Freak Kid

Ok, before anybody gets offended I should make it perfectly clear. Bullying isn’t funny. It’s horrible. I’m sure everybody has been on the receiving end of it at some point in their lives, and it is, without exception, the kind of thing that makes you want to lock yourself in a closet and never come out. Serious bit over.

However, it’s when you meet somebody whose never been bullied at all that you realise that bullying does have something going for it. If you’ve never had people laugh at your shoes or your ridiculously self-indulgent ideas as a child, you turn into an infuriatingly annoying adult. At university all the people who’d be schooled at home pretty much fitted this description. You ended up wanting to punch them just because of their own inflated sense of importance. A healthy dose of bullying teaches you when to keep your mouth shut. It also, just sometimes, gives us some incredible music.

If ever there were someone destined to spend their childhood having their heads forced down the toilet, it’s Patrick Wolf. ‘An English eccentric’ doesn’t begin to cover it – he’s just plain nuts. A quick survey of his wardrobe includes items like pink platform shoes and gold lame bow-ties. He was, by his own admission, something of a “freak kid.” Surprise surprise, his look, closely resembling an androgynous elf who’s fallen into a pantomime dressing-up box, didn’t go down too well at his secondary school. And it was bullying that drove him deeper into his music. He’s often said how, like many artists before him, music became a kind of escape from his increasingly unpleasant existence – from an early age he was writing music “obsessively”, using a range of unconventional instruments, from the harp to the ukulele.

Wolf is no newcomer to the music scene. Refreshingly, he’s not an artist who the media have jumped upon after the release of a couple of singles. He’s already got two full albums under his belt, though it’s his third, entitled The Magic Position, that looks set to catapult him into the public arena.

Like “Wind in the Wires” and “Lycanthropy” before that, his latest album truly merits the “folktronica” label (that’s a combination of folk and electronica, before you ask). Multi-instrumentalist Wolf uses a huge range of instruments – clarinets violins, cellos – in combination with just the right proportion of electronic bleeps and squelches to create something special. But while “Wind in the Wires” was dark, inspired by the time Wolf spent living in a beach-hut on the English coast, “The Magic Position” is a much more joyous affair. Wolf fell in love, and the album charts the course of the relationship right until its end. Songs like the eponymous “The Magic Position” are truly euphoric romps, while “Enchanted” is a love song in the classic tradition, pure and simple. Of course, this is Patrick Wolf, a man who previously wrote about the rape and mutilation of young children, about paralysed acrobats and twisted fairy tales, so of course there’s a darker side. Tracks like the spectacular “Augustine” are genuinely terrifying in their intensity, with Wolf asking “do we kill this one tonight?” Nice.

The signs are all there for Wolf to make it big in the near future. Articles on him are cropping up in all the right places, and the LP has got a major label release. On the album he also duets with none other than Marianne Faithful, one-time lover of Mick Jagger and the woman with the most terrifyingly sensual voice in the music world. I suspect we’ll be seeing more of Patrick this year. Keep your eyes out for the gold lame bow tie and pink platform heels.

 

 

 

© Tom Wilson 2007