As he releases loved-up single ‘The City’ – the poppy trailblazer for forthcoming fifth album Lupercalia – the newly engaged Patrick Wolf talks about domestic bliss.
Happiness just hit him like a train on a track.
I’d been single for such a long time, going out and falling into gutters – being paparazzied on a small scale, but enough to mess me up – and I just felt empty. Then, when I was out one night, it was a love-at-first-sight moment. This album was all about trying to write about being in love without the cliché.
He played a homemade theremin for performance art legends Minty (whose alumni include Leigh Bowery and Dan Black) when he was 13 years old.
I just remember leaving school at four o’clock and dragging this thing all the way to Camden in my school uniform. Minty at that time were all post-Leigh Bowery, all blacked-out eyes and teeth – very extreme. They just loved the fact that there was this 13 year old who’d come straight from maths class.
He has been doing a spot of wardrobe-weeding.
Performance art has become the mainstream. And whenever someone like Lady Gaga comes along and does that, anyone in the underground has to make a decision. Lady Gaga is 100 per cent acceptable in the way that dubstep is now 100 per cent acceptable. Many things have made me ask: how do I push things forward?
He’d like to retract the Steve Strange-related incident.
I regret the moment on stage in Germany when I regressed about 15 years on stage, when my show was cut short by half an hour because one of Steve Strange’s costume changes didn’t arrive on time. That and slagging off Mika on Facebook were two of the big tombstones in the perception of my work.
Financing his last album through Bandstock is the bravest thing he’s ever done.
Raising £100,000 just through my audience was exciting, and it took a lot of guts. After being dropped from Polydor, maybe other artists would have started something else. I refused to let everything going wrong stop me moving forward with my work.
… but releasing ‘The Childcatcher’ comes a close second.
My parents didn’t want me to do this at all, didn’t want me to be Patrick Wolf, didn’t want me to write music. So to leave home at 16 and release a song called ‘The Childcatcher’ about an abusive relationship I’d had… but I have to take risks as a writer, even if it’s uncomfortable for everyone around me. I still get letters from people who’ve been abused who were really helped by that song.
He has no idea what Tilda Swinton sees in him.
Tilda Swinton, Marianne Faithfull… if you look at my collaborators, it’s all strong, inventive, legendary women with amazingly powerful characters. Yeah, I can’t work it out. Maybe it’s an energy I give out?
