If you don’t know who Patrick Wolf is, I’m sorry for your loss. Don’t fret though; there is still time to learn all about him and his music-muddling ways.
Lupercalia is an ancient fertility festival apparently hailing from Roman times. It’s also the fifth album for UK indie-pop artist Patrick Wolf. The latest instalment in what is evolving into a saga of biographical experimental indie-pop.
This record serves as an introduction to a domesticated Patrick Wolf.
‘In a way it’s just the most straight up, honest record I’ve done for awhile and I found such a different experience in coming off tour and actually focusing on being a human being again,’ he said over the phone from London.
‘For this album, the things that thrill me is cooking for two and keeping the house spotless and folding my clothes…because that is not my normal life, it’s not something I’m used to.
The thing for many people would be to try heroin; for me it was to go to the dry cleaners for
the first time.
‘All that stuff I had no idea about, I just lived on the road since I was 17 or so.’
Since his 2003 debut album, Lycanthropy, Wolf has pushed the envelope time and time again. Wolf doesn’t make music per se; he crashes sound together much like a particle accelerator does. Traditionally, the effect can be as euphoric as much as it can be offensive. Now at 27, Wolf has reached a new level of maturity in life and his craft. Lupercalia is orchestral and romantic and yet it maintains his trademark flair for the abstract and creative. The indie-pop artist has been compared to Madonna before and it’s easy to see why. While he finds the term ‘reinvention’ a bit too cliché for the queen of pop, he admires her chameleon-like ability for change.
I’d rather be the new Madonna than the old Patrick Wolf in a way.
‘I just want to keep on changing. It’s [been] in my natural rhythm since I was 12; give me a pair of kitchen scissors and I’d have a new personality and idea in three days.
‘I’m kind of addicted to that way of killing off one part of yourself and giving birth to another and that kind of shows in each album.’
Lupercalia stands alone from his four other albums; the record is notably more toned down.
‘There’s been a lot of spiritual and emotional and human growth since the last album.’
‘The other four were definitely telling my life through metaphor; through fairytales and hiding some of the subject or themes… and this one [the themes] are really exposed; words and music that are very private notes to the man I love.
With his success to date, Wolf said he has been able to invest much more into the production of his records which is evident when comparing his new work to his first records.
I think my skills as a producer have grown a lot.
‘When I started my first album, it was all from bits and pieces of half-broken equipment scrambled together and I started from quite an experimental sound-recording technique.
‘Right now, it’s very much all studio, done with the best engineers I could find in the world and in a way the budget has got bigger.’
Despite the luxury of a big budget, Wolf said lo-fi music can be commercially successful and he should know. Commercial audiences are something that Wolf is finally ready for and this may be the album to do it. Predictions floating around the ether suggest Lupercalia may be the album to catch the attention of mainstream audiences.
‘I found it really exciting that my song here was play listed on the A-list for about four weeks on Radio Two which is the main kind-of music station over here in terms of, not the pop music.’
‘It’s really exciting [but] my biggest fear is to be marginalised, you know, with any person who is labelled as a gay artist is that, as much as I love my fraternity and my brotherhood, I really think it’s important to have a wide audience in your work – you’ve got a cross-section of life, really.’
Wolf remains remarkably gracious towards the fans that helped him get to this stage. He remembered the last time he visited Perth in 2009; it was his first gig in Western Australia. Initially he had been worried after the six-foot-four English man had been heckled in the city for wearing hot pants, or at least that’s why he thinks he was heckled.
‘I was walking from my hotel, I was quite tired, and I had this shouting at me, it didn’t matter what part of Perth I was in and it was quite tricky at first.’
‘Then I got on stage and looked out at the audience and it reminded me no matter what the atmosphere on the street is: the more conservative it is, the more hunger there is for a subculture…’
Wolf’s metamorphosis is far from over; this iconoclast is still warping pop music and will do for quite a time to come. Yet this new record may prove to be a true turning point for Wolf; this may prove to be another opportunity for him to shed another skin and hit a new stride with Lupercalia.
Benn Dorrington
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