This morning, before his interview, Patrick Wolf, 41, went swimming in the North Sea. It’s what he does every day, from the beginning of spring until fall. Afterwards, he returned to his home in East Kent, a place where he arrived by pure chance a few years ago at, he says, “my lowest point of obscurity.” Up until that point, the London native had always been a city boy. “I used to live in a house [in London] by Waterloo station. But in the pandemic, I was forced out to the suburbs. For so much of my life, I’ve been really drawn to the places where my brain starts to rot, in the liminal spaces and suburbia, the places which aren’t one thing or the other. The black mold of my soul just crept in. I knew I couldn’t afford to go back to London, like many people can’t. I thought — and this was combined with sobriety as well — I’ve got to go somewhere where I can wake up in the morning with a sense of wonder and the thrill of looking around my environment. So, I went as far east of England that you could and found a little house here. I found an abandoned concrete hover port with all this nature. I just felt immediately, this is where I live now.”
What might seem like yet another story of moving during the era of Brexit and gentrification is in reality, a tale of survival against the odds. Between 2002 and 2012, Wolf had a brilliant and atypical career in British pop. At 18 years old, he released Lycanthropy, a shining introduction to a singer-songwriter who played all the instruments on his albums, an artist who had his roots in English folks and counterculture, a kind of feral child raised among ukeleles, synthesizers, electric guitars, harps and clavichords, whose deep voice sang gothic and sophisticated lyrics that seemed straight out of an Angela Carter or Virginia Woolf story.
That album was followed by four more, two of them on major labels. Wolf found success, played nonstop concerts, earned money. In 2012, after putting out an unconventional acoustic compilation, he fell silent. Later, the public would learn that he’d been overtaken by creative, personal and family crises. Addictions, losses, bankruptcy, grief. That cycle is finally coming to an end.
Last month,Wolf released Crying the Neck, his first album of completely new material in 13 years. Since May, he’s been touring its music and reuniting with his fan base. “ When it had been a decade since my last album, I put out a little EP [The Night Safari, 2023]. It was getting a bit too self-indulgent, the time away. I thought, ‘It’s now time.’ I had survived on royalties and bankruptcies, saying I had no debts for a while. I had been digging long enough under the earth, I’d found enough treasure that I thought it was time to bring it back and start sharing with the world.” One need only listen to the first piano chords of Reculver, the song that opens the album, to agree that Wolf is back. And in top form, with prodigious melodies and that deep and unmistakable sound, austere yet refined, of his early recordings.
“Luckily when in bankruptcy, they can’t legally take the tools of your trade,” he explains when asked about having regained his sound. “If you’re a musician, they can’t take your instruments.” During the first years of his career, Wolf collected all kinds of instruments. “The way those records were sounding was because those were the instruments around me, that I could see in my bedroom. And then when I became a pop star,” he smiles, “I had so much, being in the public eye, I kind of forgot that all those instruments were in storage.”
When he re-emerged from the shadows, he discovered they were still there, and picked them up again. Now, a shed in his garden houses a small recording studio where most of his new album came to life. “It was my dream as a teenager, and all the way up to my thirties, when I stopped having dreams about where I want my life to be and my work to be. A lot is to do with having a room of your own, really, to think. Like, the major label albums, I would always be on the contract with the creative control. But when somebody is throwing half a million pounds around, creative control also means a lot of boardroom meetings,” he says.
His relationship with the recording industry was somewhat convulsive. The Magic Position (2007), his biggest commercial hit, led to him being labeled as an extravagant, Baroque artist, a kind of colorful response to the folk renaissance. Wolf made perfect songs, wore his hair dyed red and even starred in a Burberry campaign alongside model Agyness Deyn. In 2011, with the release of Lupercalia, he said he’d spent a fortune renting a glassed-in penthouse on the banks of the Thames, just to see what it felt like to live there. But it was all a mirage. In 2015, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and Wolf nearly died in a hit-and-run in Italy. He rose from the crash covered in blood and, completely distraught, shouted, “Let’s go to the beach!”
“It was the universe saying, ‘Slow down,” he confessed to The Guardian. In 2017, he was declared in bankruptcy and in 2018, after the death of his mother, he started drinking again. But he prefers not to wallow in those years. “I put the work in to be free from that period of time,” he says. “I used to think that the power of writing would be enough to divorce you from the recent trauma of life. I realized by the end of my twenties that hadn’t worked for me. I had written, I’d made art I was very proud of, but in terms of doing the emotional deconstruction, none of that work had been done. I was still basically an 18-year-old, you know, but 32, and I hadn’t done any work. I’d just been out there looking glamorous and singing to big audiences and sharing my stories with people and being useful to other people. I do think other people’s music can help you through problems, but writing your way out of this situation — it sounds like this romantic emancipation, like a spiritual quest, but really, there’s a reason why psychotherapy exists.”
The key, he says, is not to sublimate suffering through art, nor to drop one’s guard. “I’m still in recovery for the rest of my life as an addict. I have to do daily work, that’s a way of keeping on being the dominatrix over the slave, making sure that misery is on the chain and you’re in charge of it. I’ve grown with responsibility in order to stay functional, but that involves not staring at the past at all. If you look that way too long, there’s a danger of it.”
His new album is the first of a series of four which, during the next 10 years, Wolf plans to release following an almost conceptual plan. Each corresponds to a season of the year, and speaks of traditions, legends, rites and folklore. Crying the Neck, at first glance, is luminous — it’s the summer album. “This grief naturally feels like gothic subject matter. I’m not going to set that in Halloween,” he jokes. But nor is he hiding from the trauma. The press statement for the LP talks about mourning, addictions, loss and illness. “I’m like, this is for a party!” he jokes. Lead single Dies Irae is an impossible conversation set between the artist and his dead mother.
“They are all quite intimidating subjects. I’m like, why isn’t it on the radio? I’m delivering quite a lot of overwhelming subjects. If I was in the literature world, then it would be intimidating work, but within this context of pop music, I understand if this might be a hard record for people,” he reflects. “For me, survival is like — death becomes an affirmation of life.” Has he learned something from the suffering? “Well, I think some people don’t learn and they sink with the ship. There seems to be a disease in culture, I feel, at the endings and positivity. What the album tries to address is that actually, it’s very important to live with your sorrow, it kind of creates a shadow for your job, a contrast to your optimism. The album doesn’t have this happy ending and then you turn into a butterfly and fly away and it’s a sunny day. It finishes by saying, I am feeling incredibly heavy and I think I will carry this with me for the rest of my life. It’s important to live with these things and to find a space for your sorrow.”
In his case, that learning has led him to limit his public presence. “I wasn’t that famous. But I was ashamed, and that was inherited from the way the media perceived me.” He says he regrets having allowed them to paint him as “this kind of monstrous clown”. “I did want to be famous, you know, because it seemed so much fun. Little did I know that the pursuit of it would drive you insane, and that it’s the complete opposite of doing good work. You know, unless you’re very clever and your art form is celebrity, like Charli XCX. But my work, if I look back on it, is incredibly introverted.”
Part of that overexposure had to do with his sexuality. “It was like, you’re the only gay person and you work at McDonald’s, or you’re the only lesbian in the office. Out of survival, you become more funny, or you become something that you’re not in order to develop a sense of belonging. But you’re actually not sharing your vulnerable side at all. Talking about indie music, I was the only out gay boy in this country, you know. I had unresolved trauma from being that at school, and the violence that surrounded that. Then you’re thrust into a professional context, and you feel like it’s the only way people can accept you. I had to deconstruct that over the years, and I can’t do that anymore. What I realized when I got clean and sober was that I’m actually an incredibly quiet person and really unsure of myself, and that’s not conducive to being a successful public figure. I’m out here now as an advocate for my work. It’s such a strange mental labyrinth to go into, that I’ve escaped now. I understand that it’s not about being Patrick Wolf, it’s something that I think comes down to a minority experience within the workplace.”
I’m still in recovery for the rest of my life as an addict. I have to do daily work, that’s a way of keeping on being the dominatrix over the slave
What does he think, then, of the new generation of artists who celebrate such labels? “I don’t think that my experience at 41 is gonna help somebody at 21. They’re going through a whole different set of social circumstances,” he reflects. “But for a long time, we were all trying so hard for there to be no suffix. There were certain interviews that were like, ‘sing a song right now’ and it had to be flamboyant. It was like seeing Laura Marling release an album as ‘a female songwriter’. And now the new generations are coming in like ‘queer artists, Black artists.’ I’m like, guys, don’t undo the freedom of having your work speak for itself. It’s really very liberating. But I think in a way, it shows that something that we were really trying to push away is seen as something to celebrate. I think over the next 10 years, my comments on sexuality and society are going to be quite sparse. It’s a rapidly changing country in which our identity is either being weaponized or commercially exploited. I think it’s better to be observant and see where you can help on a day-to-day level.”
But for now, the priority is his new songs, his tour, and his plans for the coming years. He’s now better prepared for success, if it comes, and has learned to enjoy living in a place where no one has ever heard of Patrick Wolf. “I landed here at my lowest point of obscurity. My driving instructor said, ‘What do you do?’ He got really obsessed with Googling me and people are finding out very slowly. Generally, they don’t care about that kind of thing at all down here. But I can’t keep that secret any longer. It’s like a nudist beach: at the end of this, I hope I can still be naked and no one’s going to get their phone out and stuff like that. I’m not insane enough to want to pursue that level of celebrity. I kind of would love pure anonymity for the next 10 years, but it won’t happen, you know.”
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