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The Night Safari EP

Electronic / Rock

April 19, 2023

Patrick Wolf ’s resounding baritone easily conjures up gravitas, lending his best songs a combined air of theatricality and raw emotion. The English musician’s first two records were tightly wound, explosive with pent-up angst, and beguiling in their ornate instrumentation, poetic lyrics, and damaged electronics; when Wolf trended toward a more mainstream sound—as on his last album of new material, 2011’s disco-spangled, lovesick  Lupercalia —he traded the strange charms of his early work for the ill-fitting patina of generic radio pop. Management and A&R troubles made things even more complicated for the London singer-songwriter. (“If I think about  Lupercalia now,” he  said recently, “it’s like hands around my neck.”) Wolf’s 2012  acoustic album of reworked songs became a way of cleaning the slate that also, as the years went on, looked more and more like a career sendoff.

Wolf’s first new music in over a decade, then, has baggage to unpack.  The Night Safari EP was crafted out of an intense period of personal upheaval, including bankruptcy, a struggle with addiction, and the passing of his mother. Wolf understandably turns inward, purging bouts of anxiety and depression through diffuse, melancholy electro-folk. It’s a welcome return to his earlier sound, embellished throughout with electronic wrinkles and the deep, rich tones of his viola. Early standout “Nowhere Game” clips by with clattering percussion and pitch-shifted vocal rhythms, capturing the cyclical nature of addiction in references to “the danger that keeps you alive”: “Dying to be living proof/Of something survived in your youth,” he sings mournfully over the chugging beat, adding to its acute sense of hopelessness.

The title track further recalls the sullen music of his early breakthroughs. Here, Wolf creates a gentle build of plucked Celtic harp over an eddying piano melody for a disquieting look at those late-night moments in bed when your mind chews over every anxious thought imaginable. “Don’t you lose sleep/Pay no mind to me unraveling,” he pleads as the song loosens into a digitized, cut-up rhythm. It’s a more successful approach to playing with familiar sounds than “Archeron,” which uses a 7/8 time signature to evoke a fractured headspace; Wolf delivers a cryptic, chanted monologue inspired by novelist  Robert Graves amid ominous organs and strings, jerking back and forth between quiet and bombast. It’s effective in its jarring delivery, but feels stiff and out of step with the rest of the EP’s carefully arranged tableaux.

Still, Wolf’s ear for melody and imagistic lyrics remain strong, knifelike features of his music. Although  The Night Safari ’s sweeping dramas can be dour, Wolf’s voice, sonorous and commanding, is only growing finer with age. On “Dodona,” with its gorgeously cinematic viola solo and sorrowful piano, Wolf is at his most moving, stretching his voice from a low growl to a scratchy, throaty high. “His tongue is rattling,” Wolf sings of his protagonist, a “whipping boy” overwhelmed by trauma: “But broken bells don’t make a sound/No matter how hard you hit ’em.” Like the rest of  The Night Safari ’s most enthralling songs, it gives way to a well-earned, bruising form of catharsis.

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The Night Safari - EP

March 17, 2023 5 Songs, 26 minutes ℗ 2023 Apport

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Patrick Wolf: ‘I saw music as a traumatic space to be in’

After a decade-long silence and a traumatic growth period, the south london songwriter is ready to start afresh with his new ep, the night safari.

Silence has been Patrick Wolf’s default for the best part of a decade. 

Having shared six studio albums by the age of 29 and collaborated with artists including Marianne Faithfull, Angelo Badalementi and Nan Goldin, the prolific singer-songwriter and producer stepped back from music in 2012, following the release of double-disc retrospective Sundark and Riverlight. “I’d put a lot of music into the world, but I don’t think I’d had a normal growth pattern,” Wolf reflects today, speaking from his home on the east Kent coast. “I almost had to catch up with my emotional and spiritual development.” 

The ensuing years brought little peace. Fighting alcohol and drug addiction, reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent death, and betrayed and bankrupted by a management team who’d neglected to file a single tax return in eight years, Wolf simply had no stomach for the vocation he’d pursued doggedly since his mid-teens.

“With all the toxicity that I was wound up in, I saw music as a traumatic space to be in,” he sighs. “And once you stop, things that have always been held together so tightly by adrenaline and ambition start to fall apart spectacularly.”

Wolf tackles these wilderness years head-on on his much-anticipated comeback collection The Night Safari . Over ambient organ chords and staccato Celtic harp, the five-track EP begins with the words, “ Pardon me for disturbing your dreaming / Did not want you to hear me crying / Or watch me reeling and receding / Into this old mania of mine .”

“Many of my album titles – like Wind in the Wires, The Magic Position – have been phrases I’ve used to describe a mental process or an affliction,” Wolf explains. “ The Night Safari describes these nights lying by the side of my partner and detaching mentally as I looked at the last two years’ – and the next two years’ – failures and anxieties. And the realisation you’re going to have to navigate your way through that to reach the morning.”

The EP charts that spiritual journey, from the quiet terror of the title track and the emotional instability of Acheron – named after one of the five rivers of Hades in ancient Greek mythology – to a place of healing on Dodona and Enter The Day . On the latter, Wolf entreats the listener to “ Enter the day / When out of the shadow of doubt ,” over undulating piano. It’s a cautious plea for resilience, rather than an expression of blind optimism.

Though clean and sober for “multiple years”, Wolf still has complicated feelings about sharing the specifics of his story. “I'm still trying to work out what my public relationship is with [my recovery],” he says thoughtfully. “I see some people that enter the public eye with their recovery, and it’s almost like they’re trying to sell people something. And that’s not the way that I want to go forward… I don’t want to be too guarded or defensive, but there’s still something very precious about being private.”

Amidst the tumult of the last 10 years, there were attempts to create. In 2015, he took a pilgrimage to Acheron and the oracle at Dodona in northwest Greece – a detox trip disguised as a sort of writing retreat. “I had some kind of Byronic idea that the grand journey was going to change my perspective on life,” he says wryly. “I thought I would enter a real state of prolific and insightful work, but from then onwards I stopped writing.”

He rallied three years later, making arrangements to record an album at the New York studio of Tony Shanahan, whom he met while playing harp and viola in Patti Smith’s band. Shortly before he was due to fly, his mother was given a week to live, and the record was later scrapped.

‘Once you stop, things that have always been held together so tightly by adrenaline and ambition start to fall apart spectacularly’ – Patrick Wolf

In 2020, he played a sell-out residency at St Pancras Old Church but found himself beset by illness. “I really felt like I had not returned to work mentally prepared at all,” he confesses. “For me, those shows felt extremely dark and gothic. So it really wasn’t until I worked very hard at building a solid foundation of sobriety and balanced it with this quiet life here by the sea, that I was able to start again [with music].”

The seeds for Wolf’s recovery were sown while still living in Bloomsbury. Undertaking a bi-weekly course of psychotherapy to tackle his addiction and apathy towards music, he found further solace visiting exhibitions at the Bedlam psychiatric hospital in south London. He began collecting ceramics created by current inpatients, and discovered “new superheroes” in the shape of former inhabitants, the artists Richard Dadd and Louis Wain. “To see people in a place where they were healing and the things that they were making was really encouraging to me.”

After lockdown ended, Wolf swapped London for Kent and embraced a slower pace of life with his partner and his two cats, Percival and Hieronymus. “When I bought this house, I really saw that as the beginning of a chapter,” he says. “I was able to close a 10-year period.”

The idea of starting again “from scratch” is borne out by The Night Safari, which sees Wolf self-producing and playing every instrument – from the bowed psaltery to the suitcase organ – just as he did on his debut album Lycanthropy , almost exactly two decades ago. Every bit as integral to his creative rebirth was his decision to reclaim his primary instrument. 

“My first love was the viola. But from Lycanthropy onwards, the more that ‘popstar’ tag was thrown at me, the further away that instrument got. The quest for fame is really a quest for validation and acceptance, and I realised that could be sought holistically elsewhere. So to put a viola solo in the middle of Dodona was a spiritual statement; a reclamation.”

Wolf views The Night Safari very much as the opening chapter of the second stage of his career. And with his seventh album already close to completion, it does feel like his most fruitful years are still ahead of him. Certainly, as the once boy-wonder prepares to move into his fourth decade, he seems more at ease in his skin than ever. 

“I haven't quite worked out how my age will define me,” he smiles. “But I have always looked up to artists that start young and continue to grow. I’m excited about going into my forties because this is when it starts getting good in other people’s catalogues.”

The Night Safari is out now .

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Patrick Wolf

The Night Safari

After several years absence, Patrick Wolf returns as singular a pop star as he's ever been, finds Luke Turner

This past Tuesday night, Patrick Wolf finished his first UK tour in years with a night at the Village Underground in London in a joyous, confident performance, at times a lot heavier and rattling than anyone familiar with his Sundark And Riverlight , his 2012 compilation of folk reworkings of his back catalogue, might have expected. Best of all was how the material from first two albums Lycanthropy and Wind In The Wires sat alongside new EP The Night Safari in their distinct sonic inventiveness – ‘The City’, ‘The Magic Position’ and ‘Accident & Emergency’ from the era of his more concerted attempts to assault the mainstream paled in comparison.

As Patrick Wolf told me in this Guardian interview, the past decade of relative silence was a personal hell, involving familial grief, bankruptcy and a battle with alcohol and drug dependency. These years of musical exile shaped the five tracks of The Night Safari EP, alongside a return to DIY self-dependency and, crucially, some of the instrumentation that made his early music so good. It veers between the gloriously dramatic ‘Dodona’, Michael Nyman via Warp records cracked electronics in ‘Acheron’, a shuffling modernist crooner in ‘Nowhere Game’ and to finish off, ‘Enter The Day’, all rolling piano and optimism.

At the Village Underground, Patrick Wolf prowled the stage in his rather fabulous self-made clothes and was by turns honest, witty, bleakly funny (“you’re all going to die… sorry, I am told I am too mean to my audience”) and filthy (‘Tristan’ introduced with an ad lib apparently about fisting), and best of all sung in the finest voice of his life. I used to always think that it would only be in another world less tainted by commerce, algorithms and laziness that Patrick Wolf could be a pop star, but I realise I was wrong. He now seems perfectly happy to do pop star as he wants to be, and for that world to be his very own.

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