Patrick Wolf, London Heaven

March 12th, 2009

A new side of Patrick Wolf emerges with every record he releases. Lycanthropy saw him trudging the darkened streets of London and Paris, obsessing over Virginia Woolf and writing mutant, breakbeat songs about childcatchers. With Wind In The Wires, he fled to the coast, with only a ukelele, a laptop and the elements for company. 2007’s The Magic Position, meanwhile, found him decked out in bright colours and platform shoes, straddling a deer on a fairground roundabout, though the glitz and Charlotte Church Show appearances hid a darkness that continued to lie at the core of his songs.

Free of the major-label headaches that blighted the Magic Position tour, Patrick Wolf is ready to return, with perhaps his most dramatic transformation yet. He is set to release the first of two records due this year in June, entitled The Bachelor; The Conqueror is due later. Judging by Wolf’s performance in London, his reclaimed independence, alongside a new long-term relationship, has allowed him to find a new confidence and sense of freedom.

As he emerged after a prolonged intro to a largely adoring crowd, we were given our first glimpse of Patrick Wolf, circa 2009. His bleached blonde hair went down past his shoulders and he wore a strange black cape, with shoulder pads that reached out more than a foot on either side. And then, most surprisingly, there was the headset microphone, which he wore all night; like Madonna, but without the botox or the cynicism. This allowed him to concentrate, for the most part, on singing and interacting with the audience. As a result, the barrage of new songs didn’t alienate the audience; instead, we got a performer clearly comfortable with his new material, and intent on delivering them to his listeners.

The new songs veer from beefed-up, electric guitar-led tracks, to string-drenched ballads where Wolf comes over half Joni Mitchell, half Mariah Carey (except I’ve never seen either of those two topless, hitching their leather trousers up with one hand mid-melisma). ‘Hard Times’ and ‘Battle’ are very much along the same lines lyrically as ‘Accident and Emergency’, though they hit harder. The smattering of familiar songs were slightly altered too, to fit in with the new live show. ‘Bluebells’ has lost some of its fragility with Wolf’s new band line-up, to the extent where some members of the audience attempted to pogo to it; it didn’t quite work. ‘Tristan’, ‘London’, ‘The Libertine’ and ‘The Magic Position’ went down a storm though; the new songs see him embracing his many different sides that you can find in these older songs, sometimes all at once.

For the encore, another costume change was in order, and Wolf emerged with his face painted and two large, feathery wings for new single ‘Vulture’, which finds him channelling Bowie in his vocal ticks; it sounds like Scott Walker gone electro, with Wolf undergoing an existential crisis over sleazy, compressed beats. ‘Bloodbeat’ follows, and we’ve come full circle, back to a song he wrote at the turn of the millennium. Over a rapturous reception at the end, Wolf declares that it’s good to be back, and his fans cheer in agreement. An antidote to soulless, personality-deficient pop crossovers like Lady Gaga or insular, ambition-phobic indie bands, you wonder whether he’ll get the success he craves this time around. Whether he does or he doesn’t, you can bet that there’ll be another Patrick Wolf, ready to emerge next time.