They fuck you up, your mum and dad | Music

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

Martha Wainwright came up with an effective way of dealing with having a singer-songwriter father who substituted looking after his family by writing about them in songs. She proved that those who live by the pen will die by the pen, and wrote a song about him called Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole. "For most of my childhood Loudon [Wainwright III] talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do," says Wainwright, who only started writing songs after becoming peeved at the amount of attention her brother Rufus was getting. "Especially as he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims, and we can't tell our side of the story. As a result he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole."

Martha Wainwright's career might well be designed to irritate her family. Her first album is filled with unhinged, emotional songs that fall into what she calls the "woe is me" vein, and she requires no prompting to reveal the source of her inspiration and especially the effect her father's song I'd Rather Be Lonely had on her. "I always felt terribly sorry for the poor woman I thought it was about because of the line: 'Every time I see you cry you're just a clone of every woman I've known.' Then one time I was on tour with Loudon and he said to the crowd: 'I wrote this song about my daughter.' I had no idea. We lived together for one year in New York when I was 14 and it was a disaster, and I'd Rather Be Lonely was about that year. He really crossed the line there."

Wainwright's mother, the Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, had an equally formative effect on her daughter's creative output. McGarrigle wrote a song called Go Leave, in which she describes her then husband Loudon running off to Europe with the performance artist Penny Arcade in the early 1970s. The heavily pregnant McGarrigle came over from Canada in search of him, found him, and lost the baby, after which he announced he was leaving her. "It's the most gut-wrenchingly painful song ever," says Wainwright. "At the end, you hear the sound of tear falling on to a string of her guitar. I used to listen to it as a child and cry my eyes out."

The family stereo system was dominated by McGarrigle's taste in esoteric, impossibly rare folk music, and a 1973 album by Galt McDermott, the composer of the musical Hair, which was released under the name Fergus Macroy. "We were forced to listen to that fucking thing over and over again," Wainwright remembers. "It's very obscure - nobody has it but Kate - and he sings really badly, but there are some great lyrics on it." While Rufus found escape in opera and classical music, his sister discovered Cyndi Lauper, Prince and, when she was 13, I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen. "It's completely dated now because he uses a crappy synthesizer, but I'm Your Man was a revelation because it was clear that the words are more important than the music. When everyone at school was listening to pop radio, I had this album on tape, but I wouldn't dare tell my friends that it was my favourite because they would be like: 'Euuw.' This is where it all started for me."

Another important record for Wainwright is Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. The hugely successful album was famously time-consuming and expensive to make and ushered in an era when overblown production was worn as a badge of honour. "It's the only good record that took so long and was so expensive," says Wainwright. "It's all about the benefit of high production, although they were probably just having coke blown up their asses the whole time. It's still the perfect record. I would get home from school and listen to this six or seven times a day while Kate was still in bed, screaming at me to turn it off."

Wainwright digs out Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan. A common choice, but her reason for choosing it is not so common. "Bob Dylan wanted to fuck me," she announces, casually. "He had seen me in New York once when I was wearing a low-cut dress and he called me up and asked to go out on a date. But he knew about my family and he said 'I bet you're pretty good, aren't you?' - he was talking about music - so I asked if he would consider having me open up for him on tour. I sent him a record and I never got a response. So I guess the answer is no."

Need to know

First record bought: Tracy Chapman
Favourite film: A Streetcar Named Desire
Record to grab in an emergency: Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis
Inspiration: Marlene Dietrich
Recent discovery: Arcade Fire

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