Something For The Weekend: Patrick Wolf's cultural picks

Patrick Wolf is a UK singer-songwriter who mixes electronics and samples with a wide range of instruments to form a fusion of jazz, folk and electronica.

With the release of 2003's acclaimed Lycanthropy, Patrick made a name for himself as a singular creative force unafraid to break boundaries.

Over the next ten years, he released four more lauded albums, Wind in the Wires (2005), The Magic Position (2007), The Bachelor (2009) and Lupercalia (2011)) copper-fastening his reputation as one of the most talented and idiosyncratic musicians of his generation.

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Following a hiatus, in 2023 Patrick marked the 20-year anniversary of his first release with his EP The Night Safari, followed by a collection of B-sides and other rarities, The Circling Sky.

Currently working on a new album to be released later this year, Patrick Wolf performs in the National Concert Hall on Friday 10th May, as part of his The Crown of Stars tour.

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We asked Patrick for his choice cultural picks...

FILM

I’m currently on a night train to Rome from Prague on tour and am watching Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in preparation for a pilgrimage to his little basement museum before soundcheck later when I arrive. His work is a world of magic realism that I feel at home in.

I spend more time watching films than listening to music, a lot goes straight into my eyes and out of my mouth. But the one that stayed in my brain and found a place in my heart too recently was Enys Men, watched during this last winter alone, writing my album out in my house on the east Kent coast. I felt both seen and understood by this film on some existential levels, it was very beautiful.

The last great Irish film I saw was The Hole in the Ground. I’m not sure how well known it is, but it reminded me of the dark-sided imagination that would come to my sister and I looking out into the black sky of night above the distant woods seen from my grandparents’ house in Clonakilty.

MUSIC

I decided to learn to drive last year and bought an old 4x4 when I passed my test, with only a CD player, so it’s forced me to listen to music, which I’m grateful for. When I’m making an album, I tend to shut off from listening to anything other than what I’m working on, and this album has been almost a decade in the making.

For my first few months’ road adventures, I bought the CD single of Pretty Good Year by Tori Amos which was my first cassette single and this led me to reconnect to most of her albums, Boys for Pele and Scarlet’s Walk, both are my two car favourites. I listened to her audiobook Resistance on my first long drive. Entering my third decade as a songwriter, I needed to hear this. It was incredibly inspiring and affirming.

The soundtrack to Carrington by Michael Hyman helps with my nihilistic moments as does Vivaldi’s Concertos for Anna Maria which helps with not entering a death match with Kentish drivers. His Concerto in A minor was the first major piece I learned as a violinist.

BOOK

When I left Vienna on this tour a few days ago I decided to start reading Ludwig Wittgenstein as a way of connecting to the city a bit more. I am deep in Philosophical Investigations and doing my head in, for what benefit I’m not sure yet.

I’ve been reading mainly non-fiction work in the last few years, gathering local folklore and esoteric dictionaries, geo-political research books about the landscape I’m writing about, my new home on the North Sea. To share those titles now would probably give away much of what the album is about.

In terms of fiction, the most informative book in the last few years I read was The Master by Colm Tobin. My mother used to give me his books for birthdays or Christmas, so I sometimes hear her voice when I read his work. In The Master, the writer Henry James moves to Rye, a few towns away from me now. There were passages of writing that explained that speed and rhythm of my own life as I was reading that was deeply comforting.

I feel the same with The Waves by Virginia Woolf which Is the only book I took with me on tour, a paradise of words to escape to when I’m being scolded by Wittgenstein.

THEATRE

It’s a very rare event to go to London unless it’s to my engineer’s studio to work. But my old school friend Johnny Flynn was doing a play with Mark Gattis, The Motive and The Cue, that I went to see. We used to sit next to each other in the orchestra so there’s something joyful in watching his trajectory through stage and screen.

Sunset Boulevard was wild at The Savoy, I think I can only enjoy musicals if they are somewhat demented and unhinged, and this was both in a very innovative and sophisticated way. I will be following the director Jamie Lloyd in fascination to see what comes next in his body of work. I do hope to see the play London Tide soon, with music written by PJ Harvey who has been a life-long inspiration to me as a songwriter

I have become fascinated by and fixated on the actress Carrie Coon recently, something about the devastatingly graceful and malevolent delivery and demeanour of her character creations really speaks to me. I’ve become a completist of her work and recently finished season two of The Sinner, which was her cult leader masterpiece.

Otherwise In terms of television, I am working my way through quite a lot of vintage drama, there is not much that is made today that moves me in the way I want television to do if it’s going to take up so much of my time. So recently Portrait of a Marriage, A Dance to the Music of Time and The Camomile Lawn have all been beautiful things to me.

GIG

Like going out to plays, I am rarely able to go out to see live music. I’m also a couple of months from my fourth year sober and the idea of being in a room of other drinkers is no danger but has really lost its fascination for me.

But in my little harbour town in our beautiful music hall, I went to see my barber’s band The Great Malarkey who were astoundingly massive and joyful, I don’t think she will have time to cut my hair when the rest of the world boards their ship.

My friend and neighbour Nadine Shah played a windswept and divine show out on the clifftops near our houses that has stayed with me too. We are connected as siblings by the same manager. I hope to see one of her big shows coming up for the Filthy Underneath album she just released. She really has her audience spellbound by the end of the first song, that is quite a rare and benevolent ability I urge anyone to go be cast under.

ART

There is an abundance of beautiful, wonderful incisive and pointing-to-another-world works of art being made at this time of living. I think I feel a sense of kinship more to the why-and-what of the work of my artist peers and the subject matters they are navigating than I do with musicians at this moment.

The work of Matilda Sutton captivates me. I was raised by a narrative, figurative painter and artist as a mother, so I am naturally fine-tuned to read or decipher stories from a canvas. So, I love when I am presented with a brilliant story to read or find reflection in.

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There is a linocut artist from my area of England called Paul Jerome whose work reminds me of how I see the landscape I belong to now. My house now has almost one piece in every room by him, his work feels like home. Also, there was a majestic exhibition by Billy Childish at The Carl Freedman Gallery in a town along the coast from me that moved me, especially a painting of a chalk stack and arch I go swimming around in the summer.

TECH

For this tour, an instrument maker under the name Resonance Labs built me a sound generator. His work is something I am using daily and fascinated by. Much of my work I’ve realised was informed by the other path I wanted to take in life, to study minimalist classical composition, which I did for half a year. So, I can put a drone of one note under most of my songs and it will harmonise with all the chords around it. The generator has four oscillators that I can tune to make those drones for me as well as three conductor plates I can generate static and white noise with my fingers that references a lot of the sounds I was working with on Wind in the Wires. It’s a really brilliant box of wonderful noise. There are so many great inventions in his menagerie of generators.

I feel like the world of vintage synthesisers has become a bit too much like collecting vintage sports cars. The new culture of it made me feel a bit repulsed when I went looking for some new sounds for my album and was thinking about finding an old synth. So now I’m really excited by new inventions and especially ones made with so much imagination and heart as what’s being made at Resonance Labs.

THE NEXT BIG THING...

It's a selfish Big Thing, but I just received confirmation of Irish citizenship two days ago while on the train out of Vienna and the certificate will be there when I get home from this leg of the tour. So, to bookmark this, my next big adventure is for a long slow road trip around west Cork in my banger on my own and write this summer after I’ve finished making album 7.

But before my concert at the NCH, I’m taking a few days to go and stay near Thoor Ballylee. Yeats’ work has been majorly influential on my lyric writing since my grandma gave me a copy of his collected works I cherish to this day. I've always been halfway through his A Vision, so I plan to finish that on my trip. I've always had that tower in my head during chaotic and horrible times in life as a beacon and anchor, so it has a lot to live up to, poor building.

Patrick Wolf performs in the National Concert Hall on Friday 10 May - find out more here.

Something For The Weekend: Patrick Wolf's cultural picks

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