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| jaqkvade | Дата: Понедельник, 18.07.2011, 15:25 | Сообщение # 41 |
 the childcatcher
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| Patrick Wolf is wearing his red stage-suit in honour of Valentine's Day. This evening, he is off to a Chinese restaurant with his boyfriend, William Charles Pollock, to whom he is engaged to be married this summer. It's a fitting day for a conversation about his new album, Lupercalia, which is, after all, about love.
"I've not got my engagement ring yet, it's being made right now", beams Wolf. Will his fiancé wear one, too? "There are no rules. I think we're both going to wear one."
This is the talented performer's fifth album, at just 27. Wolf is exuding an air of self-contentment and fulfilment not usually associated with the singer-songwriter, who has come across as more of a tortured soul. He threatened to quit the music industry altogether back in April 2007, stating on his website that his last shows would be in November that year, and around that time he was pictured in tabloids, spilling drunkenly out of nightclubs. And over the years his clothes became increasingly outrageous, to complement his shock of dyed-red hair.
Then, three-and-a-half years ago, when he had been touring relentlessly around his album The Magic Position, he met Pollock, who works at BBC Radio 6 Music, at a party ("it was love at first sight") and, slowly, things began to change. "I was really, really exhausted and not looking after myself", he says. "I went from one day being a very self-destructive person to starting to realise that it was time to open up and share love."
The self-destructiveness is the result of an unhappy childhood. Classically trained, and a keen musician as a child, he faced years of bullying at school which only came to an end when he was transferred to the arty Bedales boarding school at 15. At 16, he'd had enough. He left his family home in south London, where he'd built up a taste for PJ Harvey, Stockhausen, English folk music and Chet Baker's jazz, and set off to start his musical career.
His debut album Lycanthropy came out to much critical success just after he turned 20. "I did it all through my work and performing, without any form of therapy," he reflects. "Of course it was going to end in some form of public negativity and aggression. Musically aside, it was obvious that my last album was very aggressive; visually I turned more and more into a provocative character more make-up, more hair, more fighting and I just didn't want to do that anymore."
We had been expecting Wolf to release The Conqueror next, a second part to his angry, baroque last album The Bachelor. But Wolf surprised us with Lupercalia, and its romantic theme. Gone are songs such as "Oblivion", with its dark imagery of "guns", dangers" "petrified", replaced by "my love" (I counted 21 uses of the word "love" throughout the album). Lyrically it's his most direct, and from the most personal perspective to date, leaving behind his Angela Carter-style metaphors. With his new-found contentment, a bitter follow-up in the form of The Conqueror would have been impossible.
"That would have been a return to the fighting mode, and I really had done as much of that as I possibly could with The Bachelor. Live it was a fighting kind of set – it was really quite aggressive. I didn't want to be wearing these 30-hole skinhead boots, and musically I didn't want to be making big-noise aggressive music anymore. I was a lot more domestic and filled with love so I had to be honest about that. So that's why there's no more of The Conqueror, no more of the ego, and no more fist pumping in the air."
Today he has a lick of foundation, and his hair is a deep natural chestnut. Wolf explains how he finally decided to deal with his childhood for the first time, investing in long-overdue psychotherapy sessions. There he worked through how he felt as a teenager, the despondency and aggression he still felt towards his tormentors, the way he'd been treated at school and by society.
"I just thought it wasn't, at 27, a dignified thing to be working off energy that you had from when you were 14. So I decided I had to do a lot of cleansing of my soul and not still be the bullied outsider that hated the world and was angry about the way I was treated." Today, he doesn't want to dwell on the past. "I try not to go back so far now. I think it's to draw a line under it", he says, politely putting as end to the subject, over a second glass of white wine.
It was a huge relief for him, both as a writer – it gave him a clean palette to start again – and as a person. At his lowest, he was searching the internet for negative comments about himself, comments which he had indirectly provoked with his extravagant stage personae. They even extended to death-threats. "If you're depressed, you always go and seek the most extreme negative opinions. I remember finding this fantastic thing, 'Patrick Wolf if you ever come up to Leeds I'm going to cut off your head and shit down your neck and put you in a bath of acid'."
He can laugh about it now, but back then it only served to send him spiralling further into depression. "When you look a different way, immediately you think he's probably not even listening to my music, he's just looking at this character on stage. If you're in a weak place mentally, you immediately take that stuff personally, and if you're in a strong place you can laugh at it and think, 'how hilarious'. It's about finding a place as a person that you are proud of yourself. So I found that and I think love, being in a good relationship, is really important. It was about time I had something to dedicate myself to as well as writing, because it helps the writing."
At every junction of his career Wolf has surprised us: after threatening to quit, dropped by his record label Polydor, he returned to release The Bachelor, funding the album via the website Bandstock, selling shares to his fans in exchange for a future copy of his album. It was such a successful enterprise, that he earned £100,000 to make the album, which went into the Top 50 chart. Strange, then, that he should choose to return to a major label.
"To be honest I was pretty much bankrupt by last year. Although I had such great funding for the album, to take a five-piece band on the road for almost two years, I didn't even think about paying my own rent or paying for anything, I just thought about keeping the show on the road and keeping singles coming out. By the end of it I'd worked myself into a really bad place, and my business was about to fold." Luckily for Wolf, and his fans, the demos he'd made landed in the hands of A&R person Keith Wozencroft.
"Just when I thought I'd lost everything and I was about to just go back to busking or something, Keith came along and saved my career and here I am making another album. To just have someone believe in my work was wonderful. I am eternally grateful for that." For someone whose fervent following stretches around the world, to Russia, Poland, Japan and Germany, it's surprising that Wolf doesn't show more confidence. If that weren't enough to boost his confidence, surely his numerous collaborations with well-known faces such as Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith and Tilda Swinton (who had a speaking part on The Bachelor) is; "that was good..." he giggles. "I get quite speechless about it."
In addition, he was asked by photographer Nan Goldin to write a 45 minute classical piece to soundtrack her work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at Tate Modern. "That was a big moment for me. If people like Nan really believe in my work I really should believe in my work a lot more."
We meet at the South Bank, close to the south-London home he shares with his fiancé and which is so integral to his love-filled album. Home is just as you'd imagine Wolf's to be: filled with instruments (piano, two harpsichords, violins, viola). He tells me that he has transformed what's meant to be his walk-in wardrobe into a studio to house all his recordings, microphones and archived work from the last 10-odd years. Currently he's focusing on the Celtic harp, piano and the dulcimer.
"Everything I have is out everywhere – it's just to surround myself with what I love." If there is much imagery of the night, and insomnia, in the album, that's because you're likely to find Wolf playing and composing at 3am. "When my fiancé has gone to bed and I'm left alone in the small hours of the night, that's when I really start to play"
Wolf grew up in a creative household. His father is a musician, his mother a painter, and he took inspiration for his latest material from Henri Rousseau's tropical landscapes.
The album has huge commercial potential, its upbeat sound more accessible to the listener. Not that it was written with this in mind, although Wolf wouldn't shun success. "I always think, if you pour everything you have into an album lyrically and sonically – and I'm always happy with two people liking the record – but if the work finds a wider audience it's always flattering. I'm not going to lie and say it's not. I think it's really exciting." So too, is his engagement, which he announced via Twitter.
"Yes", he says hesitantly. "I didn't even think about what it entails in terms of money, and planning. It's a nightmare. I have a venue, but I've been sworn to secrecy." He is keenly following the news that churches will be opened to gay weddings, which would allow him and Pollock to be husbands rather than civil partners. "If it means I'll have to marry him next year and it's the right way then that's the way it's got to be. I want it to be for life."
just sing
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Понедельник, 18.07.2011, 15:25 | Сообщение # 42 |
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the childcatcher
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| What can you tell us about 'The City'?
"In a way it's a protest song. It's saying that no matter how homeless, poor or jobless we are, we won't let that affect our love and relationships. From a production point of view, brass was very important to the song. There's a great saxophone moment which I love, because it's quite a gutsy, rebellious instrument and that suits the theme."
It looks like you were having a lot of fun in the video...
"The idea was to portray an escape from the city, and Santa Monica beach is right next to its city, so you can party on the sand and still have that urban feel. It's filmed in 16mm, which was expensive but important, because I feel that a lot of the digital stuff nowadays lacks any depth. I'm still very much an analogue person!"
It's probably your most radio-friendly single yet. Are you hoping for greater commercial success this time out?
"I'm back on a major label now, which helps! I wanted to create songs that were more radio-friendly this time, but saying that, the music all came before the record deal, so I wasn't being told what songs to make. I'm in love at the moment too, and when you feel like that you want to share that emotion with as many people as possible. That said, I'm not ashamed of wanting commercial success - I don't always want to be on the outside and not let in."
Do you feel you've been treated unfairly as an artist in the past?
"I've been sidelined a lot in the past as an artist who isn't allowed to be successful and is difficult to market. I want to gain a wider audience now, but I won't compromise my writing or production choices in the process."
Does the positive tone of the track carry on through the record?
"There are about four sad, melancholy moments on the album, but in general it's jubilant and about falling deeply in love. It's a really romantic record and it's extremely honest. Every song is a true story and not disguised with the folklore and fairytale that I've been known for in the past."
What's prompted the change in musical style?
"I'm in a confident place. I've exorcised a lot of demons and overcome a lot of my problems from when I was younger. I've healed and I'm probably in the best place in my life that I've ever been. I've recently moved back to my hometown of Southwark - and a big theme of the album is returning to your roots and being grateful for what you have."
Why is the album called Lupercalia?
"Songs about love are obviously the most common theme in pop music, but I wanted to approach it in a way that hadn't been done before. The title refers to the Lupercalia festival, which is the ancient fertility and love festival that happens around Valentine's Day. I strive to be original - it's one of my biggest ambitions. There can be nothing worse sometimes than a soppy love record - imagine if I'd called it To Love: Patrick Wolf!"
How does feeling happier affect your music?
"It's affected the lyrics, which in turn affects the production and what kind of world I want to create. For example, I didn't want to use harpsichord on this album because it's too dark, too baroque and too nocturnal. Instead I've used harps, brass band and strings - all these things that signify romance, love and celebration - rather than suicide, depression and aggression, which my last album was about. I also wanted to make something that I could listen back to in a few years' time. It's hard hearing some of my darker albums because I find yourself revisiting those painful memories."
What are your favourite songs on the LP?
"There's a song called 'Bermondsey Street', which is a love song for a straight couple and a gay couple. It's for the straight couple to realise that the gay couple are experiencing the same emotion of love, but that it just happens to be between the same sex. I wanted to try and eradicate the prejudices that come with gay love. I also love 'The Days', which is like a wedding waltz song, and 'Together', which has a classic disco production with an amazing string section."
What do you make of the current music scene?
"I think there's a real hunger for things that seem human, tactile, organic and handmade - which means real instruments. The charts have been so whitewashed with Auto-Tune and simple one-chord songs with hedonistic lyrics about partying, money and celebrity. In fact, the current music scene is partly what inspired my album to be made in this way - I wanted to go against all the computerised music and record something naturally. Saying that, there's a lot of good music that's not getting aired by radio. Hopefully that will change over the next few years."
Do you feel that now is the right time for a comeback?
"It's been a very intense two years and I've had to be 100% dedicated - it's involved a lot of sleepless nights and I've barely had time to socialise. It might seem weird to some people for me to be releasing a much less complex album, but it's a completely honest one and it's true to my life at the moment. Whether people want that from me, well, we'll have to wait and see."
just sing
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Понедельник, 18.07.2011, 15:26 | Сообщение # 43 |
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the childcatcher
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| Dazed Digital: The City has been described as your most up-beat pop song yet... is this a natural evolution of your sound or are you just happier these days?
Patrick Wolf: I think this song shares my nonstop determination to never let anyone else screw things up on your behalf, whatever situation, banks, governments or bad business, bullies at school, to not let all your positive elements be dragged down or lost in times of adversity. Im definitely naturally evolving, I strive to never make the same thing twice in my life! As to happiness.. I would say I know myself better these days, It was important to me growing up as a songwriter to not be burdened with any badness from my past, I felt too heavy and low towards the end of the last album tour and after I needed to focus on working through some problems I had never faced before, trying to shed a skin... Writing The City was definitely a turning point musically for me in my life, a breath of fresh air from existing in quite a pastoral nocturnal world with the last album.
DD: What inspires you to write your music?
Patrick Wolf: I think the moment I need to confess something I've been brewing up inside me is when i need to write a song, I mull over a lot of situations and emotions and suddenly or slowly it comes back out as melody or poem form first, its hard to say, my life has been totally dedicated to writing songs for over a decade now, i wouldn't know what else to do, i think with this album, I was focused on romance and euphoria, as producer I chose instruments that I thought would sound like falling in love or longing, yearning for someone else. I think this is the most intimate and honest album i've made ever, especially lyrically, i didnt want to disguise my emotions in too much fantasy,everything is a true life story, moving away from fairytales and fiction, back to raw nerves, real world and love.
DD:You obviously have an interest in clothes and distinct style, what's your worst fashion secret?
Patrick Wolf: I dont know what a fashion secret is!? I am really enjoying collaborating with someone for this album Anthony Stephinson who I've known since I was 15 or so. He says he remembers me when I used to use a hollowed out pumpkin as a bag when i was 16 in soho, i used to have alot of taxidermy going on..I find it hard to remember this stuff, its lovely now to have a deep connection with someone I can trust to create the visual world with me as to styling and working with other designers, who knows my history as a performer and who can be putting as much love into how the album will look as I did writing it and making it sound.
DD: How do you feel about the Journal video? Was it an accurate portrayal of how things went down?
Patrick Wolf: William who films and edits these journals, he is a very talented film maker and editor so of course..i totally trust him and he knows my aesthetics very well. I feel like these journals are very personal video letters from me to my wolf pack around the world, I want to keep making them for many years, I am really falling in love with the opportunities of this digital age, so many mediums of expression and communication and almost zero rules.. really exciting times.
DD: What are you most excited about next?
Patrick Wolf: I'm going on a first pre-album European and Russian tour, shooting the new album front cover, another single and video, and I want to know what my album sounds like in the sunshine now I've finished it in cold rainy february and a summer wedding.
just sing
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Понедельник, 18.07.2011, 15:32 | Сообщение # 44 |
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the childcatcher
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| Interview: Patrick Wolf
by Max Raymond
On this misty morning Patrick Wolf, complete in a very suave looking purple suit, has a noticeable spring in his step. His eagerness to talk about Lupercalia, his fifth record, is striking, and he comes across as a completely different person to the one portrayed in tabloid tales around the release of The Magic Position in 2007, where he was, as he admits himself, 'a wreck'.
"I really hope that I have worked out things like treating my voice correctly, warming up", he says. "When I first started the last thing I thought about was warming up but about coming out of the show alive. I've really had to look after myself and look after my energy. At 27 I like to think I'm a little bit more of a master and not so much a train wreck".
Since then he has unleashed all the angst and troubled feelings on The Bachelor, a epic and, at points, unashamedly over-the-top LP. This new release is certainly not a direct continuation; more concise, very clean and incredibly upbeat with a totally different selection of sounds. It's out with the loud guitars and in with harps and other tender instrumentation, as showcased on songs like Bermondsey Street and Slow Motion.
"An album ago I would have done that melody on the harp on...a harpsichord maybe", he says of the latter. "The last record was really heavy on guitar and was very noisy. This is about love, intimacy and romance, and I grew up playing the harp as well. I've tried electric bass lines for the first time, which I hadn't before. Also in the ballads, rather than doing a time signature of 6/8, I wanted to work in 3/4, so that they are kind of waltzes."
"I looked into the sadness of troubled times with The Bachelor...this one is very much not wanting to sink the Titanic, you know?" - Patrick Wolf on the sense of 'anti recession' evident in the writing of Lupercalia
One of the standouts on the record is Together, which also dates as one of the oldest songs and is, as it turns out, a favourite of its creator. Recorded in Berlin with old collaborator Alec Empire during sessions for The Bachelor, it didn't fit with the angst and melodrama. "I immediately knew that I didn't want to put it on The Bachelor, I didn't want anything to do with that album and I wanted to start a new album around it, but I had a lot of pressure at the time like 'Patrick, you've got to put that on the album.' and I think I had to state that this was the first seed of the new album."
Incredibly uplifting and optimistic, Lupercalia goes against the current tide. In this political and social climate of cuts, protests, anger, war and uprisings it would seem perfectly normal to expect a more melancholic, angry or fiery musical landscape. The fact that Wolf's fifth album isn't any of these almost makes it 'anti recession'. Presented with this theory, he offers a very diplomatic and considered response.
"I looked into the sadness of troubled times with The Bachelor and related what was going on in the world, and how a lot of my friends were losing their homes and had stalled careers because they couldn't get any jobs. This one is very much not wanting to sink the Titanic, you know? I make my own boat to survive and to enjoy life and not to sink and be miserable. It's not ignoring the current economic downturn and cultural recession, it's about maybe trying to find the thing that does get you through it and, for me, that's love and optimism. In a way it's quite rebellious, this album, I think, but in a different way then putting on leather boots and screaming and shouting at the audience like I did for a long time."
Once again there are many guests - Sky Larkin's Katie Harkin ("with Katie, I'd just met her in the car park of the studio I was working in and she had a big red bus and I had a big red bicycle and we started talking"), Thomas White, harpist Serafina Steer and even his sister. Wolf has firmly decided to move away from the thing that brought him attention in the first place with 2003's Lycanthropy, his debut. "I'd wanted to move away from folk music and instrumentation. I think most people would agree there's not much folk to the record, and I was quite certain on focusing not on that because I think I'd be repeating myself.
This comes in part from his own self governance. "I leave a lot to chance and that's one of the great things about being a solo artist - you have no rules. My record label gave me no rules for this album and they just said 'Patrick, you're on album five, do what you want'. So that's one of my favourite things about being solo, because I really can say 'I'm going to do an album of...one tuba and a beat box! That'll be my next album". He laughs. "So I can be as exploratory or as conservative as I want to be, and it's great".
"It's more important that I'm communicating as a songwriter and that's what this album is to me. I couldn't give a shit about the image to tell the truth!" - Patrick Wolf on his renewed musical focus
Unlike his last effort, where he experimented with a now deceased fan-funded service called Bandstocks, Lupercalia is released under his own label, Hideout. When asked about his reflections on the experience, he has both positive and negative memories. "I spent a lot of energy in the creative aspect - being there 100% for the photography, the artwork, the production, the songs, everything - and I was doing the label as well with my two managers. That all took one and a half to two years, and I think it showed in my live performances that I was very tired and"... he tails off briefly... "it was just a lot of plates to spin and that's the thing. You're going to start dropping plates and start going a bit mental".
"I think it's a wonderful model, and that it will become easier to do. Because Bandstocks was in its infancy, the founding of it and the closeness I developed with my audience was amazing, and I'll take it to my grave with me because The Bachelor would never have been made without that. Anything that makes an artist more self-sufficient and gives them the power to increase the control of their work is always a good thing".
A recurring theme in our conversation is style. The singer-songwriter has, in the past, been known as much for his flamboyant look and presentation as he is for his music. This is something that he is very keen to move away from, instead letting his artistic work do the talking. "With the publicity for The Magic Position it was about acid and colours and fairgrounds, and it was very playful. Before that was Wind In The Wires" (his second album), "where I spent three years touring with just a stripped down sound and a drummer and it was very much about the music. No image, no show, just about music. Sometimes you have the right to, as a musician, say 'fuck image, I don't really care about it'. It's more important that I'm communicating as a songwriter and that's what this album is to me. I couldn't give a shit about the image to tell the truth!"
As our time runs out he confirms plans for summer festivals and more UK shows in the autumn, alongside his upcoming jaunt in March. Whether you believe him or not when he says he doesn't care about image, you can't deny that this will be his best chance to date to put all of that behind me and make people listen. It's a new battle in his career, one he is determined to win.
just sing
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Среда, 12.10.2011, 19:53 | Сообщение # 45 |
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the childcatcher
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| PATRICK WOLF INTERVIEW (FROM THE FUNKY MOFO ARCHIVES)
Patrick Wolf is truly in a league of his own in the music world. We caught up with the musical wizard still in his night attire one December morning via telephone…
Céline: I visited your website last night and found out that someone has released ‘Wind in the Wires’ before the actual release date in February. That’s not nice!
Patrick: I know! For me I can understand why people would want to do it. They want to hear all the music now and if you have access to Broadband it’s a really easy thing to do. They need to be a bit clever, you know, have more control over yourself! I put a lot of passion into the artwork as well. There’s really little things like on the CD body itself, on the finished copy, there’s two birds so when you put it on the CD player the birds start flying. Things like that, for me, makes the whole album really back to front, cover to back, really special things for people.
Céline: You mention the artwork there. You’ve been working with Ingrid Z…
Patrick: We did the video for ‘The Lighthouse’ together. We met through the Hidden Cameras, she’s from Canada. She’s the only one left in London that’s a really close friend of mine right now. We live in a house together in Hackney! It was a friendship that turned into collaboration. She’s like another extension of my visual brain, I suppose I’m kind of hers now! When I first started out I was working by myself with mixing the album and mastering the album and it was a real solitary experience. I never really wanted it to be like that but then I’ve been really careful as to people I work with rather than just work with people for the sake of it. They’ve got to be the right people, we have to share the same universe.
Céline: Your influences include Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, Meredith Monk and Angela Carter…
Patrick:With all these people like PJ Harvey, Joni Mitchell and Meredith Monk… Meredith Monk is the one who has influenced me the most musically. She’s somebody that when I heard her record I actually wanted to call her up wherever she was in the world and say “please teach me something! I have something to learn from you!” I’d listen to her records obsessively and realise there was something from her music that a lot of the world couldn’t understand. Maybe, with a bit of translation, other people might be able to understand and really feel something from the way she sings, the way she puts her music together.
Joni and PJ have also been great inspirations musically. “Is This Desire” really gave me confidence to use my passion for the dark English winters and Thomas Hardy wild West country storylines and communicate that in song. “…Desire” is a real masterpiece, a very rare British one too. Joni was a realisation that a musical communication could be just as strong with one instrument and a vocal… there didn’t have to be a symphony orchestra in order for the song and recording to be powerful and her lyrical magic is nothing but totally inspiring… “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” comes highly recommended to those that see her as the hippy blonde girl with an acoustic guitar, that lady has balls.
Céline: I read somewhere that you lived in Paris for sometime. How long did you stay?
Patrick:It was in my 18th year. It felt like I visited Paris about 12 times that year… How many times I can’t remember exactly. Kind of going backwards and forwards the whole time, sometimes maybe a long weekend and then sometimes a week… it felt like a long time but maybe it wasn’t!
Céline: Why Paris?
Patrick:It was a really natural thing. I was asked to play a show over there with this band ‘Maison Crimineaux’. We just turned up with a CD player and a suitcase full of bad outfits and rolled about on the floor and made a couple of friends there! Had a really beautiful experience. I think I had this idea that I wanted to move there but things started happening in London. I spent a lot of time just walking around, more of a solitary experience rather than getting involved with any culture. All cities are a complicated beast, street to street it’s very different.
The most magic time was turning 18, two weeks alone in a friend’s empty apartment in Place de Clichy with a bedroom view to the Eiffel tower. I put on my best home-made clothes and gate-crashed a load of high society parties… taking a white horse driven carriage from outside the Tuilleries to an out of town polo field sipping free champagne and slipping fancy chocolates into my pockets. Special times.
Céline: You met a spirit medium in Paris who told you to change your name to Wolf. Is that true?
Patrick:Yeah! It is true! [Laughs] It was at the ‘Montmartre’ cemetery. I was just walking around, it was the first time I’d visited with the band and it was raining… this person just appeared. There was no one else in the cemetery! I’d been to look for the grave of Hector Berlioz. The story is all in the song ‘Paris’ from the first album.
Céline: I’m going to stay on a French theme… ‘The Libertine’, which is the first single and the first song of the new album, does it refer to the Marquis De Sade? What is it about? Is it about the Libertines??
Patrick:It kind of does. There’s a reference point there but it’s not really about them. The reason why I called it ‘The Libertine’… some people call it “The Hitchhiker”… there’s a different character in each line of that song. I was reading the newspaper, I don’t know [The Libertines’] music that much really at all, there was something about someone from the group who was in jail. I thought this was a real contradiction and that really summed up a lot of what’s wrong with the people right now. A Libertine in jail, it’s the ultimate contradiction! These are really weird times for me. It’s a stagnant age, I don’t really see any multiple progressions artistically or creatively right now.
Céline: It seems the media are trying to make a newcoming of the Britpop like we had 10 years ago…
Patrick: I think with the English press what I’ve always had this idea since Britpop is that England is obsessed with the fact that it had punk or it had the 60’s. Ever since then they’re obsessed with trying to do something else, like the other great British thing will happen. It’s some bizarre English mentality and I think what happens is – they will find a band or two bands that will both have saxophone in it and they will be like “Whoa! There’s a saxophone movement!”. Then they’ll write 10 pieces about great British saxophone movements, then everyone will call these bands saxophone movement, then they’ll hate it and the bands will break up! They just keep on killing things! Won’t let anything develop and grow into what it could be because they sensationalise everything so quickly. Then again there’s not actually anything great to sensationalise right now anyway. [Laughs] I sound like I really hate everything!
Céline: You’re a multi-instrumentalist aren’t you?
Patrick: I’ve never been somebody who’s been attracted to groups. I work as a single entity, I’ve always been attracted to and inspired by single entities that’s why I can’t imagine ever being part of a band. The sort of artists I like are the solitary mad geniuses sitting in a log cabin communicating to the world.
Céline: You’ve managed to get your father and your sister on your album!
Patrick:Yes I did! That was a really special thing for me because ‘Lycanthropy’ lyrically was dealing with… I left home when I was 16 and I didn’t speak to my parents for about a year, my sister I didn’t speak for a year as well. I’ve always had a really loving family it was quite a traumatic thing back then. In the last couple of years getting back to a family unit again, it’s a really important thing for me. ‘Lycanthropy’ was really like leaving home, being this care free, quite dangerous liberty. ‘Wind In The Wires’ is more like appreciating family again, what it feels like to belong somewhere, this desire to drop the anchor somehow. To get my father and my sister on the record was really… it wasn’t just superfluous, it was definitely for a reason.
Céline: ‘Tristan’, I’m very intrigued by that song… what does it refer to?
Patrick:A complicated one! ‘Tristan’ in a way relates to ‘Teignmouth’. When I first wrote that song [Teignmouth] I was 17 and it was a train journey down to Devon. I’d just been to see Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’, it was in German so I didn’t really understand what was going on in the opera but then I found it in a book, the actual story line. It was about Tristan who was from Cornwall, those myths are always so complicated. The name Tristan means ‘born of sorrow’. When I did this journey down to Devon I had Tristan on the brain then I wrote the song. It came about last October 2003 in Cornwall, I went down to write songs, to concrete ‘Wind In The Wires’ and open my lyric book, really go through everything with a fine tooth comb. I went on this really amazing walk along, there’s a 10 mile beach, it was out of season, no one around out there, just storms. There were very offensive and dark sand dunes. This character just popped up and the song was written in 5 minutes! It was almost like I had a visitation or something!
Céline: Your music is very well produced. Jo, my partner in crime, actually blew the dust off her violin and started playing again because of you!
Patrick:That’s really good! [Laughs] I think more people should pick up… I always meet people who go “Aww, I used to play violin!” Yea! More violins! I always think it’s weird when these high budget bands come in with these horrible fake strings. I once made this rule to myself, if you can have the real instrument, have the real instrument! Synthesisers are there for synthesising totally new sounds, not for synthesising real instruments.
Céline: I know we were talking about recent bands and the lack of talent, is there anyone that you like or anyone contemporary that you like?
Patrick:I’m not really an active record shopper, I’m normally somebody that the music kind of finds me somehow. Then I go out searching for it. I like the recent PJ Harvey album. I think I may appreciate it in two years!
Patrick asks us if we have any favourite bands or artists from 2004. Jo mentions The Futureheads, Patrick dislikes the ‘Hounds of Love’ cover version, the discussion quickly moves onto Kate Bush…
Patrick:When I was growing up my Mum really played Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. I totally forgot about Kate Bush until I was about 20 so it was only in the last year after Lycanthropy came out. People started saying Kate Bush this, Kate Bush that so I bought ‘Hounds of Love’. Then a lot of people were saying about how she was the same age as me when she released her first album. She’s somebody in the last year that’s really given me confidence that there are ears out there for my work.
We end the interview with talk of kittens, hand-eating terrapins and a homesick pigeon (“which I had for about 2 hours on my 21st birthday”). Patrick will certainly be in great demand throughout 2005, catch him while you can.
Céline Lux & Jo Whitby
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Понедельник, 24.09.2012, 22:25 | Сообщение # 46 |
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| Patrick Wolf’s ‘Sundark and Riverlight’ an Acoustic Self-Portrait
9.24.2012
BY ALEX PANISCH
The singer-songwriter takes a look back at his decade-long career in his latest release
It’s been a decade since Patrick Wolf, the always soulful, often flamboyant, singer-songwriter burst onto the music scene. His first album, Lycanthropy, dazzled critics with its lyrical honesty, sonic complexity, and genre-bending variety (to watch a video we recorded with him from a few years back, click here). Ten-years on, the former busker from South London has stripped down 16 of his favorites and put out an acoustic double album, Sundark and Riverlight. We spoke with Wolf about his current world tour, what’s behind his latest album, and where he sees this all going.
Out: So how’s the tour been?
Patrick Wolf: It’s been so much calmer than most of my tours. It’s a lot smaller touring crew. It’s really a lot more like four friends doing a road trip rather than this kind of huge production and it’s making for more of an intimate energy on stage, a lot more relaxed and just totally about music.
Were you going for a more intimate feel for the tour and the album?
Yeah. Normally when I do an acoustic show, it’s pretty much a one off thing in the midst of some really big, cool production shows. I always found that they were kind of my safe haven away from the lights and the drama of these two-hour long, quite physically demanding shows. So here I am doing a whole tour of it and it’s something I’ve wanted to do.
Back before I released my first album, I used to busk on the streets with my accordion and I used to play at folk music bars and cafes. A lot of people were eating dinner and stuff and it was without any microphones and [the tour] reminds me a little bit of those days. It’s gone full circle.
You don’t use any electronic flourishes on the new album. Why is that?
The albums have been a kind of series of experimentations with different sounds. I was heavily into producing and programming dance music when I was a teenager. Then I fell in love with a different kind of music, music by Joni Mitchell and Lenny Cohen and the craft of singer-songwriting. But I do feel, honestly, that sometimes a song has been lost under tons of noise and production that I had been experimenting with at the time, so this is a real opportunity to expose what the songs really, at the end of the day, are made out of, as narratives. I think it’s giving the songs “make-unders” in away and exposing what they’re really about.
It’s a double album. Does each disc have a distinct theme?
Yes. Sundark is an album that is a collection of songs that were written in loneliness and not really thinking about other people. It may be vaguely hedonistic and misanthropic and quite pessimistic, which has been me at times.
The second disc is more centered on enlightenment and joy. There are songs about relationships or involving other people. So there’s isolation and solitude on one and togetherness on the second disc.
I didn’t go into the studio with this concept. In a way, I took a bird’s eye view on all my work, all the ninety-nine songs that I’ve written, and realized that they do fall into these two categories a lot of the time or they have done over the last ten years. It was the chance to categorize and document my work of the last ten years and hopefully move on as a writer and do something totally new.
Would you say the album’s biographical?
Yeah, I’d say it’s more of a self-portrait of me over the last ten years. It’s not chronological, it’s not in order, but I could tell you about every experience in every song. I haven’t really written too much fiction in my work, so any completion I would make would be some form of a biography, because the songs are biographical.
When you’re not writing for an album or preparing for a tour, what instrument do you like to play when you’re fiddling about the house?
The harp has really always been a grounding instrument for me. It used to be the piano, but I’ve relearned the harp over the last three or four years. I used to play it when I was a teenager and relearning it has been equal to my journey of getting through to a more stable place and to being more in control of my emotions. It’s been a therapeutic instrument to learn. It really does something to me and I could play it for hours on end—and I do sometimes.
Would you say as a compellation, Sundark and Riverlight is saying something?
I think my relationship with my audience and with the world is that when I do something that is a self-portrait it’s not really for myself. I’m not really doing a self-portrait for myself; it’s those personal bits of information that inspire other people. It becomes more of a public portrait. The songs that I have written over the period of time that I thought were the most biographical and the most idiosyncratic parts of my life and experience. Sometimes when I’ve written something I think, “how are people going to relate to this?” Actually those are the songs that people relate to most because they are extremely honest. So I think this album, yes, at one point was a personal project or document, ten years and my personal highlights. I know also how much the song “Paris” means to all the people I’ve got letters from who’ve said it’s “saved their lives,” or from “Bermondsey Street,” I know what it was like playing in Russia to all young gay and lesbian kids in the crowd. In a way I was also choosing songs for the people I knew who would really really appreciate hearing them, now I’m twenty-nine.
How did you come up with the titles?
It was from when I was recording the song “London,” and I rewrote the lyrics. There were two words that really stuck out. The song opens with the word “Sundark.” Some times in London there’s this feeling of threat and this feeling of constant lack of sun or when the sun comes and [London] is just a dark place anyway. “Riverlight” was at the end. It’s the light that reflects off the river and the reflection. Those words really stuck with me. “Sundark”and “Riverlight”is almost like a signing off; it’s almost like a goodbye. It was just two words stuck in my head for a month or two when I was making the album. The two albums needed names and Sundark seemed to be perfect for the misery and solipsism and Riverlight seemed to be perfect for a period of reflection but also hope and optimism.
But it takes me ages to choose album titles. That’s one thing about making albums that I drive myself insane with. If I ever were to be a father, it would drive me insane what I was gonna call my child. I think names are very important. Sometimes the name becomes the album. You spend two years making an album and you change everybody’s perception with one word.
Where do you see yourself going next?
I think about it quite a lot and at the moment I wanted to buy myself some time. I’ve always released an album every one-and-a-half to two years and that was always something I needed to do. My first album took about eight years of writing and I need a lot of time now to take a deep breath and think about how I feel about pop culture and what kind of artist I want to be. The great thrill is I could be absolutely anything. I really have no expectations for myself and put no limitations on what I can do, so I expect anything’s really next for me because I’ve explored so many different things. I’m just so excited, I’ve got a real totally clean slate now and I’ve still got youth slightly on my side at twenty-nine. I really think in a way this is my graduation; I’m about to enter the real world now in terms of being an artist and a musician.
Quote http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2012/09/24/patrick-wolf-sundark-riverlight-acoustic?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OutComFeatures+%28Out.com+Features+%7C+Fashion%2C+Style%2C+Celebrity%2C+Opinion+for+the+Modern+Gay+Man%29
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Понедельник, 24.09.2012, 22:26 | Сообщение # 47 |
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the childcatcher
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| INTERVIEW: Patrick Wolf
Laurie Tuffrey , September 24th, 2012 11:54
We talk to the singer about why he is dedicating Sundark & Riverlight, his new album of acoustic reworkings of songs from his catalogue, to his Russian fans
Long-time Quietus favourite Patrick Wolf has a new album, Sundark & Riverlight out tomorrow, September 25, via Bloody Chamber Music/Essential Music.
To celebrate ten years of making music, he’s re-recorded 16 songs from his back catalogue using exclusively acoustic instruments and analogue recording techniques - have a watch of the video to the new version of ‘Overture’, originally on 2007’s The Magic Position:
Wolf is also dedicating the album to his Russian fans, highlighting the difficulties faced by LGBT men and women in the country. The new version of ‘Bermondsey Street’ features fans’ spoken word versions of lyrics Wolf improvised for the song during a performance in Moscow in 2011, on the day riots began in the city against the anti-LGBT ‘propaganda’ bill being passed in Saintt Petersburg and on the front cover of the album, he holds the “Gusli”, a traditional instrument given to him by his Russian fans, as a message of hope.
We spoke to Patrick, currently in the middle of a US tour about why he wanted to address these issues with the album, as well as the experience of taking a retrospective look over his career.
Last time we talked to you, you mentioned you were thinking of leaving London - are you basing yourself in America now?
Patrick Wolf: No, anywhere that I end up really! So rather than coming back after the show, I've always dreamed of staying on. Part of the tour finished in Paris and I stayed on for a week there, and then I just want to do that for a year or two and see what happens. Put everything in storage and just carry two suitcases - it's a very different way of touring. It's a lot more inspiring, I guess.
Will you be doing a lot of writing on the road?
PW: Yeah, because I think, doing this album, focussing so much on work and stories that I already knew, it gave me so much space in my head, with no deadline or pressure to come up with another album. I wanted it to be like when I first made an album, without deadlines and people looking down over what I was doing, and I guess you have that freedom that comes with travelling, where no one can ever get hold of you.
So will this draw a line under the last ten years of music and send you in a new direction for the next album?
PW: Yeah, I don't think I realised that that would be what I got out of it, because when I'm making an album of new material, I do find that I've lost some emotional baggage. But with this being focussed on the past, I didn't realise that it would have the same effect. It was a bit like having an emotional facelift.
At the beginning, when I had a look over all the songs that I'd written over the years. I was asked to create a biography in book form of my lyrics, and that just seemed like a project that would take me way past the mark of the ten year anniversary, so I ended up making an album instead. But I just felt really old - at 29, I just felt heavy, like heavy with a lot of songs, and I thought I've got to shine a focus on the ten songs, or ten messages, that mean the most to me, so in a way, I can almost forget the last ten years and just take with me, like out of a house fire, the ten things that I would want to save and burn the rest. So it ended up being 16 songs and a kind of double record.
I was able to analyse any repetition in my work - it was like doing three or four months of scrawling, just going through all the lyrics of every song and deciding what I thought was immature and what I thought was not great work and what I thought I could do better with in the future.
What's the selection process? How do you decide which ones you grab from the burning building?
I started grouping things together. I wrote down every song and plastered them all across the studio down at Real World. I went down with absolutely no obligations really, I just booked studio time out of my own pocket and I didn't have to explain to anybody before I went down what I was doing or demo anything. So it left the freedom to really eliminate, in the studio, anything that sounded too similar - I would find four songs that, actually, once you strip away the production and the time they were written in, when you put them next to each other, they were actually maybe too close in terms of subject matter or chord structure.
That made me feel really guilty and really embarrassed, because I felt like I'd done something original and unique and actually when you look at the songwriting, I guess, over five albums, I did spot quite a bit of repetition.
Why was it so important to use entirely acoustic instruments and analogue production processes?
PW: I think that, again, through listening to the albums and the extreme difference in production of each one - the microphones that I used on the first album (2003's Lycanthropy) and the third (2007’s The Magic Position) were really not suitable for my voice. I really didn't realise, because I never went to school for it. I thought it would be nice to give these songs a really classic, really professional engineering style, so it was about shining a light on my voice as it is now and I didn't want too much clutter and production around it.
I don't know what's happened at the moment, but I feel that I'm not connected to electronic music. I don't know if it's that it seems too easy. I just find that everything sounds the same and I know all the plug-ins and all the free software that everyone's using and I don't see much mystery or magic to it at the moment. At the moment, I still believe in electronic music, but I feel that it's hit a ceiling with it all. Things like dubstep, I remember hearing 15 years ago, it's not new to me, a lot of these things people are saying are new.
I'm really obsessed sometimes with what's not cool at the time with making albums, and for me acoustic music is a bit of a dirty word right now. There's a record by Shirley and Dolly Collins, an old English folk record, and you can hear them coughing at the end of the song and they keep it in. It's all medieval - it's totally, totally done organically with one medieval folk drum and a pipe organ and vocal. And then maybe Blue by Joni Mitchell, where there's only ever three instruments maximum, but you just don't lose interest throughout the album. You don't feel "oh my god, I wish there was more!" So I really went down with the three instrument rule.
Was it a case of creative limitation then?
PW: Yeah, definitely. I did have to, otherwise I would have been there for years. I think that all my albums have had an aesthetic before I go in, of what it's going to sound like and what ingredients I'm going to use in the production. So, it was a brand new thing to go totally acoustic with it all. There's only one drum, a snare drum, and there's one bodhran, an Irish drum, but it's as simple as that really. I wanted to really make sure the string and woodwind instruments are holding together rhythmically, that they didn't need a drum behind them, so it was a challenge. I also listened tons to John Cale and Nico's acoustic productions, because to me, I never listen to this and go "oh this is acoustic or electric", I just really get taken to a place that is a really beautiful exploration of instruments. That's why I started doing things like bowing my harp. I had an aesthetic, and I stuck to it.
You recorded in Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, and borrowed a few instruments from him. Did he give you any advice? Any involvement on the record?
PW: No, it was kind of like the Wizard of Oz down at the studios. There was a Yamaha grand piano - it was a shame, it was such a beautiful wooden studio, but I hated the piano and it was really wrong for the record. I asked if there was any way we could hire one in and then Peter Gabriel stepped in and said I could borrow his Bosendorfer from his writing studio, which is the first time it's ever happened. The Bosendorfer is like my dream piano and knowing that it had been behind so many records, that was a nice early blessing on the record.
Did Gabriel emerge from behind a curtain then?
PW: No! It's very expansive; there are three different areas. The whole thing about Real World is that even if there are other bands working there - so like Dappy was actually down there at the same time, and he was trying to buy me out of my studio because he was trying to finish his album and I was holding fast! But I was panicked, because I thought "oh no, it's going to be a metropolis of musicians and people", but I pretty much felt that I was in solitude the whole time.
How do you feel the songs have changed over the course of time?
PW: I think that's all coming through live experience and becoming less scared of changing the song on the night for myself or for the audience or - it's a dirty word! - doing medleys, dropping in bits of songs in at the beginning of others, not like in an ABBA way but in a more experimental way. I love touring so much, but I hate when it becomes like a repetition of set lists. So I'm really experimenting with taking the song up to nine minutes. Basically I just thought about my favourite moments of transformation of the songs live over the years. I sometimes do annual shows the opposite of how the album sounds, with the big orchestra playing at the Palladium or the Nan Goldin classical piece. So I have heard the songs over the years outside of the album briefly transformed.
It feels like, with the new version of ‘Bermondsey Street’ and the image of you holding the “Gusli” on the front cover, the difficulties faced by Russian LGBT men and women is a key theme for the album - why now?
PW: Well, I did my first show in Russia very, very early on. It was one of my first invitations overseas and it was back at the end of Lycanthropy, that tour was pretty much the UK and then Russia: it was so bizarre! It was sponsored by the British Council. There was this real openness at the time to Russia. People were telling me "be careful with this, don't look like this" and I just felt very, very connected to and amazed by the audience. I found them almost 100 times more rebellious and interesting than I would have experienced in rock n' roll crowds in London. So I felt this real sense of liberation - I hadn't sold many records there but they all had these mental bootleg CDs, it was kind of pre-YouTube and they would find self-made recordings and demos and put them on these CDs that they were selling on the streets. I was really shocked and really amazed.
I would go back every few years and it's funny when you see a country go backwards in terms of human rights or culture. I just found it really sad, it's like a friend of yours slowly being eaten up by a disease. One of my best friends and the main violinist in my band is Russian, so we would get her opinion with the politics, because her father lives in Moscow, so we had this overall Russian aesthetic to the tour and jokes. And then, very quickly, over two years, I started to become very interested in this charity All Out, which keeps an eye on international lesbian and gay rights across the world and produces some really fascinating information and the chance to make a difference through petitions.
When the Lupercalia album came out, there was a show we did in Moscow. There was still the petition to change the anti-gay law in Russia, so I was talking a lot about it online and thinking about what it would mean, standing on stage in front of this audience and thinking that I couldn't be honest about who I am and tell people it's okay to be who you are, which is fundamental to performance. Whether you are gay or straight, that power and ability to make people feel okay about being an outsider or to alleviate any suppression even for just an hour during the show, that would be taken away. What I do, when I go to somewhere like Russia or Poland, just the fact that there is an out-gay performer there on stage, and my audience are young gay, my audience is 13/14 year-old girls and boys up to twenties and thirties, it's quite different to how it is in England and America, so I'm like a rebellious figure, I guess, to them. I do speak out and I do try and inspire people to be strong, so I guess it got more like that.
First seeing that on a really personal selfish level, and then seeing how that would spread to that 14 year-old boy dressed up for the show - they all had to change after the show and basically put on tracksuits to leave and feel safe to go home. So I sang 'Bermondsey Street', and I hadn't really had it make any impact on the tour so far, and here it was like the crazy moment of the show. It's quite a subdued song, but people were going mental for the lyrics and so we ended up turning it into a nine minute song, and I ended up improvising some of the lyrics, against the government and "no fear of society" and it was a real moment and me and my violinist were crying and it was really crazy!
So that happened and I came back and started to make this album. The law was passed [bills banning the spreading of pro-LGBT propaganda have been put in place in eight regions in Russia over the last six years] and I realised that it was going to be very hard for me to go back to Russia, hard for my crew, very dangerous, and extremely expensive, because promoters are very on it there - they're aware of what you're thinking, saying and doing and so it's become pretty much impossible for me to go back to Russia until the law is changed. We looked into it, and the only way I can go back now is if I play for aristocrats, people who have tons of money and can have very private shows.
On one of my tours I was given an instrument - all my fans saved up and they bought this instrument called the "Gusli", one of the ancient folk instruments like a lyre, it's a beautiful instrument. Then I just thought I'd dedicate this album to my fans in Russia, because out of anyone, they're the ones that won't be able to see the show, so it's a message of hope to hold that on the front cover. Then I went on YouTube and found the performance of 'Bermondsey Street' that I'd done and offered it to my Russian friends to do spoken word versions. I was going to put them in the five minute bass breakdown at the end, but there was this one that came through in an e-mail and was so passionate and almost like a statement of military intent with so much heart that I thought it had to open the song. And then the most beautiful thing is all the messages of support that came for the issue: on the song we've got Mexican people, Cantonese, Polish. I'm really proud of how it sounds now: I was scared when I made it that the production was too lightweight but now I feel it's really where it's meant to be; hopefully I'll look back on that song and think it will be a moment in time.
Do you think there's any hope in the current situation?
PW: I do because people care, and I think the world is listening this time. Sometimes with international politics, when it comes to lesbian and gay politics, a lot of the time, they're the first rights to go. People should be more aware of it - they're the first scapegoat most of the time, and then women's rights come second. It's interesting that the first big thing was the St Petersburg bill, which nobody cared about to be honest - I wrote to people, friends of mine, celebrities, film stars, to see if anybody would put at least one Tweet aside for this petition. Nobody did, nobody wanted to be involved in it, but then the Pussy Riot thing happened and everybody goes bananas, and I'm so excited that that has happened.
It's true that women's rights and lesbian and gay rights do come hand in hand, but I guess there was never a big press moment [with the LGBT bill]. I do think that, hopefully, we'll get to a point where we don't need those big press scandals, where we can stay a bit more in tune with our brothers and sisters around the world. I think there is a greater window of opportunity now - you can sign petitions to politicians, and after the Pussy Riot thing, I can really see it's exciting that everyone else has woken up to it.
http://thequietus.com/article....erlight
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Вторник, 30.10.2012, 17:40 | Сообщение # 48 |
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the childcatcher
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| I interviewed Patrick Wolf, one of my personal musical heroes, back in October 2009, right before he went on stage in Belgium. The interview was posted on the blogspot, but disappeared because the blogspot got deleted (drama, drama, drama). Patrick Wolf is currently recording his new album The Conqueror, his fifth full-length. (photo)
disco naïveté: This is your first album on your new label ‘Bloody Chamber Music’. You are referring to the English writer Angela Carter, why this reference?
Patrick Wolf: When I was 16, Angela Carter’s books helped me with my lyrics, especially with the language and imaginary I wanted to use. It’s about reality, sexuality, desire, death and life, but it’s told through a wonderful language. I think she works with very powerful metaphors. I always felt very much connected to her for giving me that first inspiration. I think she was the inspiration for changing my name to ‘Wolf’. Music is more than just what we see here with the lights and the concrete sound: it’s about finding your own world.
If I’m not mistaken, Bishi is also referring to Angela Carter with her album ‘Nights at the Circus’?
You just have to find your own favourite book. My favourite was Bloody Chamber, a compilation of short stories. In Nights At The Circus there’s a girl lost in the circus of nightlife, I’m sure Bishi relates very much to that.
You’re known for your extravert clothing-style, changing the colour of your hair, but how important are style and appearance for you? Does it relate to your music?
Well, you just saw that in that other room. There are some true artists, visionaries, out there; there aren’t much of them; I’d like to meet those people. Half about it is looking how I feel, representing how my songs should look. It’s like when you’re directing an opera, you don’t want a character that is a Viking dressed as something else: he should be dressed as a Viking warrior. You have to make sure it’s representative. On the other side it’s about drawing attention, using my looks as publicity, and the voice I have within the media. The people I work with are really great designers and I would like more people to love them as much as I do.
I’m wondering what kind of music you were listening to when you were my age, 18 years old. Have these artists influenced you? And what contemporary artists influence you?
Starting at 18, I think that was a very strange time to me… I was deep in the middle of making Lycanthropy. I was also in a band called ‘Maison Crimineaux’ which was a kind of really bizarre, good, fun band. It was basically only about noises, like terrorist-noises, really hard white noise. I was listening to a lot of industrial music back then. Inspirations for me were people like Grace Jones, I love how she acts on stage. Björk had been an inspiration as well, PJ Harvey, …
Lots of women?
Yeah, I think female creativity is a lot more intelligent. It’s emotional, fearless, that’s the female aspect of music. Men can make female music to: you just need to combine your feminine and masculine energy. Both of these can exist in a man or woman.
So far you’ve recorded four full-length albums, several singles and EPs: of which are these are you most proud?
I’m most proud of just ‘finishing the album’, because you just want to get the record started. It’s a personal victory, something personal to finish. Twelve songs you’re very proud of and represent you and your life, and things you want to say to the world. It doesn’t come naturally. Mhm, it does come naturally, but it takes a lot of living and experience. I’m just proud of the whole journey: getting somebody to believe in my music from day one. All the different business-madness that’s going on, the publicity around the records, the drama’s and scandals, all that kind of stuff: it all seems like a very bizarre journey and the records are just milestones within all that chaos in my life. I look at them as chapters in my life and I can’t really say of which I’m more proud. I think it’s about being a good mother. You don’t pick your favourite child. You love all of them equally.
You’ve explored several genres of music already, such as experimental, more classical music, pop, and lots of mixtures between those: are there any other genres you’d wish to explore?
Yeah, definitely. That’s my mission statement. I don’t want to be forced into something by businessmen or by public, because they want me to create something specific. I’m not going to stop making something because of losing money or audience: I’m on a constant mission.
Are you interested in something like acting in a movie, painting, participating in an opera, or writing the music for an opera, like The Knife did with ‘Tomorrow, in a Year’?
These things have been suggested as I was travelling around the world: there were lots of offers. It’s all about making priorities. A movie in which I got an offer to act in was a remake of ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ in which David Bowie starred. Everyone was like “Oh, you’ve got to go to Hollywood and act in this movie!” and I was like “guys, this is a classic film and why would I want to step on a piece of history?”. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and bad suggestions, I think, and I choose auditions very carefully. In fact I recently did an audition for a movie, but I can’t say which it is, but it’s very exciting. I’d like to look back at my life and see 90% of hard work, making music, and 10% of it as fun.
The past couple of months you’ve performed at a lot of festivals in the whole world, along other artists such as Bat For Lashes, Florence and The Machine, Grizzly Bear, The xx, Fever Ray and many more. Did you went to see any of these bands – or other bands – and did you like their performance, did they inspire you?
Fever Ray is beautiful. I love the album a lot, it’s really original, unique. Festivals are quite messy: you basically arrive and do interviews until half an hour before you go on stage, then you get your hair and make-up done, you get on stage, you throw all equipment on the bus and then you head straight home or to the next festival. You don’t camp for the weekend.
His manager interrupts him and says “You’re not allowed to have fun.”, Patrick laughs and starts talking again…
We have fun in our own way, downloading Girls Aloud albums and stuff like that. I think the biggest music inspiration for me was me and my band making songs on the tour-bus.
What’s your favourite album of 2009?
Buffy Sainte-Marie’s ‘Running for the Drum’. The story of Buffy is really astonishing and I never thought she’d release another album. She’s 67 years old and it’s wonderful for a 67-year old releasing an album. She created a great contemporary album, she even produced it herself, to show that no matter how old you are, you can still make a valid, refreshing album if your ears and eyes are open, and your heart is open to you in these modern times. You don’t have to be an artefact of the time that you were famous in. It’s a really astonishing record, really great. Very inspiring for me, cause I’m 26 but I’ve always said I wanted to make music until the day I die. It’s good to know that my albums won’t get worse and worse: I’ll just get better, like Buffy does.
Recently Morrissey considered participating in Eurovision. How about you, would you like to participate in such a contest perhaps one day?
I love Eurovision! I think it’s a wonderful platform for folk-music, it’s a competition about showing the colour of your country. It’s a song-contest about Europe, you know, and I’d definitely would like to represent my country in this contest. I have written a song that mentions Paris, Berlin and London: wouldn’t that make a perfect Eurovision-song? I’ve done so much travelling around what we call ‘Europe’, since I was young. I’ve seen lots, I’d just have to put all experiences together and make a song out of it.
Lily Allen recently quit music because of the illegal file sharing: what is your opinion about the illegal file sharing and quitting music because of this?
I don’t think she quit music because of the file sharing. There are times in musicians lives where family is more important, or money might be very tricky. Sometimes it can be a dramatic gesture, and some people do quit. But for example Cher has been on a farewell-tour for ten years now. I think Lily will always make music. I personally would never allow something like file sharing or the lack of money within the music industry to stop me from finding a way of being creative. The thing I did very recently with Bandstocks definitely shows that I’m not a quitter, I’m a survivor and I’ll always make sure that my music survives and I’ll always be free to be creative.
Are you going to play Empress tonight? Because you tweeted something about that some time ago and I would love to hear it live.
I don’t have the files, I’ve got to recreate it with my band, which is cool, but… I’m doing a solo-tour next year so I think I’ll put it in the solo-tour-. It’s quite a complicated number, and I love the song. I forget about some of the songs: some of them are really bad. Recently I was like ‘eh, I wrote a song called ‘Empress’… but it’s pretty good in fact’. (laughs)
Patrick Wolf started asking me some questions, all of a sudden. What other artists I listen to, and so on. He tells about how it all started for him in the music-industry 10 years ago and encourages me to keep on writing about music, doing interviews, and so on. He tells me he’s about to do a duet with Florence (and the Machine) soon and I’m sad cause I won’t be there. And then he leaves the room because he has to get dressed to get on stage. And the gig was beyond amazing - of course.
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Четверг, 08.11.2012, 22:50 | Сообщение # 49 |
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the childcatcher
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| The Insurrectionist
04 Jul 2009/0 Comments /in Interviews/by Christopher Bryant
On the mantlepiece in Patrick Wolf’s living room is a framed reproduction of The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis (1856). Chatteron was a poet who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, driven to it both by poverty and the rejection of his work. He was later celebrated by the Romantic poets as a genius. Shelley paid tribute to him in ‘Adonais’ and Keats dedicated ‘Endymion’ to his memory. In ‘The Sun is Often Out’ from his new album, The Bachelor, Patrick laments the death of his friend Stephen, a poet who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames. It is an arresting song, stripped bare to Patrick’s vocals and accompanying strings.
“Although there are lots of explorations on this album of darker times and dark feelings and negativity, I never want to inspire that emotion in anyone else,” Patrick said of this song, which reaches toward its conclusion with the uplift of a choir singing the title. “I want people to explore it and maybe feel some empathy, not to bring them down.” Patrick’s work is steeped in literature, history and art. His work is a tribute to the creative mind and the redemptive power of art, both of which are all too often lacking on the conveyor belt of the music industry.
Two things are striking about Patrick Wolf: first how tall he is, and second how young he is. Although he turned twenty-six at the end of June, The Bachelor is his fourth studio album and it is released on his own record label, Bloody Chamber Music. His first album, Lyncanthropy (2003), was recorded when he was eighteen. This was followed with the practically flawless Wind in the Wires (2005), and the more commercial The Magic Position, released on Universal Records in 2007. Polari talked to Patrick on the eve of his world tour and the release of The Bachelor.
“I feel like I’m only just starting,” Patrick confides. “This album has a confidence about it. I almost feel like it is a debut album. With my own record label my work is now becoming what I want it to be.” The writing and recording of The Bachelor, which was originally intended to be a double album entitled Battle, was bound up with Patrick’s conflict with his record label, Universal, and the consequent contractual obligations.
“Battle was a perfect name as I was going through a lot of battles with Universal at the time in order to produce the album myself, as well as creative battles and personal battles. Battle will be the name of the two albums together at one point. When I decided to release it on my own it seemed to be the most ludicrous shot in the head, to finish the production of two albums and then to finance it. It would easily have been something I’d have wanted to milk out of Universal, definitely, but when it came to my own label I thought, ‘I’m gonna fuck things up myself’. To make two effective albums at the same time, it’s a big feat.” Patrick smiles and adds, mischievously, “Nobody wants to make double-albums anymore. Which made me really want to do one.”
“It was very clear at the beginning that I had about forty songs. I didn’t want to have to throw away some just for the sake of the traditional music industry release plan, or having to wait six or seven months in between releasing one album and recording the next. Normally by the time you’ve finished promoting one album you’re tired of even performing, and you don’t want to go into the studio again, you don’t have the energy to do it, so I didn’t want that to happen again.”
“I knew there were two periods of work being written and documented at the same time. There was the time of The Bachelor years, from when I was 15, 16, about real loneliness and disbelief in love. You’re desperate, reading Thomas Hardy and listening to Joni Mitchell, and just really believing in it, searching for love, but being very skinhead-boot, ‘fuck you, love is for cowards and losers’. Then there was suddenly finding love at the end of that process, but not being able to get into the studio until 6 months later, in the Summer of 2008.”
“I didn’t want to make a schizophrenic record again. I think lots of my albums have had too many personas. Growing older as a writer I want to streamline my ideas more, to make purer communications, so it was good to do The Bachelor, and then the follow up, which wouldn’t be The Groom, but coming away from that thinking and feeling.” The companion record, The Conqueror, is “chaos leading to order”, as Patrick describes it in a press release, “a tribute to a solid type of love, not an exuberant, temporary kind of love, like I sang about on my last album”. The album will be released early 2010. “I’m just finishing off the lyrics for it now,” Patrick discloses, and adds in a conspiratorial whisper, “as we speak”.
Patrick’s own music label, Bloody Chamber Music, was created to facilitate his creative process. The name is taken from Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979). “It was a book that really changed my life. There are three wolf stories: ‘The Werewolf’, ‘Wolf Alice’, and ‘The Company of Wolves’. When I was at school and found out that Little Red Riding Hood had been turned into an Angela Carter story about puberty, about a girl coming of age, I asked my English teacher about it. She explained to me how fairy tales were metaphors for a situation, for life and for experience. I suddenly thought ‘that’s why I want to write lyrics’. It was an awakening, that lyrics could be metaphors. It totally changed my perception of writing.”
“The Bloody Chamber was my first of those books. I was thinking of a name for the record label that was music of the heart, music that wasn’t commercial, music for reasons other than being famous. It was just for the heart. I thought that although the story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is about a womb, I could interpret it as a heart. It was another chamber made of blood. It seemed perfect.” At this point Patrick reverts to his playful self and adds, “And I had played a lot of chamber music when I was young, and I used to think ‘bloody chamber music’! Also it can be like EMI and BMG.” He smiles and pronounces the acronym emphatically: “BCM.”
“It’s just a mad world, the Disneyland of record contracts,” Patrick recalls of the battles with Universal. He does not betray any lasting bitterness about the experience, however, and remains upbeat and jocular when talking about it. “It was a total blessing in disguise. It left me in a really creative empowerment phase. I am happy when I wake up as I don’t have to argue about what I do.”
“I can talk about it now but at the time I was caught up in contracts. It was a tricky period.” He laughs and adds, “It was my Prince ‘Slave’ period.” For an offbeat artist like Patrick, it was the age-old battle of the mainstream conflicting with the alternative. “I never had anything happen against my will. But there were always arguments that had to be had to get things to sound and look the way I wanted them to. It got to the point where it was really counterproductive to even try and make anything. They thought it was just too weird. I was just getting put to the bottom of the scrap-heap of ideas at Universal.”
“I put so much into the album, I thought I had this great idea of where it was going. I was two days away from going to the studio with the strings and the choir. All the arrangements had been finalised. Then there was this phone call saying Universal were too focussed on ‘Orange Music Unsigned’ and working on the Duffy Coke advert than actually caring about where my album was going. They just saw me as a troublemaker.”
“Basically they pulled out at the last minute, when the album was about finished. There were some lyrics, which will be on the next album, about Catholics and Muslims, about Turkish people and English people losing their power over love and identity. Contractually I couldn’t talk about any religious minorities, or majorities, in order not to alienate a certain market. That is one of the ways they got me out of contract.”
The record industry is, so often, advanced capitalism at its purest. It is about creating product first and foremost. The business mind and the creative mind are in conflict in this system when the primary concern is how a work fits into a business model. The rule is that of the lowest common denominator. This invariably leaves no room for one of the primary functions of art, which is to challenge. Patrick is attuned to this on the practical, business side of the industry, but he is also mindful of how the perceived expectations of the audience can be as damaging.
“It’s dangerous to think about the audience too much. If I had I would have compromised more. The litmus test was if I felt uncomfortable with a lyric then it would be the right thing to release because I was pushing my boundaries and not thinking about the type of audience that would be upset with what I was doing. You have to disregard your back catalogue some times, and make what you feel needs to be made, and I think this album was like that. Disregarding your fan base, your audience, and the expectations for you as an artist. Otherwise you might be stuck. The trick is to keep forgetting what you’ve done before.”
That is not to say that Patrick is the archetypal head-in-the-clouds artist who is not aware of how to function within the system. “Real pioneers keep their creative integrity by keeping a good business sense,” he adds. “I hadn’t really heard of the word ‘marketing’ until album three. It was this mad mad word that no-one ever dare spoke in the Indie world. Now I see why it was important to the last album. It’s another headspace I can’t …” He pauses, and shakes his head. “I don’t understand it that much, but I know how it can go wrong. I’m hoping that word of mouth, and the power of blogging, and the spontaneous almost radical punk things on the internet help,” he eulogises and concludes: “Bring power back to the people that really care about music.” That said, Patrick does not discount traditional forms of marketing and advertising. “Really, the tour has to be advertised somewhere.”
Touring, as Patrick tells it, has become a fundamental part of the machine. “It was a huge part of my life at the beginning. I thought that maybe as I get more established and known and successful it would be something I would do less, but it is something I have to do a lot more. It balances out financially the losses that came throughout the last few years. You don’t make money from the album. You make it from live income, and merchandise. So it’s important in order to raise funds, to stay independent and not sell out. If you can create funds there and funnel it back into the creative process, it’s a good place to take it from.”
Patrick is more than aware that the opportunities for musicians have changed in the Web 2.0 era of social networking and illegal downloads, that there is a decidedly negative side. “The internet is just seen as one way of sharing information for free, and the live world, the tactile world, is still seen as somewhere you can make money, to create funds from. I performed at the Tate Modern last year. Nan Goldin, the artist, asked me to do a 45-minute classical piece. That could never have been performed if everyone got in for free. That work could never have happened. Nan could never have come over from New York if piracy was involved.”
“People need to realise that it is the same with albums. They need to invest in the music industry in order to make sure they get good quality work produced in studios. I can list 6, 7, 8 studios that I thought were amazing and would work in for the rest of my life that have closed down because everyone would rather record on GarageBand and LogicPro tools. It keeps their costs down. But with a good studio you can really hear it in the sound recording.”
“It’s a funny time. A state of flux,” Patricks adds, and then slumps in his chair and adds with an air of mock horror, “There should be a positive soon or I’m just going to sit here and get more bitter and miserable”.
It is the side of the internet that has shown its worse face in social networking, in the preference for instant sensation over reflective cognition, for anonymous bullying and for mob rule, that brought this feeling on. “99.9% of the world sits on the fence for far too long and never gets anything done and never experiences anything. If you start to delve into the psychology of a lot of people who spend most of their time on internet, you find they’re not there to change the world, they’re there to masturbate and download free My Chemical Romance songs, and rip people off. Maybe it will change at some point.”
The real problem for an artist like Patrick is that this circles right back to the rule of the lowest common denominator. “So many people think that although they don’t have any journalistic experience, or knowledge of the music industry, or even social awareness, they can still comment on everything in a public forum. I find that very strange. It was not something I was used to when I was younger. The easy scapegoat is the person who is doing something different. When the internet came along the ‘freak’ they wanted to mock they could mock in a very public, Mediaeval English way. Let’s stick them in the stocks and throw rotten apples at them via the internet. I am a big target for a lot of those type of people. I’ve developed a very thick skin. It reminds me of being at school again.”
“I wish that didn’t have to come with it. That wanting to be free, the liberation of just being yourself, that’s why I wanted to be a musician. I thought I could be myself, sing dance and write and have no judgement. But that is exactly what you get: judgement first, ridicule second, and then … bankruptcy third.”
The companion to this is, of course, the all too predictable homophobia. The subject of his sexuality is important to the new albums because of how his relationship with his partner William has defined them. “I won’t put up with it,” Patrick pronounces, and rises in his chair, the air of militancy upon him. “I got it when I was a kid. I’m not doing this anymore.” He laughs, and rolls his shoulders, and says “‘I’m just gonna freak you out by being so sexy you just want to dump your wife and run off with a man’.” And then jumps to his feet to tell a story.
“I was up at six in the morning and I was walking down to London Bridge. These truck drivers stopped and shouted “faggot, pussy boy, lick my arsehole”. I was taking money out of the cash machine, and I was wearing combat shorts and thirty-hole skinhead boots. I thought, if I was sixteen I would turn around right now and walk off and be really upset. But instead I turned around and shouted “lick my cock you fucking dickheads, come up here and lick my cock; actually, no, fuck off because you’ve probably got herpes”. Then they stopped and went silent.”
“And then these tramps behind me shouted ‘You tell ‘em! We’re gonna fight for you’. And these four tramps were behind me – it was like the Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ video. I said “get right down now and fight us. How tall are you when you get out of your truck?” They were waiting for the red light to change. Then one of them shouts again, “Faggot, pussyboy”, and I walked up to them and said, “Come right here I’ll piss in your face”. The lights changed and they sped off. And all these tramps are high-fiving me. And at the end one of them said, “’ave you got a pound?’.”
The performance over he laughs, and notes, “People who are really fucked up, and do really dirty things where everything is smoke and mirrors, they’re the ones that always shout at you.”
http://www.polarimagazine.com/interviews/interview-patrick-wolf/
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| jaqkvade | Дата: Пятница, 05.04.2013, 21:23 | Сообщение # 50 |
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the childcatcher
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| Wednesday 3 April 2013, 11:32
Q&A: Patrick Wolf
Marking a decade since his first EP release, Patrick Wolf last year recorded new acoustic versions of a selection of songs from his back catalogue. Split into two halves, ‘Sundark & Riverlight’ explores both Wolf’s darker material and his more hopeful work.
Having toured with a show based on the acoustic reworkings of his songs, Wolf returns to London this Saturday to perform at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s Southbank Centre.
Ahead of the show, CMU’s Andy Malt caught up with Patrick to find out more about ‘Sundark & Riverlight’.
AM: What inspired you to re-record a selection of your songs?
PW: I wanted to spend some time connecting with my instruments, playing totally live music again. On my ‘Lupercalia’ tour I had a big band so that I could perform and sing, but during that time I also started relearning the Celtic harp and, after touring around Eastern Europe with 22 people in one bus, I craved some musical solitude for a bit.
I had been invited by Tilda Swinton and Sandro Kopp to sing a couple of songs at the opening night of Sandro’s art exhibition in New York. After that big tour, for that show I simply took a baritone ukulele and sang a few of my songs acoustically in a gallery. It reminded me of how I started out, just me and my instruments singing for my supper in folk clubs.
It was an inspiring week, and I felt so shattered from the tour that I quickly fell into a warm loving winter embrace with New York and stayed there in an old monastery. I was in discussions about writing an autobiography, but realised I was only 29 and not about to die, so it might be more fun to spend that time making a kind of musical biography instead, marking the ten years since my first EP release.
AM: How did you select which songs to re-record?
PW: I wanted the album to be as spontaneous as my live shows are, where I change the setlist every night depending on the country or the weather. So I went to [Peter Gabriel’s] Real World Studios with just one week booked and 100 songs I had written in the ten year period. I had every song title up on the studio wall and crossed out songs as I played them.
AM: How did you approach rewriting or reinterpreting those songs?
PW: I really have age to blame for this. At 29, my voice has grown a new baritone area, and over the years of touring a lot of my songs have grown strong and anthemic. As a result, some of the songs seemed slightly immature to me when I heard the original recordings.
My relationship with my songs is that as long as I keep playing them, they keep on evolving. I find new ways of playing them, and different aspects of the song with age and experience. I make records by my own rules and the rules of a nineteen year old are very different to the rules of a 29 year old!
I really love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Travelogue’ album where you can hear the age and experience in her voice singing songs from her past, telling a story of her life so far.
AM: Was the recording a difficult process then?
PW: It really did my head in, to be honest, but where I am as a writer now is so exciting because I have learnt so much about my repetitions of words and melody, it was the best kind of brain cleaning and learning process. I ended up staying at Real World for two weeks and breaking my ‘one instrument and one vocal’ rule by adding compositions of the string and woodwind arrangements.
AM: At what point did you decide to split the album into two halves?
PW: I always want my albums to have a narrative, and the Sundark and Riverlight double concept came when I realised that most of my work split into two blood types – firstly, the solitary introspective type looking for purpose and asking questions to self, and then secondly the more philanthropic person, loving and caring.
AM: In terms of the recording process, presumably that was very different to your usual approach, with the songs being so much stripped down. How did you find that compared to previous records?
PW: I was ready for it and, in a way, was experimenting to see if the song became stronger without the original productions. The music that I keep listening back to over the years has had simple productions – Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Buffy St Marie – I wanted to hear a powerful production from using as little as possible, it was really exciting and challenging to me, and has definitely changed the way I will approach future recordings.
AM: Speaking of which, what are your plans for a completely new studio album?
PW: I’m very excited to say that I’m setting my own studio up this month and it will be the first time I can have all my instruments in one place since I was about 21, because of all the touring. My first project is to produce an album of modern day Appalachian folk songs for a really gifted singer songwriter I met called Calpernia, who hails from Nashville, then a film score for a film by John Jenkinson called ‘Pelicans’. I also have a lot of songs prepared to give to other bands and singers that I want to finish off first.
AM: You’ve released music using the major label system, self-releasing with the fan-funding model, and now via your own label as a subsidiary of a major. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each and why did you come back to the label system?
PW: Actually, and I’m sure this will be read by people who have worked with me who will laugh at this, but I really like being told what to do sometimes, at least to have some form of protagonist, and I still would like to meet a real David Geffen character in the music industry.
I read an amazing book called ‘Laurel Canyon’ about the history of the American music industry and I still have a romantic idea of Joni Mitchell and David Geffen supporting each other and entering a long-term relationship of releasing albums.
To be honest, I would love to say I made six great albums with a record label like Joni did, or PJ Harvey has with Island, but I’m really proud of the adventure I’ve been on. I’ve learnt so much about the industry and still feel I haven’t compromised my music or lost any passion for making it.
Of course, there are advantages to working with a major: I have a big imagination and love to make amazing videos, to bring in wonderful huge string sections, and to record in the most beautiful studios in the world. The big labels have the scale and budgets to achieve this. Though major label budgets probably used to be bigger in the past than now. But either way, I always make the best of whatever I have.
AM: How do you feel about the music industry today, compared to when you first entered it? It is a more positive place?
PW: Well, I think it’s quite the opposite. There was a certain gung ho and risk taking attitude when I started that seems to have disappeared with the panic of the digital age. I guess it’s a sign of a long recession, but something will kick in. The United Kingdom is so pretty depressing right now, I really hope the music and entertainment industry still remembers it has some duty to inject some colour, character, bad behaviour and excitement into society and make waves.
For me everything seems too staged, produced and conservative. I would love for Malcolm McLaren to come back from the dead and to take over ITV or the BBC. The talent show era is ending now, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative breakthrough moment for the outsiders, like ‘Top Of The Pops’ or any TV show that helps the music industry launch a star into the mainstream, apart from award ceremonies I suppose. It would be nice to have at least one or two shows people could connect with.
I do think it’s an exciting time for new artists, with all the free online publicity available, and I like that there’s a huge return to live performance and vinyl, that’s quite exciting. But away from the computer this seems to have been a very culturally vapid and meandering decade, empty high streets and Frankenstein music. And being online seems to take away some of the enigma needed to create something otherworldly to inspire people.
Some new movement is going to happen soon, I hope. We now have unbridled amounts of potential with technology, but we are just at the tip of an iceberg of what’s to come. Growing up in South London I remember as a kid the bleakness of the 80s recession and cherish the fantastic stuff that came out if it. Things have to get bad to get better.
AM: You’re performing at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London this weekend. Are you performing acoustically, or will it be the full-blown Patrick Wolf experience?
PW: It’s ‘Sundark & Riverlight’ live, so its totally acoustic, but the point was to make acoustic medieval folk be an interesting sound again. As a band, we hold down a tight rhythm between the accordion player and my violinist. I go between the grand, my viola, the Celtic harp, the uke and my new tenor guitar, which adds so much weight to old uke written songs.
I see people get out their seats and dance a lot, I encourage any questions, heckles or requests, and I want the evening to feel like you’ve asked me to play some songs for you after a long dinner at my house. It’s a different kind of full-blown experience, I guess. There will be guest turns and David Coulter will be playing musical saw, Serafina Steer is an amazing harpist singer-songwriter and I hope we get to sing a song together.
http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/qa-patrick-wolf/
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