As a rule of thumb, artists who play the same venue within a matter of months fail to truly impact on the second landing. Wainwright had graced this very stage in May of this year, though while he shared the stage with his aunt, sister and mother, renditions of his solo numbers were tantalisingly thin on the ground.
The beauty of Rufus’ live set, ultimately, is the wonderful juxtaposition between his despondent, fragile music, and his quick-witted comedic turns. He reels the audience in with his vulnerable, tragic songwriting, then makes his moist-eyed audience howl when he exclaims that he never much fancied the bloke for whom his songs were written anyway (“he wasn’t much into boys…but he did like singers,” he muses slyly).
Though much of the power of Poses and Want One is in the ornate, layered production of the music, Wainwright has proved that his voice and one other instrument are the only tools he needs (“I couldn’t afford to take the band over,” he offers, by way of apology). In their stripped-down incarnations, ‘Matinee Idol’ and ‘Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk’ do, in fact, sound as resplendent and sublime as they do when accompanied by horns, strings, bells and whistles. In fact, he performs ‘Vibrate’ with only a single hand on the baby grand, the other hand swaying in front of his face as though conducting the glorious instrument of his own voice.
Hmm…so this is what is meant by sonic cathedrals…