nervous system, it is
characterized by massive highs, with an increased
libido, that can last for up to 20 hours. But is swiftly followed by
gruesomely protracted come-downs.
"I couldn't stand breaking though the beautiful landscape painting and finding there was nothing on the other side," he says, recalling the dreadful emptiness of coming down after one of his long drug binges.
But his "partying" went on for some time, with his friends and colleagues becoming increasingly concerned that he might follow in the footsteps of other gifted but ill-fated addicts such as Kurt Cobane.
It was only when he awoke one morning to find he had temporarily gone blind from the effects of drug and alcohol abusethat Wainwright finally admitted he had a problem and decided it was time to get help.
Intervention came when he asked Elton John, who has described Rufus Wainwright as "the best songwriter on the planet," for help. He checked him into the Hazelden Foundation rehab clinic in Minnesota and it was there that Wainwright started the long and difficult road to recovery that has helped him to achieve a drugs-free and clearly much happier state of mind ever since.
"So much of the rock and pop music world is concerned with annihilating itself," he explains. "It's a grand old tradition that I was happy to take part in for while but not any more. Anyway, I have a boyfriend now so trying to maintain a bona fide, normal relationship often at a great distance is pretty harrowing. It's my new challenge."
Perhaps it's the new love in his life that has finally tamed him and given him the inspiration to stay still for a moment and even consider settling down. Is his new love the moving-in together type?
"At the moment, we just snatch time along the way but soon he is moving to New York, now that he's got a job there. I don't think we will be living together though, not just yet anyway."
Wainwright is very frank and forthright about his sexuality. Even when he came out as a teenager growing up in Montreal, there was a certain inevitability to his being gay.
"I never really questioned it," he says, "and anyway I was voraciously sexual even by the age of 14."
When, at 23, he was flown to LA to sign his first record deal with David Geffen's Dreamworks, he made it clear from the start that he wouldn't be part of any cover up when it came to his personal life - in other words, he had not intention of doing a George Michael. And when I ask him if he felt that being gay might have hindered the progress of his career by moving him away from a more mainstream audience, particularly in ultra-conservative America, his reply is characteristically honesty.
"Well, as I like to say, that's why I make the small bucks," he laughs, "which is a shame because I would love to own a house in Nice. But I have stuck to my guns, though, and the work that I have presented hasn't been compromised. However, I think the record companies are baffled. They would love me to write a hit single and in that way they could easily market me to the legions of screaming girl fans, which I have anyway. Really, they'd really love me to dye my hair and dye my sexuality."
Perhaps in a strategic effort to bring him to a wider audience, he has appeared on some very high profile soundtracks. There’s that Leonard Cohen 'Hallelujah' in Shrek 2, as already mentioned, but he is also prominently featured on Moulin Rouge and Brokeback Mountain - both highly appropriate movies for a gay icon. And he even makes an onscreen appearance as the nightclub singer in The Aviator alongside Leonardo di Caprio.
Recently, he had a huge personal triumph at New York's Carnegie Hall where, for two sold-out nights, he sang a tribute show dedicated to his hero, Judy Garland. (I tell him he should have called the show ‘Rufus Over the Rainbow' and he laughs politely.) Backed by a 40-piece orchestra, Wainwright reproduced faithfully the entire Judy Garland concert album recorded at that great venue back in 1961. The whole city buzzed in anticipation and the show won rave reviews, surpassing all expectations.
"That was a testament to what you can do if you get your head together," says Wainwright, meaning get free of drugs, "and we have an incredible audio recording of it which will be released in due course. There are also plans in the pipeline for me to do it all again at the London Palladium."
But, in his own songwriting, he remains true to his very distinctive style and resists the pressures from heavy weight industry executives to sell out, change his image and aim for the big bucks. As a result, it is frequently complex and highly intellectual, with a musical language that seems firmly planted in the classical tradition. In his album Want One, he creates elaborate, operatic vocals that weave their way over piano accompaniments with all the chromatic complexities of a Chopin nocturne (The Art Teacher). He rises to the challenge of creating a song around Ravel's Bolero (O What a World) and invents an arch, pizzicato orchestral style in the manner of Bizet's opera Carmen for the parody song, 'My Phone's on Vibrate'.
Indeed, it's when you mention classical music, and opera in particular, that Wainwright's face comes alive and he sits up straight in his chair, moved almost enough take off those iconic sunglasses.
"I love opera," he waxes lyrical, his voice already up an octave. "It has saved my life on a number of occasions." Now that's more like it, I think. Forget the sex and the drugs; it's thoughts of opera that finally cause the full impact of Wainwright's theatrical sensibilities to kick in.
"It's been the one constant in my life," he continues passionately.
"Opera helped me come out, it was there for me when I quit drugs and really it has helped me survive the music business."
For all these reasons, and not underestimating his instinctively dramatic response to songwriting, Wainwright's revelation that he has recently been commissioned to write an opera for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York indicates that he might be on the verge of reaching an important milestone in his career.
"At the moment I am writing the libretto in English but I am thinking of changing it to French," he says, explaining that being from Montreal he is a fluent speaker. "Opera singing sounds uncomfortable to me when it's sung in the English language," he adds. And I must agree, he has a point. But will he be taking any advice from his good friend Elton John when it comes to creating a new work for the stage?
"When I walked into the Met and told them I wanted to do a one act opera like Strauss' Salome, except about a day in the life of a Prima Donna, they were a little concerned at first. But I have obviously convinced them of something because now I get free opera tickets."
And if theatrical Prima Donnas are the new focus of Wainwright's attention, perhaps Elton's experiences in that area might be useful after all.
While he maintains that his love of opera has been with him since he was a child, it stands in direct opposition to the folk tradition of his musical parents. His mother is Kate MacGarrigle, a respected Canadian folk singer who performs as a duo with her sister Anne, while his father is Loudin Wainwright 111, dubbed for a time in the 'Seventies as the heir apparent to Bob Dylan. Their marriage was brief. Rufus' parents split up when he was just three years old and he went to live with his mother in Montreal. Things continued to be difficult between him and his father with whom he had a tempestuous relationship while growing up. Indeed, it is the resulting conflict between father and son and a detectible competitiveness existing between the two of them as professional musicians, that continues to be one of the driving forces in young Wainwright's career. It was reportedly after a huge row with his father following a photo shoot for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in New York that he wrote what I feel is his best song to date, the disarmingly frank and beautifully-crafted ballad 'Dinner At Eight', also on the album Want One.
"A lot of people love that song," he says, "and my mother always cries when I play it to her. But whereas initially I thought it was this damning indictment of my father, I now realize that in fact it's just a love song and was my attempt to get closer to him when things were really bad between us."
The lyrics describe Rufus as a young boy being abandoned by his father on a snowy day in Montreal. They are starkly direct and seem to sum up the sense of loss that drives him on as a creative artist, with all the dangerous distractions that he has already encountered along the way. Perhaps being gay and from a broken home helped him to grow up developing a self-sufficient style of his very own and encouraged him to fight his corner for his own individual musical expression. He is certainly not afraid to take on the establishment. In fact he already courted controversy when the huge US retail giant Walmart banned his album Want Two in their stores nationwide. When asked the reason why, he answers very simply, two words: "Gay Messiah." 'Gay Messiah' is one of the stand-out tracks on the album and, if the title wasn't enough to get up the noses of right wing America then all they had to do was have a quick listen to the lyrics and they would be up in arms. "No I wont be the one baptized in cum; better pray for your sins, 'cause the gay messiah's coming," he sings to a seductive piano accompaniment.
In throwing down the gauntlet to a fundamentalist Christian, right wing America, could Rufus Wainwright unwittingly become the voice of a generation? Perhaps he is not the Gay Messiah; he might not even be John the Baptist, though allegedly he has been known to give head. But with legions of devoted fans around the world and his undisputed gay iconic status, there will always be plenty who would be very happy to experience a second coming.