IF FAMILIES didn’t fall apart, there would be no need for art. Thus spoke Loudon Wainwright, a man now best known as the surviving patriarch of the fractured but talented Wainwright musical dynasty.

For the uninitiated, it is difficult to pin Wainwright down; he doesn’t have any famous songs (the absent Dead Skunk notwithstanding), and his material veers from comedy to parody and back, via the blues and some personal ruminations such as The Picture. All are held together by the strength and ebullience of Wainwright’s personality – a man clearly born to have an audience.

With a disconcerting habit of flicking his tongue around as he sang, it was initially hard to take him seriously, which was probably the point.

Teetering on the edge of caricature, particularly at the start, Wainwright’s performance instincts just about steered him into safer waters.

While his scabrous wit is probably one of the reasons why he hasn’t scaled the commercial heights of some of his ‘new Dylan’ contemporaries, it meant the evening was never dull.

The one constant was the presence of the reaper. Wainwright himself joked that he has been obsessing about growing old for most of his 64 years, and many of the generous allowance of songs dealt humorously with this: The S**t Song perhaps most succinctly sums up his world view, while his Bob Dylan tribute song was a topical highlight.

The breadth of his repertoire makes other performers look positively one dimensional. The set hit a blistering patch towards the end, when his daughter and charming opening act Lucy Wainwright Roche came back to duet on a cover of Love Hurts (presumably a family anthem), the lilting White Winos and the quietly affecting Primrose Hill.

With the Opera House applause ringing in their ears, the family unit were off again on their own never-ending tour, this time to London, the day having started in Glasgow.