Patrick Wolf @ Faversham
By Lauren Strain
Stunned beyond all comprehension, I am. Where do you begin to describe a man like Patrick Wolf? Well, first of all, let's rephrase that - there are no men 'like' Patrick Wolf, there is only Patrick Wolf; never have I seen a human being with this much presence, intrigue or, quite arbitrarily, height. I'm even quite tempted to suggest that he's not actually a human being at all but the incarnation of wild, rugged, wind-blasted hilltops and the roaring, elemental tide of the ocean with a voice at times as powerful and shattering as a gale force wind, then relenting into a ghostly breeze which touches your face and traces tears down your cheeks with icy, loving fingers. His taut back, showing beneath a ragged, cropped waistcoat, arches and flexes as he leans over to take his ukulele, violin or piano in his arms; his forest of hair thatches over his eyes like a thick fist of debris trapped in a dark lagoon; his flicker of a mischievous smile peeks out from the side of the microphone - all of these are just snapshots, quick glimpses, of his movement, which jostle together to form a person so intensely captivating, so unnervingly mesmerising, that if you could take your eyes off him for more than a second you'd have to nip to the doctor's to make sure you hadn't taken some mind-altering drugs earlier that day. It seems impossible to put into humble little words the otherworldly power with which he seizes... no, dominates... no, POSSESSES the stage and the pure, undiluted beauty of his songs, whether that be the stomping, churning snarl of 'Tristan' or the glacial tumblings of 'Empress', which he wrote when he was just seventeen, holy Moses.
I'm reminded of the time when I didn't sit gasping for air on a patchy chair at a crumbling table watching Jeff Buckley transport his soul into the higher realms of heaven while wearing a cardigan and sipping coffee between songs in the corner of Sin-E. This, for me, anyway, is how that moment must have been, transcended to the here and now. Some stuffy folks today say that we have no musicians who are truly unique or original, who can steal the breath right out of your body even before you've inhaled it. They say that we're all sinking into a stagnant, reeking mire of posers and cheats who scuttle off giddily with riffs stolen from Dylan and Richards, ready to usurp, exploit and corrupt them with absolutely no sense of morals. Well, "Shut up, you silly, blind bats" is what I say to those people, because tonight there stands a 21-year-old prodigy, humbly and gratefully thanking the seated audience (it was like a tea party! Aah, bless) as though astonished at our overwhelmed faces, our demands for more, our smiles of disbelief bursting out across our mugs. Don't thank us, Patrick - we're privileged to be here as witnesses to, and I use the term with no extravagance or exaggeration, a genius who whispers, yelps and breathes music. You can see the scarlet thrill of it running through his veins and dripping out of every pore, curdling in the air and on the floor into pools of oily black brilliance, the earthenware beats of the tribal drums and the lupine curlings of the cello carving his name into your core: Patrick Wolf, Patrick Wolf, Patrick Wolf. Don't even begin to form the idea that there's anyone else like him, anywhere, on any planet, in any universe, because there isn't. His voice is unreal, elevated to the silver skies one minute and burrowing through the heaving jungle soil the next, richly gulping, growling, seething out of god-knows-where, tearing the floodgates open during 'Penzance' and crashing against the cliffs for 'Jacob's Ladder'.
Everything about him is a singular expression of the visceral essence of music and nature, an elaborate yet raw image of complete abandon and union. Somehow, there's something both subliminal and fundamental about what he's found - he knows something none of us ever will, his eyes shine with young joy but with a folksy, archaic wisdom; he's a man with the ability to shatter your every cell into shards and weld them all back together again with excruciating heat in the space of one note or a lunge of the bow. He's not mortal, I tell you now...
