From minor to major

>> England’s androgynous, audacious Patrick Wolf moves to a new key, a new label and a wider audience with The Magic Position

SWORDS AND SUITS: Patrick Wolf

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I find it a really thrilling way to live, giving away little bits of yourself,” says Patrick Wolf, convinced that frankness is a good defence against the trouble that comes with fame. “It’s always been that way, since my first few songs, just wanting to rip my chest open and get it all out into the world. You’ve got nothing more to lose that way.”

Wolf isn’t a household name, even in his native England, but he is a pop idol of sorts. His success has been more critical than commercial—none of his records have really ascended the charts but he’s got one Mercury Prize nomination under his belt, for 2005’s Wind in the Wires. And yet the British paparazzi have been on his trail all year, he’s traded barbs with Perez Hilton and he’s been forced to defend his statement that “Liam Gallagher should be dead”—he only meant that Oasis’s music is “cowardly” and Gallagher’s demeanour is “an archaic form of being a man.”

More importantly, Wolf is engaged in a style of orchestral and electronic music that’s as vibrant, flamboyant and poetically pretentious as the hairdos, clothes and make-up he performs it in. Add to that his nakedly emotive lyrical reveries, combining theatrical fantasy with pieces of the 24-year-old’s life story, with all its Dickensian, Smiths-esque drama, and it’s a given that the young, female cornerstone of Wolf’s fan base is borderline obsessive (he calls them “passionate”).

His being bisexual and androgynous helps to attract the girls, as does having a unicorn tattooed on his chest, and having recently dated a lady, Canadian artist Ingrid Z. They’ve since split up, but she inspired the “major key” epiphany related on Wolf’s latest, The Magic Position, a blend of joyous, swelling pop tunes and ballads that ebb and flow with quiet melancholy and acute passion, pitting his versatile vocals against samples of chanting kids and a cameo by Marianne Faithfull.

Unlike his Canadian counterparts, in the Arcade Fire/Final Fantasy realm, Wolf openly aspires to make music that sticks with a mainstream audience.

“It’s not so much about being famous or being a pop star, really, but in making great pop music,” he says. “I’ve always thought the most interesting thing is to make extremely uncompromising work and not feel the need to be conservative or dilute my ideas, but see whether those can inspire loads of people, rather than just 50 people who buy the right magazines. Why aim for some small achievement when you can aim for something huge? If I hadn’t set my sights so high over the years, a lot of great things wouldn’t have happened.”

Great expectations

Born Patrick Apps in London in 1983, Wolf had already been part of several bands and an art collective when he released his debut album 20 years later. This was all part of Wolf’s mission to become a world-famous musician, launched at age 11.

“It’s just a very natural artistic kick, like being pregnant,” he says. “You suddenly have this thing inside you that you need to get out of your system. With each album, I’ve had a very deep urge to create and perform.”

Following rigorous rounds of violin and choir lessons, Wolf’s early creations included a homemade Theremin, the result of a teenage passion for primitive electronics. Creativity was rife in his childhood home, which also produced a musician sister. Their mother was a visual artist, their father a jazz, ska and punk player—he was a member of the Snivelling Shits, a group that satirized London’s punk scene in the ’70s. But things weren’t so rosy at school, with frequent physical bullying from fellow pupils (including an attempted stabbing) as well as teachers. Wolf wound up successfully suing the school.

“It was quite an Erin Brockovich moment, really,” he recalls. “There were two ways to go—be a Buddhist and take it on the chin, or stick up for myself as a young man and sue the fuckers. It was important for my self-respect that I bring these old English ideals to court. And I came out on top.”

Before long, however, the home front began to disintegrate too and Wolf ran away, ditched his family name in favour of something with a little more bite, quit school and became a busker in a string quartet.

“It’s like guerrilla tactics, like not fighting with tanks and guns, but having to fight with a sword again. It did teach me a lot; it was quite hard work that was very, very good for my musical muscle.”

Beats and loups

Having mastered myriad stringed and keyed instruments, and developed an ear for pop, jazz, folk, techno and contemporary classical music, Wolf formed what his official biography calls a “noisy and rude duo” called Maison Crimineaux. A fateful gig in Paris was attended by electronic musician Capitol K (aka Kristian Robinson), who later released Wolf’s debut album on his own Faith & Industry label. Before Wolf had even left home, he began developing his programming and production skills with an Atari computer and a mixing desk donated by another British label, Fat Cat, who were impressed by his pubescent demos.

Forces combined and stars aligned to create Lycanthropy, a dramatized chronicle of Wolf’s turbulent teenage years, and an introduction to his fresh and raw amalgamation of violin, baritone ukulele, beats, bleeps and vocals. It wasn’t the hit he hoped it would be, forcing him to grudgingly move back in with his family. In preparation for Wind in the Wires, however, Wolf studied composition for a year at London’s Trinity College and went away to a clifftop chalet in Cornwall to write a darker but no less playful album that further endeared him to the critics. Wolf has embraced this way of working, and has stated that he strives to achieve Gustav Mahler’s balance of private and public life—the Austrian composer/conductor spent half of every year in virtual isolation, the other half in the limelight.

“I think I already have achieved it in many ways,” says Wolf. “I’ll go on tour for three weeks and then take the train to the middle of nowhere and turn the phone off and write. For every six hours of the day when I have to be extroverted and do these interviews and think about 600 business things, there’s another six hours where it’s time for walking and sitting at the piano and thinking and staring and drawing and being inside myself, the part of the job which I was born to do.”

Next stop, Iraq?

With The Magic Position, released on the U.K.’s Loog Records via majors A&M and Polydor (Universal in Canada), Wolf has expanded his audience and amassed ever more critical acclaim. But his mind is always on the next project, and he’s been pondering it aloud to the press for months. He’s said that it will be either two separate albums or a double album, one disc symphonic and the other techno. The latter will undoubtedly involve one confirmed collaborator, Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot, while the former may be recorded with an all-female orchestra in Iraq. He told Toronto’s Now Magazine in May that he wanted to counter Prince Harry’s possible tour of duty in the country with a positive, creative British presence.

“It’s still ideas, something that keeps me going, keeps my brain alive and my heart alive,” says Wolf, who’s planning to halt touring in December to work on the record in earnest. “I will pack a rucksack and go off and see some wonders of the world to make the story more exciting, to come back with little pictures to share.”

Though it was initially rumoured that Wolf’s next set of lyrics would revolve around the USA and its warring ways, he says now that his concerns are more global, but no less messy.

“Being more aware of the world, and also being a traveller of the world now, I’ve had more realistic inspirations this year. A lot of my work before has been very fantastical and now I feel like it would be more exciting to aim for realism. But it’d be hard to write a story based in the real world right now without acknowledging some aspect of sadness or panic or chaos.”

With Bishi at Cabaret Juste Pour
Rire on Friday, Oct. 5, 9 p.m., $20