Not every artist who has kept us waiting more than a dozen years for new music succeeds in recapturing their former glory. The good news is not only has queer, British singer/songwriter Patrick Wolf delivered on the promise of his earlier work but he’s exceeded all expectations with “Crying The Neck” (Apport/Virgin).
Having survived an extremely difficult period, including the passing of his mother and becoming sober, Wolf wastes no time in laying it all out in album opener “Reculver” (“No child, no husband/Prospects oblique/Bankrupt and borderline/Orphaned and obsolete/Well, enough/Of my accomplishments/Here’s to the bridges burnt/Never to mend”). But fear not, there is healing and rebirth, all wrapped up in the most sumptuous electronic-tinged gothic/folk you’ve ever heard.
Gregg Shapiro: Patrick, you have established yourself as a multi-instrumentalist, playing a variety of musical instruments including piano, violin, ukulele and guitar. In your musical training, which instrument did you pick up first?
Patrick Wolf: First of all, I’ve evolved. I’m not a ukulele player anymore. I pioneered that whole thing. In 2003, I brought the ukulele out of obscurity into the public eye. I’m stepping back now. It’s not my problem anymore. My first love was the violin when I was seven years old. I did try piano lessons before that, but I found it really boring learning other people’s music. Also, the violin, for me, was a magic instrument. I saw somebody on my road, when I was growing up, playing it and all I wanted to know was how that piece of hair on that string made that sound. It seemed like a magical event, like supernatural. I asked my mom if I could have violin lessons. When I was 11, I had a growth spurt and was suddenly 6 foot 5. Everybody said, “You’re too big for the violin. You’re going to have to play the viola now.” I was given a viola and put into orchestra as a viola player. At that time, I discovered John Cale and realized I could be wild and free with the viola. I didn’t even bother to learn the viola class. I decided I was going to make my own music with it. The viola is the instrument that is the bedrock of my sound. It’s taken me until 40 to learn the actual guitar. For years, all I played were four-string folk instruments. The viola is the thing that started all that.
GS: In terms of your distinctive vocal style, are there performers that you consider to be influences?
PW: Growing up, it was Björk. I discovered Björk when I was a choir boy singing Latin Evensong for the church. Three times a week, I’d be singing in Latin. I discovered Björk just as my voice broke. I had two icons then; it was Debbie Harry and Björk. The attitude of Debbie Harry. I think I still have it. When I reach for certain notes, I don’t put any vibrato on, and I definitely think that she was a huge imprint on me vocally. In terms of male influences, my mother would play French chanson, people like Maurice Chevalier, and then I discovered Chet Baker. These people were delivering the opposite of what I was taught at school. Kate Bush is also a big presence as well, as a narrative singer, the way she would tell stories and bring you close to the microphone. And PJ Harvey! PJ Harvey, Björk and Kate Bush.
GS: What a spectrum! Regarding your songwriting process, do the lyrics precede the melody, or vice versa?
PW: My favorite moments are when they come at exactly the same time in my head. Those feel like they’ve been delivered to me like from somewhere else. For years, I carried a big sketchbook with no lines in it so I can make maps with words, three-in-the-morning kinds of sentences and stuff like that. That, generally, is what I will then start to rearrange around the melodies I’ve written. I guess like Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Sometimes I have the melody, and that’s all constructed. Then go into my notebooks and take those things. A lot of it I do in my head, now. I try not to get too intellectual with the process because otherwise I’ll start getting out a thesaurus and then there’ll be words that people don’t understand. Which is great and fun to teach people. I try to keep it more human; otherwise I’ll take on some forensic project, and something gets lost in translation if I try to over-intellectualize.
GS: Yes, overthinking can be a problem. There is a theatricality to your music, and the songs on “Crying The Neck” demonstrate that quality. Do you think you might have a stage musical in you?
PW: Everybody wants one! I definitely have a few projects in mind. I’ve never been a theatre gay. You’ll never find me around a piano at Marie’s Crisis in New York. I’ll be down at CBGB’s. Maybe in the last five years, I’ve started to go to traditional musicals. I love the old Rodgers and Hammerstein; the original musicals that I think are underperformed in a way. I maybe have a bit more of a problem with how musical theater is performed vocally, nowadays, than the writing of it. If I did a musical, it would probably utilize normal singers, in terms of folk singers, people who maybe just step back a bit. That thing that all gays love to be told is “tone it down” [laughs]. If I did a musical, I’d approach it from a completely different aesthetic point of view. That’s my plan, if I went into it. Tori Amos had a musical out that is really beautiful, but it was with traditional musical singers. What I did see was a PJ Harvey musical where they got the actors to sing in a folk style. It was really beautiful. There might be a different way of doing things that probably would be really unpopular and [laughs] no one would ever want to come see. That sounds just like my kind of project.
GS: On average, your early albums were released about two years apart. “Crying The Neck” is the exception, with more than a dozen years passing before its release. What was happening in your life during that time?
PW: It’s a lot easier to talk about the further away that that period gets. I plan on finishing the next album this summer. I’m going back into my album every two years mode, which felt like my way of arranging my land as a farmer; this fallow field. It’s so wonderful to say that this is a gift of sobriety, as well. When I was using, I obliterated that completely. I know that I fried that part of my brain, and I never thought it would come back. I fried that part of my confidence, my look, and had to rebuild everything again and connect the synapses together. That was a combination of hardcore clinical psychotherapy, a lot of meetings, a lot of recovery, and a lot of fellowship. That took 13 years of my life. I started when I was very young. My first album came out when I was 19 years old. We just completed the last set of films about this period of time, and my return to work. It’s going to be great because one day I’ll be able to say, “Gregg, have you seen the film? Can we talk about something else?”
GS: Do you think you might also consider writing a memoir about your experience?
PW: I think the film finishes the work, and brings that period of time to an end. Also, right in the middle of that, my mother died and it was all kind of an interconnected period of a rock bottom. There’s addiction with drugs, addiction with alcohol. There’s a lot that happened in those years that finishes with me putting my first new work out again. This for the long haul. Right now, I’m very obsessed with the present. It’s taken me such a long time to have something to be proud of in the present, to share with the world and roll with, and move on to the next project. I’ve always been forward motion. It’s great to be in that movement now.
GS: You also have a history of collaboration with fascinating guest artists, including the late Marianne Faithfull, as well as Tilda Swinton, and Zola Jesus, who can be heard on “Limb O,” on “Crying The Neck.” How do you know when a collaborator is right for a particular song, or do you write with a collaborator in mind?
PW: With someone like Zola…I was writing that song for like five or six years. I knew that it was a conversation between two people. I knew that it was taking an argument that during COVID lockdown, when all we were allowed to do was get in the car and go to the local supermarket and come back, between two people of the same age and of the same nihilism. I was going through my phone, and I was thinking about [singer] Siouxsie Sioux. In the song, there’s that [sings] “hohhhh” Siouxsie-ism. Although I’m sure Zola would be proud to say that she put her own gothic touch on things. The same thing happened with Marianne. I was writing that song over the summer, and then I read Marianne’s autobiography “Faithfull,” and there was something in the book about magpies and Marianne. She had been called a magpie at certain moments of her life. I had always wanted to do a song based on a traditional magpie rhyme. There are some songs on my album, like “Lughnasa,” when I tried maybe 18 divas around the world, because it was meant to be a song for a much older voice than is on it. It was meant to be a duet with my mother. Sometimes you can try so hard for something and then it turns out the only person who it resonated with enough was a folk singer my mother loved who was the same age as me. It was like, “Oh, of course it means the spirit of my mother doesn’t need to be 80 years old. It can be a girl up the King’s Road.” These duets come down to fate and circumstance. Always have done.
GS: Your June 2026 tour dates, here in the States, coincide with Pride month. Do you think that you might have time to check out some of the Pride festivals or parades taking place in those cities?
PW: I’ll be at the one where the Pride parade is set up down the street without the sponsorships. We used to have a thing, when I lived in London, there was this really fun party. There was Gay Pride, and then there was a party called Gay Shame [laughs]. “Let’s work through this together. Let’s work through our shame privately.” I adore Pride. The concept of Pride being a protest is not really true anymore.
GS: Yes, it’s been lost!
PW: I think it’s being reclaimed for that, and that’s the stage on which I’ll be. Either on or supporting. Down here where I live, by the sea, we have Margate Pride and that’s very like an old fundamental Pride.
GS: More organic.
PW: Yes, and each year it has a kind of point of view of something they can change (for the better). Out here, in these seaside towns, to hold the hand of a man walking down the street, you’re going to get shouted at. There’s always something to change. The straight idea that we don’t need Pride anymore. I think the whole thing needs to be, and I think everybody agrees, adjusted to being back in a movement of power. I also have this feeling a lot of the time to tell the LGBTQ youth that even if you decide not to do any activism with your life – and I know this is a controversial opinion – but if you decide to open a little bakery, live with your boyfriend, and live a really beautiful, happy life in an isolated way, that is the biggest protest.
GS: Just being gay every day is a kind of activism.
PW: Yes. If that’s your way of protesting, then that’s also beautiful. That’s Pride in itself.
British singer/songwriter Patrick Wolf performs in Raleigh June 7 at The Pour House, 224 S. Blount St. See his latest music video “The Beast” at https://youtu.be/9OvX0vXhhvc?si=iA1mPTzbYTN4PSec.