Category: 5. Entertainment

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Ólafur Arnalds had a cold knot of dread in his stomach when he flew to Cork to say farewell to his friend and musical collaborator Eoin French – aka Talos – shortly before his death, last August.

“He was in his last few days – a week – and we knew it was nearing the end. I was so nervous. I was kind of crying the whole way on the plane. I was shaking, walking into the room to come talk to him,” Arnalds, the composer, producer and DJ, says from his studio in Reykjavík.

He was struck by French’s positivity at their final meeting at Marymount Hospice – how at peace he was with the world. “I walked out of that room laughing. That’s the kind of a guy he was. He was the one on death’s door. But he cared about making me feel good on our last meeting. He cared that I would walk out of there with a good memory of our relationship.

“He asked me, ‘How are you doing?’ I was, like, ‘F**k that. How are you doing? Are you okay, man?’ He took this with the grace of a god. Sorry to use such a big word, but that’s the kind of a person he was.”

With such a wide range of musical interests and inspirations, he found a kindred spirit in French, who, across his three albums as Talos, incorporated influences as far-flung as Sigur Rós (from Arnald’s native Iceland), Bon Iver, Frank Ocean and Cocteau Twins.

[ Talos: To listen to Eoin French’s music was to be transported to a hauntingly beautiful parallel dimensionOpens in new window ]

As French’s health declined, he and Arnalds met to finish a series of compositions they had worked on the across the previous several years. Those songs are being released this month under the title A Dawning. It is a beautiful tribute to French, a songwriter from just outside Cork city, whose hazy, dreamlike music was punctuated with bursts of wonder, like rainbows followed by a sudden downpour of emotion.

Powerful feelings likewise ripple through A Dawning, whether via the ambient throb of Signs, which features a tender vocal from French, or the haunting We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, a sobbing acoustic number in which the Irish singer looks forward to the “peace that breaks at dawn”.

As is inevitable given the circumstances in which it was made, the album arrives with an aura of sadness. Yet for Arnalds it is not a project about death so much as an outpouring of joy and an acknowledgment of the preciousness of life – a point the musician, with Nordic directness, is eager to get across.

“Enough for the death questions, because, actually, we made this record while he was very much alive,” Arnalds says. “You’re now looking at it with the perspective of [French’s death]. But, the record, it’s not about that: the record is a celebration of life. It’s a trap, a little bit, for us, you know – me and you talking in an interview, or for a listener, for fans, for journalists – to kind of put this record always within that box, to always frame it [with death].

“I’ll tell you, when we wrote those songs we were having the best time of our lives. We were having a beautiful time together. We were communicating as friends through some of the best music both of us felt like we had ever done – and that’s what this record celebrates.”

Arnalds and French were introduced by the festival programmer and artistic curator Mary Hickson, who brought them together for Sounds from a Safe Harbour, in Cork.

Arnalds has a lump in his throat as he remembers their first meeting against the unglamorous backdrop of a hotel conference room. Despite the inauspicious setting, they had a creative spark from the outset. The collaboration continued after French received a cancer diagnosis in November 2023. He died on August 11th, 2024, at the age of 36, survived by his wife and daughter.

“It was the hottest day of the year in Cork, and we were doing this kind of artistic residency connected to the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival,” Arnalds says of their first get-together. “We wrote the first songs in a conference room on the second floor of the hotel. It was pretty bare bones, very institution-like. But with an upright piano. That was wonderful. We had our laptops and a couple of microphones. We would have to turn off the AC while recording anything. [It was] sticky and sweaty and [we were] drinking copious amounts of coffee.”

The death of a friend is never easy, but Arnalds was struck by Irish people’s openness about the subject.

“Iceland is Protestant – in its modern roots, anyway.” Ireland and Iceland “both had the same kind of old pagan traditions. Today we’re Protestant, and death is not something you face. You don’t look at that in the eyes. And it was eye-opening for me to be in Ireland for a wake. There’s just dancing and singing. I was absolutely fascinated by it, and very impressed.

“And I wish we had even half of that here. I feel like here, someone dies … they get kind of removed very quickly. We wait maybe two weeks or so, until a convenient day for the funeral. We might have a little open casket for the closest people the night before. Then the funeral will happen in the daytime, and afterwards people will eat some cake and go home.”

Much of the album was put together at French’s house near Clonakilty, in west Cork. The landscape reminded Arnalds of home, Ireland and Iceland being, he says, two hunks of rock plonked into the North Atlantic. He also felt parallels between the Irish language and Icelandic, both under threat in a globalised world – albeit for different reasons.

“It’s no wonder that we connect quickly to Irish people. We didn’t have our language taken away from us in the same way Ireland did. But we are currently fighting not to lose it in a different way – through globalisation and social media and just technology that always is in English. Kids are starting to speak English instead of Icelandic sometimes now. So we are also fighting a fight for our language.

“It was fun to discuss that with Eoin and talk about those things. And I’ve been very impressed meeting so many Irish people in the last couple of years and seeing the revival of the Irish language. I find it absolutely beautiful. Look at Kneecap,” he says, referring to the Belfast-Derry group who rap largely in Irish.

Arnalds is polite and thoughtful but not a chatterbox. French operated on a similar wavelength. Both were comfortable in silence, which perhaps explains why they worked so well together.

“It is something we felt like the music is partly about. How much can be said in the silence. How brotherhood goes deeper than [chatter]. We would talk all the time, of course. But it never felt like we had to. And there would be whole evenings, whole days sometimes, where we would say, like, four words. We would just focus on the music we were making, or, on some occasions, just the books we were reading separately.

“There’s some kind of a magic that often happens with music – when you are doing music together, you are speaking to each other, you are communicating to each other. It just doesn’t have to be big discussions.”

Since French’s death Arnalds has been tweaking the album. He is glad it is coming out into the world and is looking forward to returning to Sounds from a Safe Harbour, where he will participate in a tribute to French at Cork Opera House on September 11th – having already delivered a musical elegy to the Corkman on The Tommy Tiernan Show last January, when he performed We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, alongside its co-composers Niamh Reagan and Ye Vagabonds. They were joined by other acquaintances of French, including the Watford sisters The Staves, Kate Ellis of Crash Ensemble, the Cork singer Laoise Leahy and the superstar Dermot Kennedy.

Honouring his friend’s memory has been immensely emotional. That said, Arnalds has understandably had some anxiety in the run-up to the release. Finishing the LP in his studio, he would sense French at his side.

“I would miss him a lot. I would feel nervous. Am I doing the right thing? I can’t ask him does he like this. I would feel self-conscious around our friends or family, me being given the role of representing him in this way.

“On the other hand, there is no better place to channel your grief. I feel extremely fortunate to have this. I’m very glad I have this as a way to channel my emotions. A lot of the time I could feel him next to me working on this. We were still having a good time together, in some way.”

Olafúr Arnalds & Talos: A Dawning is released by Deutsche Grammophon on Friday, July 11th. Remembering Talos is at Cork Opera House on September 11th, as part of Sounds from a Safe Harbour

Riccardo Scamarcio pops up on my Zoom screen at a roadside cafe with a curtain of blue behind him. Darkly handsome in a crisp white shirt, he puffs on a cigarette – very old school – while answering in the most cleanly perfect English. He is crossing the mountains to Tuscany. The spirit of classic Italian cinema could hardly be better honoured if he were rendered in black and white.

I mention this as his appearance reminds me of how Johnny Depp came to cast him as Amedeo Modigliani in the American actor’s second feature as director. Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness follows the painter and sculptor as he cavorts through an earthily rendered version of early 20th-century Paris. There is a great deal of arguing in bars and necking in graveyards.

Depp had arranged to talk to Scamarcio early in the evening, but he was forced to knock the meeting back by three hours. At that point the Italian was driving with his daughter and the nanny. He called into a petrol station. Happily, the staff recognised the star and allowed him to use a side building for the Zoom.

“We were talking, and after a while Johnny says, ‘Hey, man. Can I say something? Where are you?’ There was stuff around for cars, oil, strange tools around me. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I’m in the gas station. I was driving, and this is the only place I could stage the Zoom call.’ He says, ‘In a gas station!’ I didn’t know this at the time, but the producer was there off-screen. And Johnny said, ‘He is in a gas station. This is my man!’”

This is how the business now works. You do press interviews in hillside cafes and take auditions in petrol stations.

“Yeah, it was rock’n’roll,” he says. “Johnny is a very special person. He is very sweet and very gentle and very kind to every single one. He is a person who likes paradox.”

Scamarcio, now in his mid-40s, has been exhaustingly busy in Italian cinema and TV for more than 20 years. Back in 2005 he was rough-hewn in the epic gangster flick Romanzo Criminale. He has worked with Abel Ferrara and Costa-Gavras. You can see him in Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, about Silvio Berlusconi, and Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors. He doesn’t need to stretch into English-language productions, but he, nonetheless, has been happy to show off his polyglottal talents in films such as John Wick: Chapter 2 and Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice.

“It’s very important to work in other countries,” Scamarcio says. “In English you have more opportunities. The market is bigger. I speak very fluent French too. So I’ve been shooting films in France. I’m very known in my country. When you work outside your country it’s fantastic, because people don’t know you, so nobody cares. They have no expectation from you, right? There is another level, which is the language. Acting in another language is like having a mask.”

How familiar was Scamarcio with Modigliani before coming to the film? The elongated faces and mournful eyes that characterise his work are – though, as the film explains, underappreciated in his life – now an immovable part of the culture. That must be even more so in the artist’s native Italy.

“Yes, of course. My mother is a painter,” Scamarcio says. “I was obsessed with this big book that had pictures of his paintings and sculptures. My mother was always saying, ‘Why is this boy so obsessed with this book?’ Maybe it was a sign. I knew, of course, he had a very, very tough life.”

It hardly needs to be said that Depp is currently a controversial character. The Kentucky actor – somehow now 62 – has been a ubiquitous presence since the late 1980s. He was Jack Sparrow. He was Sweeney Todd. He was in a rock “supergroup” called Hollywood Vampires. (Three Days on the Wing of Madness is dedicated to late guitarist Jeff Beck.)

Over the past decade, however, he has drawn more attention for an acrimonious split with Amber Heard that led, in 2022, to Depp suing his then former wife, who had accused him of physical abuse, in the United States, for defamation. Heard was found liable. Two years earlier he had lost in the British courts after suing News Group over allegations of abuse against Heard published in the Sun newspaper. The dispute has, to say the least, caused some division on social media.

[ Who Trolled Amber? review: Relentless dig beneath Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard libel case makes a staggering revelationOpens in new window ]

When the mess went away (for then, anyway) Depp returned to a project he had first discussed with Al Pacino decades earlier: a study of Modigliani adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre. Indeed, Pacino, who has an amusing role in Three Days on the Wing of Madness as a flamboyant art dealer, had been toying with the idea way back in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Ford Coppola were all involved in conversations about it.

“Pacino was supposed to direct this project, and then he didn’t,” Scamarcio says. “It was his passion project since when he was young. Then he met Johnny in Donnie Brasco and they become friends. Pacino says, ‘I have this project. Maybe you could be perfect to play Modigliani.’ So Pacino was supposed to direct the film and Johnny to play Modigliani. It didn’t happen.”

Scamarcio is politely euphemistic about his director’s recent complications.

“Johnny had his problems that we all know,” he says. “When he won the case and he was back, Al says, ‘I think the moment is now correct for you to direct the film. I’m too old. I don’t want to do it. You should do it.’ And, as Johnny says all the time, if Pacino comes to you and says do something it’s better you do it.”

The resulting film is an amusing, anarchic romp through a highly romanticised version of Paris in 1916. As you might expect from Depp, there are a few rock’n’roll touches. At one stage The Black Angel’s Death Song, by The Velvet Underground, and Tom Waits’s Tom Traubert’s Blues vie for our attention. None of this gets in the way of a hugely charismatic turn from Scamarcio. He does good work as a misunderstood master who can barely scrabble together a few sous for artworks that would later sell for millions.

It is more than 28 years since The Brave, Depp’s indifferently received directorial debut. Did Scamarcio feel he had what it takes behind the camera?

“Basically it is about trust,” he says. “I felt that my director, Johnny Depp, trusted me very much. That is what it is all about. This is what an actor needs from his director. He needs to be loved and trusted. We did this journey together – experimenting things, changing, just trying to get some special life there.

“He was talking about Marlon Brando, when they were friends. We were talking about all the processes of being a cinema actor. For me, it confirmed all the things I believed when I think about my job. My job is to create an atmosphere.”

For all the flash and bang of Three Days on the Wing of Madness, it is at its best in the conversational duel between Pacino and Scamarcio. The older actor is a marvel. After a few decades of chewing the scenery, he seems to have recovered an inner calm.

“He’s still there, fighting as an actor and an artist,” Scamarcio says. “But with the simplicity and the fairness and the honesty of a 20-year-old actor.”

I wonder if Scamarcio could sense Pacino’s Italian roots. The American is, after all, only one generation distant from Sicilian origins.

“Oh, yeah. Because, well, you can take away an Italian man from Italy, but you can never take Italy away from an Italian. You know what I’m saying?”

Scamarcio does not seem to sleep. Early previews of the current film will feature a conversation, filmed at Tate Modern in London, between Scamarcio, Depp, the art critic Waldemar Januszczak and British artist Polly Morgan. He has another three Italian productions on the go. Will we hear him in English again soon?

“There is the international language – which is acting,” he says with a charming smile. “Being alive on scene – and being obscene. Being obscene, which means ‘out of scene’. It comes from the Greek.”

I’ll take his word for it. Educated man.

Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th, with previews on Thursday, July 10th

In the age of self-help, self-improvement and self-obsession, there have never been more places to look to for guidance. Where the anxious and the uncertain might have once consulted a search engine for answers, now we can engage in a seemingly meaningful discussion about our problems with ChatGPT. Or, if you’re in China, DeepSeek.

To some, though, it feels as if our ancestors knew more about life than we do. Or at least, they knew how to look for them. And so it is that scores of young Chinese are turning to ancient forms of divination to find out what the future holds. In the past couple of years, fortune-telling bars have been popping up in China’s cities, offering drinks and snacks alongside xuanxue, or spiritualism. The trend makes sense: China’s economy is struggling, and although consumers are saving their pennies, going out for a drink is cheaper than other forms of retail therapy or an actual therapist. With a deep-rooted culture of mysticism that blends Daoist, Buddhist and folk practices, which have defied decades of the government trying to stamp out superstitious beliefs, for many Chinese people, turning to the unseen makes perfect sense.

This week, I decided to join them.

My xuanxue haunt of choice is Qie Le, a newly opened bar in Beijing’s wealthy Chaoyang district. On a Thursday evening, the bar, adorned with yellow Taoist talismans and draped translucent curtains, is quiet. All the better for hogging the fortune-teller’s attention with questions from my deep wells of narcissism. But Wan Mo, either because of her spiritual intuition or because I am not the first self-involved millennial to seek her services, sees me coming a mile off. It’s strictly one question per drink bought.

Wan Mo, a stylish 36-year-old dressed in a loose white Tang-style jacket fastened with traditional Chinese knots, specialises in qiuqian, or Chinese lottery sticks. The practice involves shaking a cylindrical wooden container full of wooden sticks, while focusing on a question in your mind. Eventually, one of the sticks, engraved with text and numerals, falls out, and a fortune-teller can interpret the answer. Qiuqian dates back to the Jin dynasty (AD266 to AD420) and has survived centuries of war, upheaval, a Cultural Revolution and the rise of artificial intelligence to remain a stalwart of Taoist temples, and now, Beijing cocktail bars.

So I’m hoping that qiuqian will be well placed to answer my first question: Will AI take my job?

“Use both hands,” Wan Mo says firmly. She is a no-nonsense savant. “Focus on your question.” She tells me that as a foreigner, my connection with the sticks might not be as profound as a Chinese person’s. So I need to “think carefully”.

After a few seconds of focused yet vigorous shaking, not one but two sticks drop on to the table between us.

Wan Mo studies the first one. “This stick means that later on, AI will have an impact on your job … even though you’re very talented, you can’t compete with its scale. For example, if you write one article, it can write 10. It will definitely affect you.”

This is not the spiritual salve I was hoping for. Wan Mo tells me that the second stick even provides a timeline for my professional redundancy. “It says that within one to three years, there won’t be a major impact. But after three years, AI will become a major force.”

Wan Mo’s predictions don’t leave me full of hope for my next question. But in the spirit of xuanxue, I decide to try my luck again, and order another round. We take a brief break for Wan Mo to have a cigarette break and catch up with a friend who has wandered into the bar. His chipper demeanour makes me think that he is yet to discover that AI will take his job – or he’s just made his peace with it.

Eventually I muster up enough liquid courage to ask my second question. Wan Mo’s stern demeanour sends a slight chill through my hands as I grasp the qiuqian box for the second time. Shake, shake, shake. Think, think, think. A single wooden stick falls out of the container.

“Will I get a pay rise?” I ask, tentatively. The answer comes unnervingly quickly.

“There’s not much possibility at the moment. Although [the stick] is about transition … it shows there is no major change … There is some hope, but it’s not immediate. You need to make some personal adjustments.”

I ask what kind of personal adjustments I could make, hoping that she won’t make me order another drink to find out.

“If you want a pay rise, xuanxue can only offer support,” she demurs. “For example, the bracelet I’m wearing is for attracting wealth. It’s made from natural materials … we’d recommend wearing something like this. It can help bring in some financial luck and may have a positive effect. But the most important thing is still communicating with the superiors.”

I am not sure if she means my spiritual or editorial superiors. But with that my time is up. Wan Mo’s friend says that everyone comes to Qie Le with the same kinds of questions: how to get rich, stay healthy, find love. I feel as if all I’ve discovered is how dim my chances are on the first question, and it’s getting too late to ask the second and third. I slink off home to get some sleep before my early start the next day. I bet AI doesn’t have to worry about feeling tired.

Additional research by Lillian Yang

When banker Louis-Auguste Cézanne bought the Jas de Bouffan mansion and park outside Aix-en-Provence in 1859, he assumed his only son would follow him into the family business and enjoy the place as a county retreat. He never dreamt that within a year the grand salon would be a studio, covered with violent, clumsy, bizarre images, and in the central alcove his own impasto portrait: fierce, unyielding face in profile, engrossed in his newspaper, austerely indifferent to his son’s paintings. A decade after the patriarch’s death, Paul Cézanne still introduced guests to “le papa” glowering on that wall.

Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan at Aix’s Musée Granet is riveting and revelatory from the moment of its opening coup: reuniting a dozen murals which Cézanne in his twenties painted directly on to the salon walls. Not seen together since 1907, when they began to be removed panel by panel, sold and dispersed worldwide, they range from “Bather and Rocks”, a tough, ungainly nude holding up a boulder against a torrent, acquired by Walter Chrysler, to classical figure allegories “The Four Seasons”. They are a prism into a young mind turbulent but already forging his path: taking from tradition to make painting new.

Unfolding how he did so, the show is, of course, ravishing. Rilke wrote of landscapes “made with the blue of the air, the blue of the sea and red roofs conversing together against a green ground”; to see these paintings in Aix is to understand Cézanne’s visceral connection to reality, even as he transformed nature, places he walked, swam, climbed, into near-abstract forms: modern art’s foundational story.

Many radiant pieces demonstrate that formal process: “House at Bellevue”, a geometric arrangement of honey-hued stone walls, steps, terraces, rows of pines; massive, angular orange cliffs below a strip of purple sky and blurred treetops in “The Bibémus Quarry”; proto-cubist houses rising above the water in “The Sea at L’Estaque”, once owned by Picasso. 

A majestic, surging “Mont St Victoire”, sun sculpting the close-up mountain face into patches of light and shadow, found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Nazi-era collection, makes its debut in a Cézanne show. Illuminating juxtapositions include paired “Grove at Jas de Bouffan” paintings, dense in 1871, luminous, freer, in 1875-76, demonstrating impressionism’s influence, and two splendid architectonic harmonies of variegated greens and ochres on an open plain: the Courtauld’s “Tall Trees at Jas de Bouffan” (1883), airy and rustling, and the Guggenheim’s “Neighbourhood of Jas de Bouffan” (1885-87) sombre, receding into emptiness, imbued with resignation.

The Granet’s argument, that just as Provence’s landscape shaped Cézanne, so the Roman city Aix and the 18th-century Jas were pivotal to his sensibility, poised between classicism and modernity, is amplified in a wider summer festival Cézanne 2025. It offers trails to the Jas, restored following a long closure, the studio Les Lauves and, for the brave, descent to the Bibémus rocks. So biography becomes immersive experience, with rewarding discoveries. In 2023, conservators at the Jas unveiled a fragmented unknown Cézanne, “Harbour Entrance” (1860), aping Claude’s port scenes. Also uncovered was a graceful plaster relief of Leda and the Swan, part of the house’s original decor; Cézanne passed it daily — inspiration, we see now, for his quirky painting of the same subject.

In his privileged salon, Cézanne both embraced and fought the Jas’s classical sumptuousness. Across the Granet’s downstairs galleries, fantasies such as “Game of Hide and Seek” (1862-64), imitating a Nicolas Lancret fête galante, alternate with rough, near-expressionist portraits in his early couillard (ballsy) manner, paint slathered on with a knife.

His schoolmate Émile Zola, poor, fatherless and physically weedy, looks particularly despondent, but all the friends — poet Antony Valabrègue, geologist Antoine-Fortune Marion — from Cézanne’s precious youthful coterie appear dark, introspective, downcast. “Paul is a horrible painter,” Valabrègue groaned. “Every time he paints one of his friends it seems as if he were avenging himself for some hidden injury”.

Looming over this evocative gathering is a second paternal portrait, fearful, affectionate: “The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evenement” — a leftwing newspaper, employing young Zola. Louis-Auguste would not have touched it. Nor did he care for the picture depicted at his shoulder, and on display alongside: “Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup”, built from thick paint scrapings, crustily refusing convention, proclaiming independence.

Not until after his father’s death in 1886 did Cézanne dare his sole full-frontal view of the Jas. “House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan” (1885-87), from Prague, is the centrepiece of the upstairs landscape galleries, its monumental facade slightly swaying, the blue shutters echoing the clarity of the sky, offset by a brilliant red roof. Earlier depictions, as beautiful, are comparably hesitant: “The House at the Jas de Bouffan”, obscured by trees; “The Pool at Jas de Bouffan” playing with impressionist reflections on water.

From 1887, until he was forced to sell it in 1899, the Jas became Cézanne’s laboratory for three final grand series, all musing on painterly illusion: bathers, still lives, portraits of the estate’s workers.

Friezes of compressed female figures in broken outlines merge with landscape, echoing its slopes, mounds, trees, in “Bathers”: stylised imaginings of Mediterranean unity recalling Poussin, anticipating Matisse. The gauche young friends return, transmuted into awkwardly wading, undressing, reclining youths in “Bathers at Rest”.

“Still Life with Cherries and Apricots” and “Still Life with Apples and Melon”, ripe, rich, oozing, represent the French art of pleasure at its apogee, even as shifting viewpoints, tilting objects, bare areas of canvas — “Kitchen Table”, MoMA’s “Still Life with Apples” — assert painting as artifice.

Finally come “the people of Jas de Bouffan”, grave, humane, fateful. “The Card Players”’ columnar forms, emphatically separate, exist in contemplative, flickering equilibrium. Buttoned into a geometrically pleated blue dress “Woman with a Coffee Pot”, bearing work-hardened hands, is as rigid as her cafetière. Reserved in expression, lively in the restless strokes and dabs of colour, “Man with Crossed Arms” also has crossed eyes, one seen from above, one from below.

In “Peasant in a Blue Smock”, 1896-97, Cézanne at the Jas comes full circle: the worker, stoic, dignified, pensive, poses before a folding screen painted by Cézanne in 1859 with an 18th-century pastoral couple. In this painting of a painting, the peasant, weighty and substantial, is placed to obscure the screen man and imply that the sketchy screen woman, faceless, translucent, is his reverie of youth. Both express Cézanne’s hopes of art as eternal.

“Today everything is changing, but not for me,” he wrote shortly before he died. “I live in the town of my boyhood, and I rediscover the past in the faces of the people of my own age . . . who obey the rules of time”.

To October 12, museegranet-aixenprovence.fr, cezanne2025.com

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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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The subtle musical collages and slowly unfolding soundscapes that mark Openness Trio, the debut release from a collective comprised of Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson and Carlos Niño, are a far cry from the urban stamp that marks Blue Note’s classic recordings. The five tracks were recorded in various locations dotted around Los Angeles, and the trio’s rhythmic palette has more in common with the minimalism of Steve Reich than the polyrhythmic bounce of modern jazz. Add in layers of electronica that bring to mind the soundscapes of noughties Nordic jazz, and this release represents something of a Blue Note outlier.

Although the trio’s musicians project a strong common bond with shared influences ranging from Robert Fripp to spiritual jazz, their musical careers have taken different paths. The underground reputation of percussionist/producer Niño rests on his long-running ambient jazz project Carlos Niño & Friends. Guitarist Mercereau, a new underground face, is currently grabbing attention for his control of advanced guitar synthesiser techniques to forge improvised sound.

In contrast, seasoned session saxophonist/producer Johnson has performed on recordings for Miley Cyrus and Harry Styles, and spent five years as soul singer Leon Bridges’ musical director. The canny arranger’s touch remains intact, but now his crisp phrasing is overshadowed by resonant ripples, seductive doodles and swaths of mournful sustains.

The set opens with the oscillating electronic pulse of “Hawk Dreams”, which was recorded outdoors in the hills of Ojai. As the piece develops, stirring melodies from doctored sax and guitar synthesiser assemble, merge and float away over a bed of textured sound. “ . . . Anything is Possible” comes next, with acoustic sax ruminating over rhythmically fractured support, and then the churchlike moods of “Openness”, which was recorded in an oak tree cathedral growing in a hillside orchard.

The final two constructions continue to immerse the listener in ambient rhythms, kaleidoscopic textures and flutters of tenor sax. The gentle warmth of “Chimes in the Garden” is contemplative, but the sway of “Elsewhere”, recorded under a pepper tree in Topanga Canyon, pushes dynamics to the extreme.

★★★★☆

‘Openness Trio’ is released by Blue Note

Anna Weyant shares her home with a ghost. Not the metaphorical kind; not the ghost of painters before her, nor the ghost of her early, soaring success. Just the standard issue, after-life sort of ghost. 

“When I first moved in, I just felt this presence of a spirit and started researching the building — more and more things were happening and I thought: somebody’s here. There were certain areas that I didn’t want to go into. I ended up finding out that somebody had passed away in my bedroom. And so I actually found out where his widow lived,” she tells me as we enter the studio space of her apartment.

To be in touch with her, I ask?

“No, I read him the address one night to see if he might want to go there, because it’s just down the street.”

Weyant, aged just 30, is one of the most successful and spoken about young painters in the world. She lives with her elderly King Charles spaniel, Sprout, in a sedate, beautiful space uptown, which strikes me as I enter it as notably old New York, dark wood and low lighting, not fussy or self-consciously sophisticated, but definitively adult. Everything uptown feels a little more permanent, the residents older, more fixed, less subject to the temporal shifts of the city, and it makes sense to me as we speak that she has chosen to exist here rather than in a trendier neighbourhood or apartment. Despite some caustic dismissals about the nature of her career, Weyant is in it for the long haul. 

We are meeting in advance of her first major museum show, which opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid this month. This will be the first exhibition to draw from her entire output, through 26 paintings, predating her first New York solo show in 2019, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and past her most recent in London, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves? in 2024. Particularly appealing about the exhibition, according to Weyant, was the opportunity to select works from the Thyssen’s collection to be presented alongside her own, including a Magritte, a Balthus and a beguiling portrait by the German painter Christian Schad. One senses that the opportunity not only to show the growth of her own work, but also to declare some influences not typically ascribed to Weyant, is important to her. 

“There’s only one work that I really was insistent on having, this big painting called ‘Feted’ [2020] that I’ve never shown before which was in a private collection in New York, and we had to talk somewhere into loaning it, and they did,” she says. “And then my most recent painting. Actually, no — it doesn’t have my most recent painting. It was going to have my most recent painting, but last night I killed it.”

Killed it for this show, I ask, or will you never return to it?

“I’ll cut it up,” she says easily. “I’ve killed the last three.”

Weyant is aware that she could easily sell this and more or less anything else she might choose — “I’m sure I could just send it out and it would be fine, but at this point, if it’s not exciting, it’s not worth it for me to let it out into the world” — but her market value has become something of an albatross around the neck of her career, as has much of the lore surrounding her beginnings. 

Weyant’s origins are so well established that her publicist is able to succinctly list them in one brief parenthesis as items to avoid focusing on: high auction prices, Instagram, comparisons to Botticelli, selling paintings on beach towels in the Hamptons. It’s unusual for an artist to have such widely known bullet points, the kind your average person would ordinarily be able to cite about a Real Housewife or pop star, but Weyant has the unusual confluence of undeniable generational gifts as a painter and the sort of personal star power and beauty that is bait to tabloids (the Daily Mail comes in for particular outrage when we discuss her relationship to her media coverage — they published photographs of the interior of her old apartment).

Although the attention was partly to do with the spurious claim that her meteoric success began with “being discovered on Instagram”, it rocketed after Weyant began dating Larry Gagosian, the immensely successful gallerist who now represents her. The relationship has since ended, and Weyant is now with the musician Jason Isbell; she and I debrief for a bit about dating men who have children. 

Before meeting Weyant I had worried that I did not have the sufficient ruthlessness to bring up the relationship with Gagosian, what I assumed would be a source of tiresome displeasure for her. Luckily she does it for me, with the same gentle openness she communicates with all afternoon. I asked about how her work has formally developed in recent years. 

“In the past few years, as I started to have more market attention and wider attention, that’s when I decided I needed to step it up again. I also had entered into a relationship with my art dealer at the time. There was a lot of talk that maybe the success had come from that, and I’m not denying that at all, but I felt like if that was going to be the narrative, then I was just gonna have to go full speed ahead and make the best fucking work I could.”

It’s easy to see why the shorthand (if somewhat lazy) narrative of Weyant as a “millennial Botticelli” worked. Her early paintings do often have a jarring wit and juxtaposition that could be read as frivolous — she paints many pretty women, many of them her friends and muses, in a style often likened to the Dutch or Renaissance masters, but with knowing contemporary details (I love 2018’s “Sip n’ Paint”, a woman painting a gaudy Paris skyline with a glass of wine). But her work has always been more destabilising and surreal than caricature, her pony-ponytail meeting in 2019’s “My Pony” bringing inexorably to mind the sumptuous mercurial womanhood of Twin Peaks. 

When I ask about the initial development of what would become her style, Weyant refers to a year she spent studying in China after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. “I had nothing to lose and kind of nothing to gain. It was a really weird, dark, lonely time, but also so beautiful and poetic. I was alone a lot, I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t know how to get around. I was just sort of jogging and painting, and so lonely and so homesick. Which was so good for me, and shaped my practice.”

Her more recent work has, as often as the gorgeous soft wide-faced women, the kind of euphoric unsettling discord that makes the Magritte selection in her Thyssen show so relevant. And further, as I spent time with her monograph, I found that who I was thinking of most often was not any Dutch master but Philip Guston. The work of hers I love the most (and what I would be acquiring if I found myself with a few million to spare) is the disturbing cartoon mask-like figure of “A Disaster, Such A Catastrophe” (2022). 

The novelist Emma Cline, a friend and subject of Weyant’s, told me: “She’s a true artist — her involvement with her work is total. It’s like life comes second to her art practice. She’d rather be painting than doing anything else.”

As we conclude, Weyant is eager to show me the painting she will soon destroy, in that studio space that looks more like the room for a character in Succession to swill brown liquor and brood. She unveils it, a portrait of her friend Ariana, a painter in LA, obscured by a window frame. 

“I just wasn’t vibing with it, I wasn’t getting the face, so I thought, I’m going to cover it up with the window and then it looked shittier and so I’m throwing [in] the towel.”

How does that feel? She shrugs.

“Today I’ll move on.” 

July 15-October 12, museothyssen.org

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