When did you start building wind in the wires? Are there any songs you had for many years?
Teignmouth is the child that had been most pregnant in me. Since all the way before Lycanthropy was even in the recording stages, Infact I would say this song is the genesis of “wind in the wires”. It set my brain off into thought patterns about England in the winter, listening to the radio static late at night watching the sea storms rain at your window pane.
Your last album Lycanthropy was composed with songs and poems written when you were 12 until 18. Now do you see this album (lycanthropy) more autobiographic than Wind in the wires?
Lycanthropy is like twelve chapters of my life condensed into one album, “wind in the wires” is perhaps only two chapters of my life but It gave me chance to give certain emotions a real close up analysis.
Where do these songs come from for Wind in the wires? How do you proceed for composition? Lyrics and then music or not a special way?
It can be either, sometimes a melody you repeat in your head everyday and then two years later one word or a whole song can come in one moment.
Do you read a lot of poetry/French poetry?
I read a lot of poetry in the English language mainly because I don’t trust a lot of translations. I have tried to read Rimbaud and I get this horrible sensation I am not getting the whole picture due to the translation.
On this album you add clarinet and you play many instruments, more than on the first, what are the instruments that really attracted you?
On this one I was really trying to bring it down to the grand piano. I feel like the piano can create a whole universe with six notes, it is the most outrageously versatile musical tool for composition but you have to approach it without fear.
This is the first time other people play on your album, and here it’s you father and sister, it’s special, how do you did it, did it came naturally?
There is a lyric in wind in the wires, “see her waters break, rain falling to the sea, into a granite wave, a unit, a family”. That is really about belonging to a blood group, feeling safe in a unity. My family first played on the album because they were the only musicians around, but I then made the conscious poetic decision to not add any musicians from outside of my family, so wind in the wires comes from a very intimate musical soil.
Will they became live member or will they play on stage occasionally?
Perhaps for some key shows I will invite them up to sing and play, it would be fun.
For the new Wind in the wires tour, how do you see the live formation? Still a laptop, you and a friend on guitar …?
I am leaving the laptop at home for this musical expedition, I feel the need to be free from all constraints.. I will be joined by a drummer and perhaps cello, so that I can have some good strong blooded human meat in my live set.
Listening to Wind in the wires, it seems more structured than the first. Is it something you’ve learn touring or making more and more music? You separated the album in 2 parts with an interlude in the middle what’s the story behind this choice?
The length and structure comes from a very intuitive un-academic part of me, I cant explain the process because I don’t understand it at all. I just let it happen.
What were your occupations recording the last album, when you were not in the studio or on laptop and instruments…?
Occupations? I have been a full time musician since the age of sixteen, everyday is writing, practising, drawing, recording, riding my bicycle and since 2004, touring the world! When I have been out of money in the past I have done little jobs like making cocktails and a music teacher in a nursery.
I remember that After the Lycanthropy release you said you’ve two albums on the way: one darker which seems to be Wind in the Wires and one another. What’s this one, is this finished?
The technicolour pop album will be sometime in the next couple of years, This one will take a huge amount of effort as I want to conduct an orchestra of whooping cranes and tap dancers and of course, a childrens choir.
The weird thing about you is that you are often in Paris, You find your name Wolf in the Montmartre cemetery and nobody really knows your music there. Are you a sort of ghost in this city? What do you do when you went in France?
The last time I saw Paris was in the summer, Nan Goldin invited me over to see the exhibition that she used a song of mine in. It was a real joy to get drunk with my dear friend Johnny and roll around in the gutter for a few days. I don’t feel the need to be recognised in every city in the world, I’m very happy in places that I am a stranger.
You seems to be a traveller Where is you home now?
Home is a cottage on the edge of London in the marshes.
What’s your next destination?
I just came back from Mallorca with my lady Ingrid, We woke up on Saturday morning to a grey January London sky and took the first available flight to somewhere with an ocean.
Also The first thing I noticed watching the cover is that you’ve left you blonde haircut! Without it, Is it a manner to say, “this is really me” because it’s now your natural hair colour?
It was an unconscious decision one night. I felt like I was wearing a wig or something.. I needed to feel alive and well and the decision was to cut all my hair and grow myself back. So yes, I feel that on the front cover of wind in the wires, you are really seeing my true self.
Your Imagery has changed and probably became darker with this album? Is it the real evolution since lycanthropy?
It was both a natural instinct and a decision that was made once that album was finished, the images need to reflect the music, not o contradict the message at all, so the darker colours and natural quality of the photos was a step in that direction.
Do you still love clothes very much? What is your favourite clothes element?
I love clothes and dressing up but I despise fashion.
MERA LUNA 2011 - Patrick Wolf Interview
an interview from 2005.
Patrick Wolf comes from a strange place. To arrive at our meeting at a central London hotel he has left a period cottage complete with bell tower attached – marooned among ugly industrial and housing estates on the edge of Hackney Marshes – where he lives with his girlfriend and the last remaining of his albino cats, “the one that was kind of grey – he was the black sheep”. But that is only the start of it, I discover.
“I COULD DO MY MUSIC, WALK IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, AND RELEASE ALL THE DARK ENERGY THAT HAD BUILT UP INSIDE ME”
Only 22, he has already lived a life stranger than most. He has two critically acclaimed albums under his belt. Lycanthropy, written during his teenage years, was number 39 in the NME releases of the year 2003, and 2005’s Wind in the Wires was rated highly by critics, with single “The Libertine” reaching the indie top 20. In October he released his third single, “Tristan”, and played his biggest UK gig to date, at London’s Scala on Halloween – aptly enough, considering the myth of the pained, enigmatic, youthful romantic that has grown up around him.
Disarmingly genial and light-hearted in reality, the image of the romantic poet is one he dislikes, but at the same time does little to dispel as he sweeps into the bar, all six foot four inches of gangling undernourishment, dressed in black, elegantly handsome face hiding behind artfully floppy hair. Nor does he help himself with stories like the fact that his assumed surname was given to him “by a medium I met in a Paris cemetery, who gave me a plant that she said would help me play the piano. I planted it on Hampstead Heath and suddenly I could play brilliantly where I’d just been so-so before. She was Maurice Chevalier’s grandaughter as well, she said. She told me as an animal I was a wolf. Patrick Wolf.”
“I THINK THERE’S A FEW PEOPLE AROUND WHO DON’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A FASHION STATEMENT AND AN ALBUM“
The son of Irish-born artist Imelda Apps and her jazz musician turned advertising creative husband Derek, Wolf was born and grew up in London, a pleasant middle-class upbringing that eventually failed to contain him. His first experience of school was pleasurable, but as weird as most of his relatively short life story: “It was run by two lesbians. It was a very creative environment.”
Highly musical, he began the violin at eight years old, the piano shortly after, and was accepted into a prestigious boys’ public school where he soon became a soloist in the choir, touring the world and even singing for the pope in Italy. However, the rigid, academic environment oppressed him, and he soon became the target of bullying. “It was a very patriarchal society. Sports and army cadet activities, which wasn’t me at all. I grew to hate the masculine side of things. I thought it was really ridiculous. I escaped into music, coming home and hiding in my bedroom, writing music or running out at night and getting into clubs. I was about six foot at 11, so it was easy for me to lie about my age.”
While writing a music fanzine, building his own theremin and analogue synthesiser and recording on a four-track he had set up in his bedroom, Patrick began sneaking out at night regularly, and fell in with the pop-art collective Minty and the performance art group The Offset, even appearing on stage to play while barely into his teens. “There I was, this quiet middle class boy, and they loved it. I was a freak really. I’d joined the circus. This tall child in funny clothes, meeting all these drag queens and the like on the London scene. But they were all very protective of me. Although obviously there were things like drugs around, they were never anywhere near me. It was an exciting time but, when I look back, I was only a child.”
By 15 his parents had realised the extent of the bullying and removed him to the progressive Bedales School in Hampshire where he had, by his own admission, a nervous breakdown. He was so wary of males that he had to sleep in his own room rather than a dormitory: “It was as if I got my freedom there. I could do my music, walk in the countryside, and release all the dark energy that had built up inside me. I learnt that it was finally OK to be myself and not the kind of man they were trying to make me. Just because you don’t fit into a category doesn’t make you wrong. That’s why I was so happy that Antony and the Johnsons won the Mercury Prize.
“I really don’t like all this stuff now. All this MTV2 Chart Show indie rock. It’s just not trying hard enough, not giving enough. It’s all a regurgitation of everything that has already been regurgitated before. Rock music is so full of cliches all the way. Boys in bands, just to get laid and make money. There’s no originality. You can say there was in the past – punk rock was a reaction that needed to happen, the 50s were about the creation of something for teenagers which hadn’t been there before – but now?”
Wolf doesn’t have much time for much modern music – especially male-dominated modern music. His heroes are Stockhausen, John Tavener, Hector Berlioz, P J Harvey, Joni Mitchell, Bjork. His musical ability stretches from piano and viola to harp and harpsichord via the ukelele: “I’m a musician all the way, and I think creating music should be about giving a gift, giving a present of something beautiful to someone without expecting anything back like money, fame or girls. The applause, the record sales, the fame – it should all be tertiary.
“I find it cowardly to just pick up a guitar, get some stoner mate to play the drums, call yourself The Somethings, do the same thing as everyone else, and then take loads of drugs and end up in rehab. I’m against all The Somethings. I have sworn never to play a guitar – it’s too connected to that indie boy world. I prefer the ukelele. And not naming any names, but I think there’s a few people around who don’t know the difference between a fashion statement and an album.”
Much of Patrick’s teenage torment was channeled into Lycanthropy, but not before he had had yet another rebellion, and left home to tour round London and Paris at 16 with a friend, Paul, who took the moniker “Fanny”. They formed their own “white noise collective”, the Maison Crimineux, and became fashionable among what Wolf calls “the beautiful people”. It was a brief flirtation with the trappings of fame: “We went to dinner with Karl Lagerfeld – thrown out for being drunk – played at Iggy Pop’s book launch, met loads of people. But it was all about lots of ‘wants’. It was like a toxic shock for me.”
However it was during this period that he was alighted upon by Capitol K, who released Lycanthropy, while Patrick was also studying music at Trinity College in London – “a kind of gift to my parents to show I wasn’t a total waster”.
At the end of 2003 he escaped the city, the trappings of which he professes to loathe, preferring to hide away in his cottage and eschew London Transport in favour of a bicycle, and went down to Cornwall to write his second album, Wind in the Wires. “It was there I started writing lyrics, whereas up until then I had really been a sound creator. I was captivated by the sound of the electricity in the pylons, the electrical storms you get down there. It seemed to me a marriage of what I had been trying to do – the electronic and the natural and, in the middle, just me, a man in the rain. I saw the blood and guts of myself, and it made me happier, more confident. I put it all down and thought, ‘Well that’s sorted out the last ten years!’”
Patrick says his next album is to be his “happy love album”: “I’m in love with my girlfriend. I’ve sorted out the turbulence of boy versus girl inside me by working out it’s okay to be my sort of ‘non-macho’ man. I’m happy, serene. I’m Patrick Wolf. And, if anything now, I’m going to be a pop star. I’ve done London clubs, I’ve done post-punk squats, I’m not the classical world, I’m not the indie world. The only thing left is pop music.” Surprisingly, he’s quite a fan – particularly of Britney Spears: “There’s something about her, something very human, especially now she’s writing her own songs. ‘Everytime’ was great. I won’t be buying a Christina Aguilera album, I can tell you. All that ‘sex sells’ nonsense. When Britney does it, it’s all good fun, tongue in cheek, but Christina is all, ‘I want sex. I want.’ I’ve seen her on the VH1 documentaries. No. Not for me. But pop music – yeah! Let’s do it! I want to make music for everyone. Music my granny can listen to. Music for the man in the chip shop. That’s me.”
It is a shame really. With his gangly frame as thin as a pin, heavily-ringed fingers, long, dark hair framing the face of the chorister he once was, skinny-fit clothes all black under a white fur-look coat, he looks every inch the ultimate rock star.
Patrick Wolf talks to O2 Academy TV about his influences, imaginative and innovative artists and what it is like being an independent artist even when signed to a major label.
Patrick Wolf breaks down the themes on his newest EP ‘Brumalia’, his writing process and where he finds his inspiration for his live shows.
There are so many reason to champion Patrick Wolf as an alternative GT poster (man-)child, but one good reason? He’s set to be married to his boyfriend of four years. We met Patrick at their house (the very one he sings about on his last album Lupercalia) and start yapping about his forth-coming civil partnership.
“First of all we’re so lucky that we’re able to do it,” says Patrick, “it’s not just a fantasy, we’re in 2011. My parents were so excited and if I would’ve done it in 1981 they would have chucked me out of the house. I think it’s just a mixture of being so excited to have the freedom to be able to do it, also the emotion of really wanting to be engaged and so it was just very important.
“I decided we should both propose to each other. And he proposed to me in London and I proposed to him in Florida at the lighthouse, and it was important that it was an equal proposal not an archaic ‘man sweeping the woman off her feet and putting her in a domestic situation for the rest of their life’. It’s two men coming together with two different lives and making them into one.” See readers, there is hope. Though this is not going to be your average gay-sort-of-wedding. Pretty sure no one else will be able to get Patti Smith as the wedding singer, with a disco by Alec Empire. And unlike his celebrity contemporaries, there will be no OK!-style magazine spread. “Yeah unless they pay for full botox and chin lift and my next album,” he jokes. “But I like how it’s left-field and indie but still kind of celebrity.”
It’s an odd kind of celebrity Patrick has - not quite a conventional popstar, but well known enough to have people screaming at him on the tube as if he were “some sort of cartoon character”. Those were the Magic Position days, his closest brush with pop (we’ll get to Britney later). It’s his latest opus, Lupercalia, which we’ve said “sounds like he’s found his voice”. And like all musicians, he claims it is his favourite album.
“I’ll probably say that on the next one as well,” he notes. “The hardcore fans will be like, ‘why aren’t you as tortured as you were on your first record and why aren’t you as young?’ Why people want to put me in formaldehyde and keep me? I mean, you might not be feeling happiness right now but maybe one day you’ll appreciate why I wrote these songs.
“I always say that when songs are made with a positive message they’re actually not made for people that are happy, they’re made for people who are in trouble, that are sad or alienated in the world and are looking for some rope to pull them through out of a ditch. That’s why I think the Goths and miserable people, I love them to bits, but maybe it will be helpful for them to listen to some Burt Bacharach or some Kelly Marie or something that will help them you of that situation.”
this is old, translated interview with Patrick, June 2005.
I keep my eyes open for the other things
Interview with Patrick Wolf
Interviewer : The used sounds, but also the songs itself on “Wind in the Wires” sound very organic and earth-connected. Which part does the nature play for you and your creating?
Patrick : It was always a big part of my music. When I was 16 I had to go to a boarding school on the country. Until that moment I was a town boy. And suddenly the plug got pulled. I was away from the civilisation. Alone with the hills, the rain. There I realised, what life is for. What important for communication is, what true is and what not.
Interviewer : In what way is your music today connected with the modern world?
Patrick : Well, I live in the modern world, of course. And I also write about it. But I prefer to concentrate on the special elements. I don’t write about women or such things, but about my experience in the present and my reactions about it.
Interviewer : Well, certainly not about politics.
Patrick : No, at the moment I better not write about politics. When I’m 60 on day, perhaps I feel an urgent need to write about it and feel cultured enough to write a comment on this, but still my music rather feeds of a kind of abstract magic, of happiness.
Interviewer : When did you learn your first instrument?
Patrick : I began with piano when I was 5 or 6, but I detested it. If you begin with learning piano, it seems to be mathematic, as if you are typing on a calculator. At the beginning you don’t feel the passion to play it. Then I decided to learn the violin, because it seemed to be magical. I was fascinated how the bow makes the strings swing. That was a complete riddle to me.
Interviewer : How many instruments can you play today?
Patrick : Two or three different instrument-families. In the keyboard family I play the accordion, the grand piano, synthesizer and the organ. This all is very similar, just sounds different.
Interviewer : Do you think you are technically a good player or more the sound collector?
Patrick : I think my abilities grew a lot in the last two years. When I began to write songs, I couldn’t really show what I wanted to. I think, I can play very, very, very, very good now, but I worked hard on it (laughs). Well, I’m really a very good violin player. I practise since I was 6. At the beginning it was more kind of perforce, to play one day in an orchestra or begin as a violin teacher. Perhaps one day I decide not to sing anymore, but to record violin records.
Interviewer : Some would regret that. When did you discover your voice?
Patrick : When my voice started to break, I was 12. Before that I sung in choirs, even as a soloist. Then my voice was breaking and it felt like I was losing my childhood or a best friend. As a teenager, it was hard to handle with the voice. Your voice is very astable. It lasted till I was 19 to trust my voice again, but today it is an unbreakable instrument.
Interviewer : Your great, clear voice is a very good contrast to the gloomy sounds of your new album.
Patrick : Yes, it’s fantastic. My voice is going to be more powerful. The body doesn’t stop to grow hair until one is 28 or so. I feel like a growing boy. And also my voice is growing; it is very exciting for me to follow that.
Interviewer : Would you agree with me, that the album has a very dark atmosphere?
Patrick : Yes, I also would say so. But when I discover something which is about fear or hopelessness, I feel an urgent need to bring hope in it. If I give something negative, I also need to give something positive.
Interviewer : How do you record your songs? Do you have a studio at home?
Patrick : No. All the grand piano and strings stuff were recorded in a very noble studio with large ceilings and huge windows with a look out at the garden, parts of the predecessor where recorded on the country with my laptop and so. My laptop is very important to me, because I can record my vocals even in the wood. But “Wind in the Wires” was really more professional.
Interviewer : And you didn’t want to record anything in the wood?
Patrick : No, not this time. But I have some plans for the future, to sing more outside, because you have a better acoustic there.
Interviewer : The murmur of the wind and your voice. In what way would you call yourself as a romantic person?
Patrick : Romanticism is always a bit sentimental. I would rather call me passionate than romantic.
Interviewer : One song of the album is called “Ghost Song”. Have you ever seen a ghost, in any kind of form?
Patrick : I always have kept my eyes open for the other things. Traffic, fish prices, television. I have lots of friends who… (breaks off). Actually I feel uncomfortable somehow to talk about that because I have no clue if you understand that all or have the same sensibility as I.
Interviewer : At least I try to understand your album and have listened to it countless times.
Patrick : Okay. But it is like a magician who doesn’t tell his tricks. There are some things I can’t talk about because I want to keep my powers.
Interviewer : It’s okay. But do you think that you can see things which other people can’t see?
Patrick : I think I see things which people should see. And hopefully I make them attentive on that.
Interviewer : Most of the bands release there albums to get dough or to become rock stars. Do you write the music more for you than for the auditors?
Patrick : That’s a mean question (laughs). I make what I make, even if I had to pay for it, what I already had to.
Interviewer : So you see the music as a vocation?
Patrick : In some reason, yes.
Interviewer : Doesn’t it look all funny to you? You are only 21 and have reached more than most of the people in life.
Patrick : Funny, that you think so. My works are actually only things I had to do. I haven’t done them to get glory or get great reviews or screaming fans. My father was 22 when he had to go to India to fight in a war. And my grandfather has a farm in Ireland. And I think they have really reached something in contrast to me.
