Still Escaping

In response to the polite well-being queries that kick off most phone conversations, Patrick Wolf is curt: “I'm very busy,” he says from the kitchen table of his London home as he prepares artwork for his forthcoming ten-year, double-album retrospective Sundark & Riverlight. It comes as a shock to hear his quiet, gentle voice given Wolf's dramatic, well-projected vocal, though it does speak volumes of the flamboyant vigour injected into his musical persona.

Wolf began his journey as a recording artist with the release of a debut EP, which intended to capture the raw energy of a 19-year-old earning his chops in folk clubs, galleries and on the streets, though his inquisitive nature saw him incorporating samples and loops across five albums of broadly defined pop experimentations.

Stripping back to the basics, Sundark & Riverlight sees Wolf returning to his first love. “Well, it's a retrospective record about the last ten years and yeah, it's like my favourite songs that I thought were kind of the most personal songs that I'd written, and songs that I feel if I were to put them together would make some form of a musical biography, I guess. I wanted to record them in a kind of classical, medieval folk way, which is like my favourite kind of music, but I've never really made a fully acoustic album before so this is my first,” he says.

“It was nice to work totally away from digital computers and away from the whole... I dunno, electronic kind of thing of building tracks up within our computers and work totally in a classical [way]. Going back to when I studied arranging and composition and stuff, it kind of reminded me more of what I wanted to do when I was a teenager than what I actually ended up doing over the last seven, eight years – kind of a pop musician.”

Video to coincide with release of Sundark And Riverlight.

With Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios and Bosendorf grand piano at his disposal, Wolf fully immersed himself in his retrospection. “Well it's a very, very beautiful studio and I needed to get away from London. I needed to get away from a city environment and from being in the reach of anybody that wanted me to explain what I was doing during the early stages of creating something; you don't want anybody to kind of ruin your joy. So I didn't want any managers or bands or anyone coming along… It's built on a big lake and it was just nature, and me and my engineer in a really beautiful wooden room which hasn't really been used for a long time in a way that I think it was built for. I kind of brought it back to life for a couple of weeks, which was cool.”

Dividing the double-album between light and dark, Wolf explains the contradictory mindset that produced each side. “It's either moments where I remember being in a lot of misery and I was trying to communicate hope to myself, and there were times I was really, really in a state of happiness that I would communicate a lot of darkness and maybe be quite aggressive. Maybe sometimes when you think you're the happiest, you're actually being hedonistic and kind of destructive; when you're at your most miserable, you're actually at your most comfortable, so looking back at ten years of life experience, there's a hell of a lot of ups and downs and complicated emotions going on,” he reveals candidly.

Often finding that his songs would evolve as they enjoyed a new life on the road, Wolf's self-produced collection features updated lyrics and arrangements, though he's still too close to the project to be sure what to make if it. “I'm not really sure at this point; I think I'm not sure whether it was worth it,” he says with a slight, almost inaudible chuckle.

“I only just mastered the album today. You never know how it's gonna be received, and I'm not sure whether it was actually totally exhausting and draining or it was worth it really. [This will come] only when I've had time to rest or kind of think about what was positive about the creative experience… Once a record's finished it's not my responsibility, it's not really my possession any more, so it just depends whether people care about it or not. But that's not what validates the creative process, it's more what I feel I've learnt from it on the other side. But it's too close to kind of understand at the moment I guess.”

Wolf admits to a tendency of feeling “quite allergic” to anything freshly written, which means he is only now able to understand the achievements of his last studio record, 2011's Lupercalia. “I'm very proud of that album. I think that it's done two things; it's really showed and still does continue to make people very happy with the songs, and it also kind of I think shows a diversity in sexuality and to be confident with your sexuality, no matter straight or gay, transgender or bisexual – just to almost not feel so much like an outsider the whole time and to feel all that domestic bliss. I think it was quite a contemporary statement about love and freedom of love. Now I can see the good in that record and I'm proud of it; I'm proud I made that statement with it.”

In the meantime, the task at hand for Wolf is to figure out how to translate all this work into a live performance. “I've just been having a lot of meetings about the way to recreate this album with just three musicians and yeah, each album needs its own band and each album needs its own aesthetic and touring regime. So I'vetried to keep it half kind of like when I first started touring, which was just me and my instruments. And then I've found a really great multi-instrumentalist who will accompany me on tour – and we're gonna be swapping a lot of instruments and playing with loops and stuff and everything's going to be totally acoustic…”

Playing the finest theatres on offer in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, Wolf is chuffed about the opportunity to perform at the Opera House during his Australian visit, though he's particularly excited by the chance to rekindle an important friendship. “I'm going to be spending five days in Melbourne before I go flying to New York, and I have to visit a very dear friend of mine who helped me run away from home actually when I was younger and looked after me like a kind of big sister, so I'm looking very much forward to seeing her again,” he says with quiet joy.

“I have a theory that I ran away from school, I ran away from home straight onto the road and making albums and music and never really stopped – I'm still on that adventure. I like escapism, I like escaping – I'll see as much of the world as possible.”

Patrick Wolf will be playing the following shows:

Friday 7 September - The Tivoli, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 8 September - Sydney Opera House, Sydney NSW (Sold Out)
Sunday 9 September – Sydney Opera House, Sydney NSW
Tuesday 11 September - The Forum, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday 12 September - The Gov, Adelaide SA
Friday 14 September - Fly By Night, Perth WA