patrick wolf live (+ still alive)
There's something magical about being in a smaller crowd where every single person in the crowd is a superfan. It's the opposite of a music festival experience, where there's a shitload of people but very little loyalty. Everyone at the Patrick Wolf show came armed with maximum devotion. He took the stage in a sumptuous, shimmering blood red cape w/ corresponding headpiece and played a stripped-down version of "The Magic Position" on piano. As soon as I heard everyone do the chorus hand claps together, I knew that the crowd was here to throw down. It was the kind of audience where everywhere I turned, I saw sequins winking at me—sequined jackets, sequined dresses, sequined baseball caps.
Yes, another opportunity to catch some unexpected and excellent live music in Los Angeles, California. What a blessing to be able to do stuff like this. Back in 2023 I was marveling at the ability to see shows as 'press,' something that has yet to stop thrilling me:
That "Irish hip-hop show" was Kneecap, who I wrote about, and who have since blown up massively, a reminder to Always Go To The Show. Anyway, last Tuesday I saw Patrick Wolf play Lodge Room. I even got a photo pass and got to take pictures with my nice camera, which I haven't done in ages (even when I used to bring my camera, it was usually for video, so this was a fun challenge and wow do I respect all the concert photographers out there).
It was almost certainly NYLON Magazine that alerted me to the English musician Patrick Wolf back in 2007; in high school, I made a good deal of my music decisions based on what I read in magazines and so I went out and bought The Magic Position on CD from Borders and loved it so much. The beat on Patrick Wolf was that he was very talented on multiple instruments, very young (just 20 when he released his critically acclaimed debut Lycanthropy), and had an ambiguous sexuality that was often a focus of interviews and criticism. If you look at pictures of him from his early career, he often has a wedge of dyed hair, a boyish pout, and and outfits that I can only describe as "angular." I kind of miss what was happening with jacket shoulders in 2007.
There was this baroque dark cabaret moment happening in indie music throughout the '00s—Arcade Fire, Dresden Dolls, some of the moodier Feist tracks—and The Magic Position was part of that wave. My favorite songs were the faster ones, of course. The title track is a perfect love song, its repetitive scale refrain paired so cleverly with the line "To live, to learn, to love in the major key." Same with "Get Lost"—bleeps and bloops and hand claps and big brash dance contest drums. I'd then fallen off listening to his music, which happened with many artists whose albums I loved in high school. I was excited to catch up on what I'd missed.
It was an unbelievable show—Wolf played songs from all across his career, ping-ponging from piano to acoustic guitar to mountain dulcimer to a stringed instrument apparently of his own invention called the Kantalyre. He looped guitars and then played viola over them. His (self-designed) costumes shifted around from song to song; the cape was shed to reveal a ruffled burgundy shirt; the ruffled burgundy shirt was removed for a spell, then replaced with a black sequined jacket. Throughout it all, Wolf never sounded tired or frazzled; even when the viola mic malfunctioned, he kept his humor, faux-dramatically mouthing the words What...is...happening?? into the mic before adjusting the rig himself. His voice was strong, he had a striking mustache, and his hair was dark.
In between-song banter, he spoke of how much he was enjoying himself on his latest tour, which took him across the American South ("I looked like a male hooker in Buc-ee's...I've been sowing seeds of sexual liberty across the land") and also referenced the long break he'd taken from releasing music ("thirteen years of addiction and alcoholism"). It turns out I wasn't the only one who hadn't listened to new Patrick Wolf in a minute, because he'd been mired in some incredibly tough stuff for quite a long time and, up until last year's Crying The Neck, hadn't released a full-length album since 2012. As he's rejoined the musical world, he's spoken about the "clownification" of his image over time, the reduction of his complex identity to merely "flamboyant!" I'm reminded again that the natural compression of musicians' narratives to the basest and most eye-grabbing bits has always been a thing, even before social media was the delivery mechanism; how quickly something like a blog can flatten a human into a story...or worse, a blurb!
Driving back from the show and mulling it over, I imagined how a huge stage show could do Wolf's complex, layered compositions justice. I was thinking about how he deserved an orchestra of his own, live percussion to really hammer home the danceable section, sparkling lights and video backdrops for extra cinema. But in the end the one-man-band style was perfect as is. I was thinking with my music festival brain, but an enormous stage serving a casual audience doesn't make sense for Patrick Wolf's thing right now. The intimate solo show was just right. A comeback doesn't need a lot of fanfare. After surviving what sounds like pure hell, he seems to be happy doing what he loves.
One of the best songs of the evening was the stirring "Nowhere Game," a song he released in 2023 about being caught between the will to self-destruct and the will to survive. He told NME he wrote it about "a few years where I stopped singing altogether apart from record[ing] ‘happy birthday’ down the phone to my friends and family." "Happy Birthday / To the never get out of this now / Or the here you've been," goes the chorus. Had he gotten out of that amorphous, ominous 'this' yet? It seemed like it. In any case, he was singing a different kind of Happy Birthday. And...it was his birthday! Actually, the first music of the show actually hadn't come from Wolf at all—the audience sang Happy Birthday to him when he took the stage, before he could sing a single note. They even harmonized.
Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.
