"Don't these pants go well with the theatre," Rufus Wainwright purrs, tripping on stage in outlandishly striped trousers. "I look like a raped schoolboy." Pause. "Well, I want to." Wainwright is Canadian, the son of Loudon Wainright III and - fairly obviously - gay. The producers of his three cult-status albums have attempted to rein in and commercialise his more rococo tendencies, but, live, his purple balladry flourishes unfettered.
He sets out his stall succinctly in the first few songs. The elegiac Grey Gardens, inspired by a documentary about an ageing, eccentric branch of the Kennedy clan, shimmers with corrupted decadence. Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk is a neatly self-satirising meditation on addiction. Pretty Things, with its unrequited yearning and series of beautiful major to minor chord changes, is exactly the kind of song Elvis Costello failed to carry off on his latest record. Then comes Vibrate, a tongue-in-cheek devotional ("My phone's on vibrate for you"), anchored by a simple, circular left-hand piano figure. Amid the clever couplets, it's hard not to be moved by the line: "Pinocchio is a now a boy who longs to turn back into a toy."
In the presence of this elegant talent, the automatic reaction is to feel that it must be protected from the vitiated imperatives of the heartless music business. Perhaps, like obvious antecedent Randy Newman, he should be allowed to write music for oddball cartoon characters in order to facilitate the expression of his more subversive urges. He is, after all, part of Steven Spielberg and David Geffen's multimedia empire Dreamworks. On the other hand, watching Wainwright flopping around the stage, turning the tuning of his guitar into an extended pantomime, you wonder if he shouldn't have been so pampered.
And on the evidence of the gloriously explicit Gay Messiah, to be released next year, he isn't actually that worried about what people think. You can only imagine the faces of the label executives when they realised Wainwright was singing about being "bathed in come".
