Patrick Wolf - The Sugarmill, Stoke - 27/2/07
5/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
When trying to think about how best to illustrate what Patrick Wolf is like live, we'd toyed with the idea of writing the word 'genius' a thousand times, we'd thought about pointing you to his album and saying that live it's a billion times better... heck, we'd even thought about publishing photographs of us pleasuring ourselves to the shear marvel and gob smacking amazement that is the Wolf... but in the end we settled on walking you through just why this guy is one of the, oh bugger it, he is the best solo artist in the country...
The first thing that hits you like a lemon sodden sledgehammer is the capricious and childlike charm that masquerades behind Patrick's ominous (and decidedly homoerotic) performance. When he adorns the stage there's an enormous amniotic presence that shields you from whatever else is going on in your life like a foil blanket to a refugee or a hug from your mum when you were a nipper. His presence is glorious and overpowers any preconceptions you may or may not have towards him or his genre of music, which is in itself hard to tag. To say folk implies that he's trying to detach himself from practicality, to say electro would put him into an already infested field and to say indie doesn't give him enough characteristic credit. Crying out 'Celtic influenced glam-pop' doesn't even give him a wide enough birth as the elation that is Patrick Wolf is that it's not easily categorised.
One second you could be hearing a trance anthem, building up into a moment of pure excitement, and only seconds later you're wrapped in a sober shroud of delicate and ambient piano fluttering that melts your mind into a mangle of mashing emotions and desperate ticks of joy spliced anxiety. Even at the best gigs in your life there's a sense of clockwatching but with the Wolf there's only dismay as each song draws to an end and you're left circling the dancefloor in a howling mess waiting for the next track to kick in so you can preserve the sense of rapture that he's built you up to. Unlike most artists, (as much as we love the majority of music with any kind of significance and honesty), Patrick manages to not only shift through genres within a setlist but during a 4 minute song he'll take you through the myriad of influences that have, in some pitiable and minute way, inspired it.
Like his clothes, there's a clear circumstance of DIY to the set, and as the live performance differs so much from the album it's the damaged notes and imbalanced volume levels that bring certain aspects of the music forward in ways that you just can't get from the recorded sound. His basic and tiered rendition of 'Magpie' flowed through the motionless and speechless crowd as slickly as that 9th cider that you're sure you shouldn't have had and what's more amazing is that songs that should melt into obscurity, as they do within the new LP, suddenly become the highlights of the whole show, lurid and memorizing.
You could spend a week on the road with Patrick Wolf and see seven utterly different shows ranging in scale, dimension and personality, and you could say the same about a seven minute period. The reason that you just can't get bored in the least by this guy is that unlike his closest rivals, in the form of Jeremy Warmsley and Larrikin Love, he's constantly shifting and altering personas on stage like a one man super-group. You can easily say that Arcade Fire have a monopoly on awe-inspiring live music as they're a true wonder to behold and there's a sense of anarchy to a well tuned performance, but if Arcade Fire are the pinnacle of where live music performed by a band is, Patrick Wolf is among the unsurpassed representations of what a solo performer can achieve with just the minimal, albeit respected, of backing support.
OK, so why are you gonna shell out a tenner to see this fella doing what he does best? Simply because whatever type of music you like, from glam to punk and from dance to folk, he's taking it all in his stride - like some kind of super robot from the future who's taken all the best bits from the history of music and lashed them into an hour of flawlessly designed musical accomplishment. Even taking away the music side of things, Patrick is a fantastic performer who makes an acapella version of 'Moon River' sound kind of cool and throughout the show finds himself constantly hovering around the stage like a lost child who's found the doorway to Narnia. A lot of artists have to work to bring you into their minds but from the opening two seconds of the set he's in your head, dragging you in humming and clapping like a mental case at a theme park. With some flamboyant and sensual dancing you're led into his world of sparkly tops and glittery eyeliner and although you could picture him renting himself out at a Soho man-love strip joint, more worryingly you can picture him delicately reading children's classics to a room full of astonished and spellbound infants.
During the course of the evening Patrick must have played seven or so instruments ranging from a ukulele to a theremin... no, seriously a theremin; hat metal stick that makes a weird high pitched noise when you draw your hand towards it - and what's more magical is that without it you would have missed it. One of Patrick's many abilities lies in this talent of using unorthodox instruments to gain the temper and sound he wants and he's not anxious to voice his opinions on what he hears regularly asking for various aspects of the sound to be turned up depending on the song, the most exciting of which was when he ordered the beats to be turned up as high as they'd go.
Patrick Wolf has a stage show to match his bohemian appearance and though you can stand back and admire his presentation as the gleaming demonstration of music is it, you're offered the possibility to become attached to him and suckle at his proverbial teat of fascination. At moments you catch yourself closing your eyes in pure browbeaten pits of passion to strip out all toils of the senses and focus on the sound alone as though in a hypnotic trance, mellowed and sustained. At other times you're tapping your foot like a deranged whippet with Tourettes, but the inevitable effects of a Wolf gig take everybody in the same way. No matter how you're bared, desecrated or calmed by Patrick you're undeniably left outside the venue on the phone to loved ones telling them that you've just seen the best gig of your life as others pass out on the street sobbing into their empty cider cups knowing that they've just been at one of the central moments in their life... and it's now over.
Like a multifaceted film you get the impression that you've not really immersed the whole affair and you can only wish you could go back and do it all again to find out what you missed, pick up on the hidden bits and relish in the intricacy of the experience. It's beyond miraculous, from 'Get Lost' to 'Accident & Emergency'; it has taken music to that much acclaimed level of social respect known as unforgettable. Even hours after you've made your way home you can still close your eyes and picture him falling about the stage from microphone to piano and beyond, and with a sense of circumstance, being aware that what you've just witnessed is nothing short of historic. We're not saying that every show Paddy does is a one of a kind, far from it... what we're saying is that he gives this random and spontaneous impression of uniqueness that slates any performance into distinctiveness, and whether fact or fiction, it's none the less brilliant to behold.
We could belt on for days about each second of Patrick's live show but as there's not even close to enough column inches to express fully what we want to, we have to plead that you go along and see him wherever and whenever he may strike next, and with a pose we might add. If you deject yourself post gig and feel anything other than subterranean ardour for this lad, you've got problems, and though we don't like to tell you what to listen to, in this instance we're putting our necks out and stating for the record that Patrick Wolf is a fucking genius of music. A living legend who's taken all the best bits from every song ever made and compressed them into an album, and a show, worthy of textbooks and a landmark that in years to come people will look back on and say, "wow, so that was the apex of human progress in 2007".
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