Patrick Wolf’s third album, The Magic Position, bursts with
songs as polychromatic as a Pantone wheel. Wolf’s figure is trim, his
dark eyes and sharp cheekbones eminently photogenic; British fashion
line Burberry recruited him to model for their fall 2007 campaign. He
boasts a captivating backstory—child prodigy, teenage
runaway—and radiates is-he-or-isn’t-he? sexuality. Like
Britain’s other skinny, postgay pinup boys (Mika, Jake Shears), Wolf
might appear to have just sprung out of a comic strip, but his vibrant
music doesn’t just slap a fresh face on time-tested pop formulas.
Wolf has issued three daunting full-lengths informed by British folk
idioms, classical violin, and early 20th-century electronic composers;
he namechecks Berio and Boulez, not Marc Bolan. MySpace buzz? That’s
nothing: Leigh Bowery’s shocktastic ’90s band Minty numbered among his
earliest patrons. From busking with an accordion on the Thames-spanning
Hungerford Bridge, he advanced to studying composition at Trinity
College.
Surveying the cover of The Magic Position, it’s tempting to
poke fun at the 24-year-old. Dressed in scarlet knee pants, floppy
locks dyed to match, he poses on a carousel, straddling a miniature
donkey. Precious? Perhaps. But once the garrulous baritone opens up, it
becomes apparent that, as with prime David Bowie and Kate Bush, Wolf
approaches extramusical elements—videos, live performances,
promotional photos—as components of an integrated aesthetic. His
eye-popping threads weren’t chosen by a stylist, they were dictated by
the music.
Just as modulation from minor to major key in classical music
traditionally signals emotional uplift, Wolf aspired to progress past
the darkness of his previous albums, Lycanthropy (2004) and
Wind in the Wires (2005), with The Magic
Position.
“I had this abstract template of ideas that led me through:
Technicolor music, very high fidelity, no messiness, no noisiness,”
Wolf says. “Music that was clean and pure, and that reflected the
feeling of joy, so you don’t feel sad or sorrowful. There are no dirty
emotions there.”
The 13 originals bubble with chirruping woodwinds and bright,
ascending keyboard runs. The rhythms pack the percussive wallop of a
toddler banging on an overturned plastic bucket. The eeriness of
earlier work is not banished entirely (check out the sudden apparition
of Marianne Faithfull on “Magpie”), but it is applied very
sparingly.
While writing and recording, Wolf cocooned himself in a physical
space that nurtured this mindset. “In my studio, I always try to set up
the surroundings of making that record, in the same way that I might
take the steps to make a music video afterward—translate the
musical to the visual,” he says.
Had House & Garden dropped in while Wolf made The
Magic Position, they would have discovered surroundings pitched
somewhere between an amusement park and a gingerbread house.
“Everything in the bedroom was gingham,” Wolf says. The lighthearted
mood didn’t stop at the furnishings, either. “I listened to a lot of
German children’s music, glockenspiels with little childlike voices on
top.” The 1952 Danny Kaye cinema fairy tale Hans Christian
Andersen was also a staple. “That inspired a lot of the emotion on
this record.”
When he first toured to promote the album, the change of tack
startled fans in small British hamlets expecting his dark, romantic
leanings of yore. “I wore this dinosaur-goes-to-the-disco outfit, with
padded spikes like a stegosaurus,” he recalls. “I just wanted to drink
a bottle of Baileys, and cheer people up with some great pop
music.”
Once The Magic Position hit North America in May, however,
Wolf started receiving warmer receptions—particularly in our
backyard. “The Sasquatch! Festival, actually, was the first time those
songs saw a bit of daylight, and people got to experience them in a
more traditionally happy, optimistic
way—not just in some
dark nightclub,” he says. “It was sunshine and a bit of cider,
happiness and community.”
With autumn underway, Wolf predicts current dates will be less
exuberant. “I’m a very seasonal creature, so there is a bit of a slip
down the pessimistic ladder,” he says. “But hopefully in a good way.”
And when he returns home to complete work on his next record, it will
be to appropriate décor.
“The album I’m making now is a
dark, messy turmoil,” he says.
“My studio
is a mess of wires, torn fabrics, and dirty
curtains. It’s gone from Disneyland to
a haunted house.”
