Review: Rufus Wainwright - Cork Opera House

by Ed Power

In another time and another place, Rufus Wainwright would be selling millions of records and living a life of Elton John-esque fabulousness. That time was the Seventies, when tortured singer-songwriters with a knack for melody-festooned hits and off-the-cuff melodrama were quite the thing.

Alas, for Wainwright, the Seventies was when he was born rather than when he arrived as a precocious crooner. As a now 45-year-old Generation Xer he has instead been required to negotiate music's transition from lucrative industry to parlous creative endeavour – a rickety way that saw him beseech the audience at Cork Opera House to buy his next album, so that he could afford to bring a roadie on tour.

He was joking, but only a bit. The same sensibility – humour laced with tragicomedy – defines his writing though often the tragedy has the upper hand. With no new LP to promote – his up-coming record is still year off – he was in carefree mood, as was a crowd that hooted its enthusiasm and occasionally convulsed with laugher.

The latter was the only plausible response to Trump Song, a skit piece during which the Los Angeles-based Canadian delivered a comedy rap as a model dressed as Melania strutted around in a designer coat emblazoned with the slogan 'I'm In A Cage Too'.

This was funny, but Wainwright was at his best when drinking deep of tragedy. Memphis Skyline channelled his professional jealousy of a young Jeff Buckley into a keening lament (he felt terrible when Buckley drowned age 30). Even more devastating was the Art Teacher, a stark marriage of Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen, in which Wainwright imagined an unrequited spark between a high-school girl and her preppy tutor.

Here and elsewhere, the music was tumultuously restrained – gilded on the surface, churning beneath. The same could not be said of Wainwright who arrived in a gold lame jumpsuit with cut-off sleeves and whose patter suggested he thought Cork was less a prosperous second city than somewhere at the edge of the known universe (it was he said, possibly as a compliment, 'unique").

Wainwright's daughter Lorca is the grandchild of Leonard Cohen and his in-law was honoured with covers of Hallelujah and So Long, Marianne, during which the room broke out of its rapture and joined the singer in the chorus. It was haunting – one chill among the many manifesting through the evening.

[rating]5[/rating]