‘I got up, covered in blood’: Patrick Wolf on surviving addiction, bankruptcy and a hit and run

This is something I’m ready to talk approximately,” says Patrick Wolf, staring out over the glowing calm of the Channel in this vivid day. “I don’t want sympathy – I’m grateful for the revel in because it’s led me so far.”

Scratching a triangle directly to a concrete bench with a chunk of white chalk that has fallen from the cliff at the back of, the 39-yr-old musician is frank yet correct-humoured as he opens up approximately his tumultuous decade, which involved dependancy, grief and financial disaster. It all bureaucracy the narrative of The Night Safari, his first new song in view that 2012. Its launch also marks two decades on account that his debut album, Lycanthropy, a collision of viola people and digital pop that was as stark a contrast to the scrappy indie of the time as his home made garments and ambiguous sexuality were from all the ones lads in thin denims. This become an artist used to no longer fitting in.The young Patrick Apps had followed the “Wolf” personality as a defence against schoolyard bullies, a reinvention that informed Lycanthropy’s songs, many written all through the ones fraught teenage years, about self-resilience, surviving abuse and the damaging appeal of London. It become a precocious yet honest report that won Wolf committed fanatics but consists of a hint of the fall that become to return. “On Lycanthropy the motto is: ‘I’ll do that by myself, be your own hero, be your very own saviour.’ I determined out what occurs if you observe that common sense afterward – lifestyles ends.”

After 2005’s Wind within the Wires, a romantic tribute to escaping to the wild Cornish coast, Wolf’s third report, The Magic Position, his first for a prime label, become the begin of a adventure that embraced mainstream pop however ended in him losing all feel of his artistic identity. Management and A&R people became “authority figures” who interfered with his vision, particularly on 2011 album Lupercalia: “You lose your primary hues,” he says. “If I consider Lupercalia now, it’s like arms around my neck.”Standing out commenced to be a curse as Wolf became “spiritually exhausted” with the media’s consciousness on his sexuality and appearance. “I spent a whole lot of time saying ‘Look at this album that I’ve made’, and all people else going: ‘Flamboyant!’” he remembers. “But that’s simply how I seemed; my sexuality turned into simply who I became.” Trying to place an stop to what he calls the media’s “clownification” of his identification, the 2012 Sundark and Riverlight compilation became a folk remodeling of his discography that he believed is probably a innovative swansong. “I idea: Patrick Wolf is performed, see you in the obituaries. Luckily, that didn’t show up.”

Over the next decade Wolf “fell out of affection with my vocation”, thanks to the toxicity of his courting with the tune industry and a longstanding addiction to alcohol and tough pills. He adopted “magical thinking” to set his existence back on target, touring Dungeness to ruin a bottle of gin and throw it into the sea, even employing an exorcist to cleanse his studio. He insists that this wasn’t “rock’n’roll” behaviour, however fantasy and desperation. “I blamed the spirit global for the reality that I became an alcoholic and an addict.” He laughs at his misguided thoughts. “Just visit a meeting and talk about what’s going on!”There turned into plenty to speak about. In 2015 his mother become diagnosed with most cancers, and inside the same month, on a ride to visit the Italian villa of the composer Puccini, Wolf turned into critically injured in successful-and-run. “Apparently,” Wolf says, “I got up, blanketed in blood, and said, ‘Let’s go to the seashore!’” He changed into unable to walk for some time. “It was the universe pronouncing, ‘Slow down, your mother is ill, you’re fucked.’ Everything turned into chasing me.” It became to get worse.In 2017 he changed into declared bankrupt as a part of a agreement with the tax government, which coincided with him getting into recuperation for the primary time. The direction to sobriety became tough: he relapsed after his mum died in 2018, and sooner or later cease consuming 3 years in the past. He moved to a flat in a Lewisham tower block, setting up his studio with fastidious interest to element, proper down to sourcing the proper colour for lyric books. Yet the idea of making song became not possible. “For a long time, all I desired changed into silence,” he says. “If a pal cited Patrick Wolf I would shiver, I felt so indifferent from the whole assignment. I was just no longer there due to the fact I’d been inebriated for goodbye.”

The leap forward got here when he travelled beyond the London borders that he should see from his eighth-floor window, in the direction of the sea. Ever considering his financial disaster, the Kent coast had emerge as a place of recovery; now it have become an suggestion. Once lockdown ended, Wolf left London for a terrace house near the ocean, installation his studio in a lawn shed and started out a Patreon as a supply of earnings and method of reconnecting along with his in advance work and nonetheless-dedicated fanatics. Each day, he ran along the shore to a derelict industrial web site that, peculiar as it could seem, “became the primary region that felt like home”.