“I have no thrill to engage with any of that nonsense. On the funeral of the Queen I took a twelve hour walk along the coast, and came back to civilisation when it was all done.” It is four days before the coronation of King Charles III and Loverboy is speaking to Patrick Wolf at his new home on the coast of South East England.

Having written, produced & performed, often single-handedly, some of our favourite romantically wistful English albums between 2003-2011, Patrick took a ten year break. A decade which saw him experience a hit & run in Italy (“by the beach where Byron’s body washed up. A dark and beautiful place but the darkness got me.”), the loss of his mother, bankruptcy due to his then management, his addiction & subsequent recovery.

Last November Patrick surprised us all with the title track from his comeback EP, ‘The Night Safari‘. Five tracks that while dealing with the trauma of his time away, also provide us with a instant reminder of his talent for production, his gloriously rich song-writing & his voice which remains…majestic.

Good morning Patrick. Where are you zooming us from today?
I’m at home in Kent. I found this house after…well, basically someone died in it! I’ve kept a mixture of the original Edwardian features and the seventies’ serving hatch. I’m inventing my own style, “Edwardian Seventies”.

I look forward to the spread in Home & Garden. What are you doing today?
I got back from tour last week. I felt as if I had returned to the fever of 2007 when everyone wanted to sing and celebrate. I used to medicate to stay up on this insane, egotistical level after but the first thing I did after this tour was become a recluse and recharge the introvert side of myself, gardening.
On May Day I randomly travelled to Rochester and immediately heard a familiar rhythm. The street was full of sixty to seventy troupes of Morris dancers. I had used a field recording of one troupe in ‘The Bachelor’ and suddenly realised this very troupe was there in Rochester, playing the same rhythm. It made me cry. But today I have decided to go through all the footage everyone sent me from the tour.

It was so good seeing you back onstage.
Thank you. I left feeling like I had just opened a new chapter of work. I had no idea how the audience would behave after so long. But for as miserable as most of my catalogue is, there was a real sense of joy in the audience.

Do you see touring more in the near future for you?
As long as I can tour where I have some self-control over leaving, then I’ll be doing a lot of it in the next ten years. My next tour will incorporate The Night Safari and the upcoming album, so it will be a four-hour-long set, not two! That’s a threat.

Promises, promises. How do you handle those moments before going onstage? 
Well, I used to tune all my instruments during the show and torture the audience. Now I have so many delicate folk instruments, I spend two hours tuning them beforehand and it is a meditative process I appreciate doing. Finely tuning a Celtic harp keeps me grounded.

The production on The Night Safari is so gorgeous. Tell us about the instruments you use.
I would say the instrument that started the sound of the EP was the bowed psaltery, a triangular, bowed zither instrument. I had one when I was younger. I was also really attracted to the kantale, a Finnish instrument, based around drone sounds, back to Mediaeval times. They only just discovered the psaltery is not actually a mediaeval instrument. It was invented by hippies in the sixties in a Renaissance period of mediaeval times. I was kind of shocked by that but it kind of made sense.

Whereabouts in the EP can we hear the psaltery?
That really high-pitch, like an opera singer, at the beginning of ‘Dodona.’ Then the bow throughout ‘Enter The Day’ too. On ‘Acheron’ there’s a psaltery being plucked and resampled. Sometimes instruments come along and say to me, ‘Exploit me! Explore me!’
For a long time the ukelele was my go-to writing instrument but with The Night Safari I wanted to make sure we were entering a world of drone, zither and strings. Things that were quite exotic nowadays. The idea of Safari is taking sounds that are unfamiliar to people and slapping their imagination around the face.
The other mission was to work with odd time signatures to disorientate listeners. I thought if I wanted to do a long song, I would have to keep people’s brains engaged.
When I started running again, I put on a playlist of modern day pop music. Songs by pop musicians I really respect were coming in at one minute thirty/two minutes. I was like, ‘Oh this is a real shame, they’ve really been caught up in the Spotify/Tik Tok algorithm way of making music’ and I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to be competing here, I’m not even the same animal as those people.’ In this day and age, I definitely wanted to artistically make something counteractive to that system. The Night Safari EP is there to massage the listener’s attention span a little, you know?

We definitely need that. When you use these more exotic instruments, do you feel you are tapping into a lineage of players gone by?
I’m not sure there’s anyone I was channelling apart from myself but I do always think of Shirley and Dolly Collins, the folk singers who documented English folk music with traditional English folk instruments. So in the seventies they had someone make them a Mediaeval portable flute organ!

I love how connected you are to English history and the instruments connected with each period.
Music is related to your ancestry and bloodline. You’re never going to catch me with a sitar or New Orleans funeral marching band. When I play the viola, it’s connected to my Irish roots. I found out on Ancestry.com that I am 40% Norwegian, so with the Kantele I am tapping into my Scandinavian heritage.

The music I imagine is always the first step. How was it returning to creating the visuals for The Night Safari?
When I got sober, my body went into shock, it triggered alopecia and I lost all my hair and eyebrows. I was really uncomfortable. I think I probably have about seven centimetres too much forehead and skull to show the world that side of me! When I moved out here to the sea and left London, my hair started growing back again very slowly.
But when I was seventeen, I looked at Rei Kawakubo or Yohji Yamamoto’s designs, knew I wouldn’t be able to afford it, got a load of fabric and copied it all! So during lockdown I took out my sewing machine and built up a whole wardrobe that I wore on this tour. I also made headdresses which turned into the feather pieces in the video.
I’m deeply grateful to the director, Joseph Wilson, for making that little world with me. It was the most collaborative I’ve been with any of my music videos apart from the early days when I had a super 8 camera and ran around Richmond Park with my friends.

Talking about earlier work, I’ve read that you’re not too fond of Lupercalia these days?
Well, this is the thing. Since I said that, I’ve realised I was really talking about the working environment. On the recent tour, the last quarter of the setlist was all Lupercalia songs.

I loved that ‘Together’ was the encore.
Yes, it was insane. I put that half way through in another show because I realised how the temperament of the audience was. I was like, ‘Ok, well they deserve this song then.’ I have a lot of love for that album. Whenever I’ve talked about ‘Oh that was traumatic’, that was because getting that work through that system was really hard. It was like holding it in my hands out of a burning building, to be really dramatic. That was why it was exhausting.

Talking about darker times, you touched on your addiction and recovery earlier. You always seemed like someone who was so well connected and loved by older generations of artists. I wondered if any of them had been there to help you through it?
Generally it was a process of not famous people. I ended up making everyone’s tea for the first six months. It was all the very opposite of Patrick Wolf. The beauty of the twelve step recovery programme is that people there are devoid of ego or they work to be.
But around The Bachelor period I did do a lot of work with Patti Smith and she took me under her wing. I very clearly remember at dinner, something about the way in which I was ordering food was very chaotic. She pulled me aside and just said, ‘You have to slow down.’ I didn’t understand what it meant at the time. I understand fully now. I had a lot of late night calls with her.

And leaving London sounds like it was a major turning point.
Despite being born in London, for many years I didn’t feel like I belonged. I had no spiritual centre there. My last dream of London was to live in Bloomsbury, to walk out on the same square as Virginia Woolfe. I lived there for three years. That’s when I first got clean, went to recovery every morning, then locked myself in the house so I didn’t go out and use. I watched endless Wendy Williams repeats. I tried to write there and digest it all but that was a Bloomsbury of ghosts. It doesn’t exist now.

Oh hang on, sorry, someone from your PR is trying to enter the zoom chat…
They are trying to be like, ‘Patrick, stop talking about being a drug addict! Everybody knows!’ Haha…

I think I accidentally booted them out! They’ve disappeared! Well, we do need to talk about your cats. They are so gorgeous!
Thank you. They are Percival, I’ve always loved the name, and Hieronymus, after Hieronymus Bosch. Right now he is asleep in his little house. He’s a Scottish Fold but with ears up, mixed with Ragdoll. They were meant to be part of a pedigree mix but they were the cats that went wrong. That’s how I got them. I always wanted to have two gay old men kind of cats.  You’re not sure if they are partners or just like to sunbathe together. So they are Percy and Ronnie, the two gay cats of East Kent.

Lastly we are named after the biggest-selling single of 2001 and always ask, what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
The production on ‘Loverboy’ is demented. Weirdly, I’m not trying to lick your arse but that whole Glitter era is so fascinating to me. The 9/11 album. I love a cursed album.
Very strangely my parents sent my sister & I to a summer camp one year and we tried to hide from anything sports related so we created some kind of performance for the talent show. My sister lip-synced to The 4 Non-Blondes ‘What’s Up?’ and I performed ‘Anytime You Need A Friend.’ There was something fruity in the water there I think!

The Night Safari EP is out now.
www.patrickwolf.com