One Man Band

“Welcome to my home!” quips Rufus Wainwright as he struts on to the stage at Hampton Court Palace.

“I come dressed in different eras” announces the cartoonishly camp star whose jaunty “Jacobean” hat and “Shakespearean tights” (in reality, more spray-on stripy jeans) have been specially selected to match the sixteenth-century location. He’s even thrown an Yves Saint Laurent T-shirt into the mix as a mark of respect to the recently deceased designer. The overall effect is rather like a younger, more eclectic Elton John.

If his taste in clothes is hard to categorize, the man himself is even more difficult to pin down. A one-time cult sensation, this idiosyncratic talent has been inching closer to the mainstream in recent years, popping up on Disney soundtracks and frequenting the festival circuit.

This probably has more to do with the growing demand for his music (his latest album Release the Stars rocketed into the album chart at Number Two) than any desire to conquer the commercial sector.

A self-confessed egotist, Wainwright’s primary policy seems to be to please himself (how else can you explain last year’s show, Rufus Does Judy – a song-by-song recreation of Judy Garland’s iconic Carnegie Hall concert? Or his current project-in-the-pipeline, a musical built around Shakespeare’s sonnets?).

But however unlikely his ventures, success is never far away, so it’s no surprise that, even with seats at £70 a pop, the freezing cold courtyard is packed with expectant fans.

The palace’s music festival has him billed alongside Katherine Jenkins and Curtis Stigers but if the audience were expecting middle-of-the-road entertainment, they were in for disappointment.

Wainwright prides himself on the fact that no two songs are the same and his set list spans a wealth of styles and themes, from sunny sing-a-longs like Sanssouci to more ruminative, melancholy numbers such as the Radiohead-esque This Love Affair.

Going to a Town, an embittered anti-Bush ode to America, proves he can do political as well as plaintive, but Wainwright is at his best when he does searing emotional honesty and a highlight is new song Zebulon in which his beautifully controlled, halting delivery conjures up a world of adolescent loneliness and longing.