When Rufus Wainwright turned 50 last July he panicked. “It was harrowing,” he says. “Overnight, I felt more conscious about the possibility of death taking over. I thought, ‘Oh my God, that pain in my leg is probably going to kill me.’” He prods it now, through navy skinny jeans, to check. “But I’m excited for once I’m through my fifties and I’m in my ‘f*** it’ era.”
The singer has already been through a few eras. He started his career young, touring at 13 with his mother, the Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle (“I was fuelled by this mad ambition,” he says). In his twenties, as his career took off, he began to spiral out of control. He took so much crystal meth that
