With no glitter upon my face or hair, I felt somewhat underdressed for seeing Patrick Wolf. Never have I been to a gig where the crowd has been so female-dominated: this wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that most of them were clearly in the sub-18 bracket, so I was feeling decidedly old. The support-act Micachu and The Shapes didn’t help matters: the threesome looked like they had only just reached puberty. In fact, I remarked to my friend that the singer looked like a 15 year-old Bob Dylan: at which point my friend told me that the singer was a she. I spent the next half hour debating this, whilst listening to some pretty bizarre noise rock, which consisted of a battered acoustic guitar with a piece of string for a strap, percussion comprising paint pots, wine bottles and lots (LOTS) of cowbells, some bass-heavy synths and an overdriven electric guitar. Every song seemed to have its own nuance which kept the set interesting, but Mica’s flat, expressionless voice did mar things somewhat. Hey Dylan was never a tip-top singer, but you could never call his vocals dull: learn a lesson Mica! And then came the main man himself. Initially sporting a wide-shouldered black cloak, this was quickly shed to reveal Wolf dressed up as some kind of human porcupine. He even shed his hair: a ponytail which had on first glance appeared o be quite real was torn off and thrown into the crowd, taken by a guy who seemed a little too grateful.
As he pomped his way through the opening four songs (which included Tristan and three new songs) I found myself thinking of Wolf as the new Adam Ant. But of course, he can’t be pigeonholed nearly so easily. The mid-set wisely lowered the tempo (just as well as I’d been pushed back about six rows by overexcited teenagers) whilst turning up the intensity. Of the numerous new songs put out on trial, Blackdown was the most impressive: an emotional piano ballad which transformed halfway through into a rousing instrumental stomp.
The latter end of the set threw in some old faves: Accident & Emergency was stopped halfway through so that the song could be made “more CBGBs”: out went the drum machines and synths, and in came the electric guitars. It worked much better than you might imagine, however staged it may have been. The main set closed with another newbie and forthcoming single Hard Times: with an almost Iron Maiden-like gallop, it’s possibly the ballsiest-sounding thing Wolf has come up with yet, and another feather to his cap (or whatever else he wants to add to his hair).
The inevitable encore ensued and, after a lengthy costume change, Wolf returned as what could only be described as a metrosexual vulture. Another new song (aptly entitled Vulture) followed, before the night was finished on a crowd-assisted Bloodbeat. It had been a pretty dazzling performance which, along the way, had also incorporated a lectern and a goat skull mask. One of my friends was less enamoured by the performance, feeling that it had catered too much to the teen-boppers in front of him. It was true enough that Wolf had been more showy than when I had seen him two years ago, even by his highly eccentric standards, and perhaps one or two of the new songs (Battle being the main culprit) were a little heavy on fist-pumping and a little low on substance. Nonetheless, much of the new material had impressed, and to use an old footballing cliché, you can only play what’s in front of you. There’s little denying that with his neo-classical electro-pop in combination with his sheer stage presence, Patrick Wolf is in a field of one.
