Rufus Wainwright at Leeds Town Hall, review: Electrifying set features old favourites and a new rap about Donald Trump

'What you're going to get tonight is kind of a potpourri. Old material, and then some new stuff from the next era of Rufusness - which is currently pending.'

(Getty Images (Getty Images)

Even between songs, Rufus Wainwright finds room to wax poetic. This summer tour has seen him visiting further-flung locations than usual, and Leeds is one of the bigger cities on the schedule, with shows in Basingstoke and Whitley Bay already under his belt... and gigs in Bath and Bexhill-on-Sea still to come.

In a way, it's fitting, because at this particular moment in time, the Canadian is in a sort of career purgatory. It'll be a brief one, but bigger dates than this already loom in his diary. He's just finished work on his second opera, Hadrian, which will premiere in Toronto in October. After that, he'll head out on an anniversary tour that'll see him focus primarily on his first two LPs, 1998's self-titled debut and 2001's seminal Poses.

So, what for now, then? For a start, not a great deal more than the man himself; he provides his own accompaniment, flitting between piano and acoustic guitar. In between the crowd pleasers, we get vintage cuts with one eye on that 2019 retrospective jaunt: opener "Beauty Mark" is a case in point.

In amongst the staple likes of "The Art Teacher" and "Pretty Things", though, are a slew of tracks earmarked for the next conventional LP (Wainwright's last record comprised nine musical adaptations of Shakespeare's sonnets). Amongst them are "Peaceful Afternoon", which sets his pride at thirteen years of happy marriage against his fear of death's looming spectre, and "Early Morning Madness", which - like the hangover it so closely details - goes on a touch longer than you'd like.

Mid-set, Wainwright demonstrates his chops as a skilled raconteur. "Gay Messiah" is prefaced by two genuinely funny anecdotes, one of which involved him stirring scandal with the Vatican by playing it in Italy. The other, more recent, saw him childproof the song's nearest-the-knuckle line after spotting a ten-year-old in the audience, only to then meet the fan at the stage door post-show. “She was a 36-year-old lesbian! I look like a 36-year-old lesbian too, though. Just from a different angle.”

In actual fact, though, he's a 44-year-old father-of-one, as a pretty piano performance of "Montauk" reminds us; Wainwright paints a picture of his daughter's upbringing, invoking the seaside town in which he owns a home and her burgeoning relationship with both of her dads. Later, to begin the encore, he plays the caustically anti-government "Going to a Town", penned under Bush but so much closer to home today.

Before that, though, he finds room for a sillier, more absurdist take on the present political climate. He reels out a delightfully daft rap that skewers Donald Trump, explaining that he devised it to support a charity auction that a hip hop friend of his was running in California. The president's tiny hands and illiteracy take an early battering, but it's only once a FLOTUS impersonator takes the stage in a green parka, the back of which is emblazoned with 'IS IT OVER YET?', that you realise how devilishly Wainwright had found the space for satire. “Who knew Melania had a place in Leeds?” he drawls at its conclusion.

The big hitters flow soon after: "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk", his classic allegorical paean to self-denial, closes the main set, and the encore includes the second of two covers of tracks by his daughter’s maternal grandfather, Leonard Cohen; his bare-bones take on "Hallelujah" remains sorely underrated.

The night's highlight, though, suggests that Wainwright didn't pick these off-the-beaten-track rooms by accident. Peering out into Leeds' thoroughly ornate Town Hall, he asks - almost as if out loud to himself - “what are the acoustics like in here? Let's shut the mics off.” He then proceeds to deliver an electrifying "Candles", entirely a capella. If he hadn't told us, we mightn't have known he'd turned off the amplification. His measured baritone rings out clear and crisp.

It's his voice that's the star of the show, which is why, when he signs off with "Poses" and again plugs next year's birthday celebration, you wonder how he might top this. “There'll be a full band, and more of a production than just me putting on a pair of white shoes.” The magic, tonight, was all in his fingers and vocal cords. Anything else might feel like extravagance.