MARTHA WAINWRIGHT
The first thing that shocks on entering the Scala is just how popular Martha Wainwright has become since releasing her debut album. Her last London gig was acoustic, in the tiny (albeit sold-out) environs of the Barfly. Today, not only do we have a full band, but the Scala, suddenly looking enormous in comparison, is packed out. Okay, so a lot of the crowd seem to be Rufus fans checking out his little sister, given the whoop that greets Martha’s mention of her brother doing a “beautiful and wonderful thing when he was at Shepherd’s Bush”, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know all the words - or, indeed, beg Martha to marry them mid-set!
“I don’t know how I’ll repay him,” Martha goes on, musing about her brother’s generous promotion of her, “Maybe offer him a dead child.” And there, in those few light-hearted words, we have it. Martha is the darker of the Wainwright children, the one who, according to Rufus at Reading Octagon, as a teenager “sat in her room smoking and listening to Leonard Cohen. I’d want to do a song together, and she’d tell me to fuck off. It hasn’t changed, really!” A fiery start to the set with an acoustic, but nonetheless majestic, “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole” only proves this, throwing the audience headlong into Martha’s often violently angry, often melancholy, but always poignantly beautiful world.
With her band supporting her from “When The Day Is Short” onwards, Martha’s songs are wonderfully enhanced, her punky Bjork meets Kate Bush tones perfectly highlighted. “The Car Song” is bouncily bittersweet, while “TV Show” is almost heart-stopping. Martha is as cheerfully chatty as she was at the Barfly. “I’m really fucking Martha Wainwright-ed out.” She says self-mockingly, before covering Leonard Cohen instead, “Why does she have to complain all the time??” Not that anyone else minds her complaining on the PJ Harvey-style “Ball & Chain”, one of the stand-out tracks on the album and about “male genitalia”. Apparently.
There are too many great songs to comment on them all, but it’s certainly great to hear “I Have Lost So Many Friends” again, followed up by the McGarrigle Hour’s haunting “Year Of The Dragon”. By the time Martha reaches her final cover, sounding like a ’50s French starlet, she must surely have won over anyone who entered the Scala thinking she was just another Wainwright.
