Post by sprk on Jul 9, 2009 14:23:24 GMT
So, FINALLY, here's my Patrick Wolf interview. I'm probably going to have some stuff out for the mag because it's fucking long. But you'll get to read the full thing here 
This will be published in the upcoming issue of Gay&Night Magazine which will be available from the end of July in The Netherlands and Belgium, it's the Gay Pride issue
Last time we spoke, you seemed very depressed and tired. What was going on at the time?
PW: Especially during touring periods, people can catch you at a really bad time. You’re getting ready to go on stage, you have to do press, you’ve got like 6 things to worry about at the same time. I’m feeling better now though.
Part of that undoubtedly has to do with you leaving the big record company and setting up your own independent label, how is that working out for you?
PW: It’s really liberating! At first it was quite terrifying to do. There is always a lot of mystery behind the way an album is made; what the costs are, who is funding it, and by giving fans the opportunity to invest in the project, people know a lot more about it. And I’m not scared of that, it’s fine. So far it has been really positive and it has given me a lot of freedom to go back to my original roots, to do exactly what I want without really caring about the consequences. When I was with a big record label, everything had to go through mutual consent. Things that were really spontaneous, intuitive, that felt like really natural things to do, would have to be justified to three businessmen. Nothing ever happened over that year that I wasn’t happy with, but to get to that point was so exhausting. All that friction is gone now. It has made me so much more positive about everything.
The cover of your new album, The Bachelor, is very similar to the cover of your debut album, Lycanthropy. How did that happen?
PW: Yeah, that really happened by accident. We didn’t go into the photoshoot to recreate the cover photo of Lycanthopy. But we went through all the photos that had been taken during those 2 really long days of shooting, with many costume changes and set design pieces, and all the stuff was so wonderful. When we saw the last couple of shots I said ‘what? That is so weird!’. My body was in the same position as the Lycanthropy cover, and there were some other similarities as well. I guess it was some kind of bizarre fate photograph, they match perfectly. In a way I feel like this album is almost like a return to the confidence and braveness of what I was like in the beginning. I took out 2008 to work through a lot of personal issues and some negative energy, and that’s what I was doing on the first album as well. So the two albums are really partners. The first was made when I was 18 and this new album is me looking back at the age of 25, it’s about the growth of the person I was and who I am now.
Originally the album was going to be a double album, Battle, consisting of The Bachelor and The Conqueror. What made you decide to split those two albums up, and do you feel that The Bachelor is missing anything in its current state?
PW: It’s defitely missing the conclusion, and all the answers to the questions that were raised. But the plan is to stop manufacturing The Bachelor seperately in a year and a half, and have both albums come together as one double album again. The problem was that it seemed like a financially insane thing to finish off two albums at the same time. I could have exhausted myself to try and make two things perfect, but I thought it would be better to just focus on one album for the moment, then take a month off and finish the second album. I just knew that if I attempted to do them both at the same time, the level of perfection would have gone down and down. And I also felt like I hadn’t concluded the story of The Conqueror yet. I hadn’t had enough perspective. It wasn’t until I finished The Bachelor that I realized what the lowpoint was at that time in my life, and what the answer could be in the recovery process. So now that I’ve got some distance form The Bachelor, three of four songs have come while I’ve been travelling around the world with my boyfriend William. I had so many different versions of the story. But I did the last recordings of The Conqueror in July, and then it was finished.
Can you tell me about your collaboration with Tilda Swinton?
PW: I guess I was a bit terrified that it was going to sound really random and not sit well. If I had asked a big Hollywood/LA person, it would have just sounded really ridiculous, because it’s not of the same spirit. But Tilda’s accent is extremely like mine, very English. She had her Hollywood-period, but I understand what her background is. I just knew it was going to work. When I was recording The Bachelor, I realized how negative a lot of the lyrics were, and I felt like I needed to inject some hope somewhere. Some kind of oracle or something. I was doing the vocals myself, but it just sounded so schizofrenic. I would be really confidently negative and suddenly I’d come in and say something totally different. My engineer asked me who I would like to bring in do those vocals instead, and I said Tilda Swinton. Everyone just started laughing. It’s like asking someone incredibly famous to cook you dinner – never gonna happen. Bizarrely enough, I was recording the vocals in Brixton, we only had two days to go. I was just going to delete all the narration off the album. I was walking down the street and there was a Q&A with Tilda Swinton at the cinema next door. So I bought a ticket and went up with a cd of the song, and gave it to her. Luckily she was already familiar with my music, and her manager was very enthusiastic and said ‘Patrick, what are you doing here?’ You never know who might know your music and who has absolutely no idea. I always try to approach it as if no one has any idea of what I do, I think it’s better. She e-mailed the next morning and we were in the studio soon after that. I didn’t need to explain the idea to her; at one point I wanted her to be quite maternal, and then on another point some kind of oracle, an angelic voice of hope. It was a very multi-dimensional character. And there’s more to come, Tilda is on The Conqueror as well.
I remember you being a lot more evasive about your sexuality, yet you’ve already mentioned your boyfriend during this interview. How did that change come about?
PW: As I get older and experienced and become more aware that there’s still a huge conservatism in England. Equal rights were established by great campaginers, people really sticking up for their rights, legally everything was established throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. But the rights weren’t protected. There’s still Section 28, which says homosexuality cannot be discussed during sex education in schools. Racist bullying is not condoned at all, but homosexual bullying and homophobia are almost an accepted thing. I realized after my first three albums, that I was no longer interested in beating around the bush. If you go on Wikipedia, and look up a list of LGBT-musicians, there’s about four of them listed under the letter W. That’s rubbish. I just find it really crazy. I know so many people in the entertainment industry who are in the closet. I just woke up one day and thought, no more bullshit, I’m going to fight for my right to be respected on the same page as straight musicians, to fight for the respect I think I reserve, for the work that I’ve done in my life. I still think there’s a slight fear of an outspoken gay musician. That whole ‘You can be gay, but not in my backyard’ kind of thing. I get that from a lot of music press.
Can you name an example?
PW: During a red carpet situation, you can walk down and be next to a girl, one of your friends, and the tabloids will publish that you’re dating her. But if you walk down with your boyfriend, they just won’t print that anywhere. I want to be more of a vigilante, I want to fight and re-establish bigger respect between the heterosexual and homosexual world. I think it has a lot to do with the power that religion has over society. I think it has indoctrinated some really dangerous conservative beliefs, which just need to be shaken up again. In a way I feel a lot more confident and a lot more pissed-off about things. I won’t tolerate seeing someone beaten up in the street, and I won’t be called a faggot when I walk down the street. I’m bored of it now, after ten years. It’s just not funny anymore. I’m not compromising my own look anymore. I think we should rub it in people’s faces as much as possible to try and get a reaction, or evoke some kind of thought process. I do feel real responsibility toward the younger audience, to try and educate open-mindedness and tolerance. I refuse to be called a minority – I’m just a human being, I’m not a minority because I’m in love with another man. That’s a way of marginalizing somebody.
In your video for Vulture your bum is prominently shown, and your new song Who Will starts with the line ‘Who will penetrate the tightening muscle?’. What is this newfound obsession with your rectum?
PW: [laughs] I won’t beat around the bush… When I sing that line, I thought it could be about a vagina or an anus. It’s this idea of when you close yourself off from love or you’re this bachelor person and you’re sleeping around a lot, or you’re waiting and holding back, you don’t have sex for 2 years, everything becomes tight in your body and in your heart. The great thing about good sex is that you feel liberated and beautiful afterwards, and all your energy and chemicals are flowing in the right place, and you’re not so tight-arsed. I had no fear about doing that lyric at all. And I understand a lot of people think that I like bumsex, but you know what, I’m gay, so of course I like it! It’s fine. And with the video, I’m really enjoying male nudity at the moment. I think it’s still quite a shocking thing for a lot of people to see a display of male vulnerability and nudity. It’s fine for a woman to do that, because there’s a whole heterosexual pornography thing that is very well excepted. But when men do it, especially when I’m playing a very submissive role in that video, people got very uncomfertable with that. And I’m happy to explore that with people. Only by displaying these things, people will eventually digest them. But you should have seen the first edit of the video! [laughs] There was a full-on bumhole shot, where I was thrusting and spreading my legs. It was right on time, I thought it was really good. It might get released one day.
How does your boyfriend handle being with someone like Patrick Wolf?
PW: He sees through my madness. He’s extremely dominant and can just snap me out of a fit. He’s very tolerant and patient with me. He came into my life at the end of 2007. I never went on dates, because I wasn’t getting any real communication. People got on their Blackberry, looked me up on Wikipedia before they would start a conversation. They knew more about me than I did, in a way. It must be weird to go out on a date with somebody, where you can look at 60 YouTube clips of drunken interviews and stuff like that. William came into my life on a human level, and changed it. He wasn’t afraid to say the way I was living and thinking was bullshit. Get out of bed, clean your house, call your mum, wash your clothes, he’d say. He saw a human being deep inside of me and restored that. And we did it for each other, too. It has been a wonderful time. We moved in together about 10 months ago. Of course there were some problems in the beginning, but most relationships should be worked for. Not everything comes naturally.
So in your life, he basically played the part that Tilda plays on the album?
PW: Yeah, definitely. And I think it will become clearer on The Conquerer. There’s the idea of a solid, more adult relationship. With a solid base to live in and work in, more domestic. When we first met we never looked at the FUCKING fdfghjkKITCHEn. We were the most undomesticated people in the whole world. But we helped each other out, and now we’re cooking chicken dinners. Super domestic.
So you guys sit on the couch and watch TV together?
PW: Yeah! And I’m happy to discuss it as well, because I still find that there is this misunderstandig that, to be gay you have to be cruising the whole time, or sleeping around with 6 people while having a boyfriend. I’m sure that has existed for a long time, but I think people are starting to celebrate more traditional marital values between two people. I’m sure there are some 13-year old gay boys, who think their life will consist of logging onto GayDar. And it doesn’t have to be that way, you know?
So you’ve pretty much turned into a big advocate of Gay Pride issues?
PW: I worked out my opinion on this in London, last year. There were all these cool fashion kids who did this anti-Pride gay club. They were like ‘”Fuck pride, it’s bullshit, why ram it down people’s throats?” I just thought… One of your friends, this boy Ollie, is now a paraplegic because he got stabbed by a gang of Pakistani boys. In their culture they still preach intolerance towards homosexuality. It happens in every day life, you are bullied in school. So it’s absolutely ridiculous to say ‘fuck pride’, because if you have no pride of your sexuality, then how are you going to command respect form other people, and preach tolerance? So I think, now more than ever, that it’s a really valid way of communicating to the world that you’re not going to be marginalized and put in the position where everything has to be secret. Maybe a gay pride celebration can be backed up with queer rights history, a good political discussion, petitions and campaigns to get things back on track. I think any public display of identity helps. So I’m very pro-pride.
Bonus questions, that won't be published for sure:
What happened to Teratology, the album that was going to be released about a year ago?
PW: I was going to release that on my own label. It’s funny you mention that, because when I started to put Teratology together, it was meant to be a collection of… You know, I started making music when I was 12 or 13, and went through many different periods of music making, from trying to be a composer to the noise music I made with my first band. I know it’s a bit stupid as a third album- but a lot of artists release a Greatest Hits, or a retrospect or a collection of B-sides and rarities. I never really released a single for the first album, so there were all these b-sides that never got heard, and I thought it would be really lovely to make a smakk collection of oddities and rarities. But making that, I realized that there were so many sounds that I had explored but I never really used. That inspired me so much. It was all from a time when I was quite fearless and raw, experimental and had no thought of an audience or any form of criticism. I wanted to get back to these noises and not be so scared. So I brought a lot of the things I found by uncovering all these songs into this album and the next. So rather than people to hear those things, I’d almost reinterpet those noises for this album. The song Count Of Casuality is actually an instrumental I did on an Atari when I was 14. So I wrote new lyrics over the top of that. It was important to make Teratology, but I knew it was better to transform it into a new work instead of focusing on the past.
So we’ll never get to hear those rarities?
PW: Maybe in another 5 or 6 years I’ll get the urge to uncover things again, but I’ve got a lot of hard drives and mini discs full of work. I’m not sure whether it’s important for people to hear it. Maybe it’s better that I just keep on creating right now. And people can pick up the pieces when I’ve left the planet, or something.
This will be published in the upcoming issue of Gay&Night Magazine which will be available from the end of July in The Netherlands and Belgium, it's the Gay Pride issue
Last time we spoke, you seemed very depressed and tired. What was going on at the time?
PW: Especially during touring periods, people can catch you at a really bad time. You’re getting ready to go on stage, you have to do press, you’ve got like 6 things to worry about at the same time. I’m feeling better now though.
Part of that undoubtedly has to do with you leaving the big record company and setting up your own independent label, how is that working out for you?
PW: It’s really liberating! At first it was quite terrifying to do. There is always a lot of mystery behind the way an album is made; what the costs are, who is funding it, and by giving fans the opportunity to invest in the project, people know a lot more about it. And I’m not scared of that, it’s fine. So far it has been really positive and it has given me a lot of freedom to go back to my original roots, to do exactly what I want without really caring about the consequences. When I was with a big record label, everything had to go through mutual consent. Things that were really spontaneous, intuitive, that felt like really natural things to do, would have to be justified to three businessmen. Nothing ever happened over that year that I wasn’t happy with, but to get to that point was so exhausting. All that friction is gone now. It has made me so much more positive about everything.
The cover of your new album, The Bachelor, is very similar to the cover of your debut album, Lycanthropy. How did that happen?
PW: Yeah, that really happened by accident. We didn’t go into the photoshoot to recreate the cover photo of Lycanthopy. But we went through all the photos that had been taken during those 2 really long days of shooting, with many costume changes and set design pieces, and all the stuff was so wonderful. When we saw the last couple of shots I said ‘what? That is so weird!’. My body was in the same position as the Lycanthropy cover, and there were some other similarities as well. I guess it was some kind of bizarre fate photograph, they match perfectly. In a way I feel like this album is almost like a return to the confidence and braveness of what I was like in the beginning. I took out 2008 to work through a lot of personal issues and some negative energy, and that’s what I was doing on the first album as well. So the two albums are really partners. The first was made when I was 18 and this new album is me looking back at the age of 25, it’s about the growth of the person I was and who I am now.
Originally the album was going to be a double album, Battle, consisting of The Bachelor and The Conqueror. What made you decide to split those two albums up, and do you feel that The Bachelor is missing anything in its current state?
PW: It’s defitely missing the conclusion, and all the answers to the questions that were raised. But the plan is to stop manufacturing The Bachelor seperately in a year and a half, and have both albums come together as one double album again. The problem was that it seemed like a financially insane thing to finish off two albums at the same time. I could have exhausted myself to try and make two things perfect, but I thought it would be better to just focus on one album for the moment, then take a month off and finish the second album. I just knew that if I attempted to do them both at the same time, the level of perfection would have gone down and down. And I also felt like I hadn’t concluded the story of The Conqueror yet. I hadn’t had enough perspective. It wasn’t until I finished The Bachelor that I realized what the lowpoint was at that time in my life, and what the answer could be in the recovery process. So now that I’ve got some distance form The Bachelor, three of four songs have come while I’ve been travelling around the world with my boyfriend William. I had so many different versions of the story. But I did the last recordings of The Conqueror in July, and then it was finished.
Can you tell me about your collaboration with Tilda Swinton?
PW: I guess I was a bit terrified that it was going to sound really random and not sit well. If I had asked a big Hollywood/LA person, it would have just sounded really ridiculous, because it’s not of the same spirit. But Tilda’s accent is extremely like mine, very English. She had her Hollywood-period, but I understand what her background is. I just knew it was going to work. When I was recording The Bachelor, I realized how negative a lot of the lyrics were, and I felt like I needed to inject some hope somewhere. Some kind of oracle or something. I was doing the vocals myself, but it just sounded so schizofrenic. I would be really confidently negative and suddenly I’d come in and say something totally different. My engineer asked me who I would like to bring in do those vocals instead, and I said Tilda Swinton. Everyone just started laughing. It’s like asking someone incredibly famous to cook you dinner – never gonna happen. Bizarrely enough, I was recording the vocals in Brixton, we only had two days to go. I was just going to delete all the narration off the album. I was walking down the street and there was a Q&A with Tilda Swinton at the cinema next door. So I bought a ticket and went up with a cd of the song, and gave it to her. Luckily she was already familiar with my music, and her manager was very enthusiastic and said ‘Patrick, what are you doing here?’ You never know who might know your music and who has absolutely no idea. I always try to approach it as if no one has any idea of what I do, I think it’s better. She e-mailed the next morning and we were in the studio soon after that. I didn’t need to explain the idea to her; at one point I wanted her to be quite maternal, and then on another point some kind of oracle, an angelic voice of hope. It was a very multi-dimensional character. And there’s more to come, Tilda is on The Conqueror as well.
I remember you being a lot more evasive about your sexuality, yet you’ve already mentioned your boyfriend during this interview. How did that change come about?
PW: As I get older and experienced and become more aware that there’s still a huge conservatism in England. Equal rights were established by great campaginers, people really sticking up for their rights, legally everything was established throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. But the rights weren’t protected. There’s still Section 28, which says homosexuality cannot be discussed during sex education in schools. Racist bullying is not condoned at all, but homosexual bullying and homophobia are almost an accepted thing. I realized after my first three albums, that I was no longer interested in beating around the bush. If you go on Wikipedia, and look up a list of LGBT-musicians, there’s about four of them listed under the letter W. That’s rubbish. I just find it really crazy. I know so many people in the entertainment industry who are in the closet. I just woke up one day and thought, no more bullshit, I’m going to fight for my right to be respected on the same page as straight musicians, to fight for the respect I think I reserve, for the work that I’ve done in my life. I still think there’s a slight fear of an outspoken gay musician. That whole ‘You can be gay, but not in my backyard’ kind of thing. I get that from a lot of music press.
Can you name an example?
PW: During a red carpet situation, you can walk down and be next to a girl, one of your friends, and the tabloids will publish that you’re dating her. But if you walk down with your boyfriend, they just won’t print that anywhere. I want to be more of a vigilante, I want to fight and re-establish bigger respect between the heterosexual and homosexual world. I think it has a lot to do with the power that religion has over society. I think it has indoctrinated some really dangerous conservative beliefs, which just need to be shaken up again. In a way I feel a lot more confident and a lot more pissed-off about things. I won’t tolerate seeing someone beaten up in the street, and I won’t be called a faggot when I walk down the street. I’m bored of it now, after ten years. It’s just not funny anymore. I’m not compromising my own look anymore. I think we should rub it in people’s faces as much as possible to try and get a reaction, or evoke some kind of thought process. I do feel real responsibility toward the younger audience, to try and educate open-mindedness and tolerance. I refuse to be called a minority – I’m just a human being, I’m not a minority because I’m in love with another man. That’s a way of marginalizing somebody.
In your video for Vulture your bum is prominently shown, and your new song Who Will starts with the line ‘Who will penetrate the tightening muscle?’. What is this newfound obsession with your rectum?
PW: [laughs] I won’t beat around the bush… When I sing that line, I thought it could be about a vagina or an anus. It’s this idea of when you close yourself off from love or you’re this bachelor person and you’re sleeping around a lot, or you’re waiting and holding back, you don’t have sex for 2 years, everything becomes tight in your body and in your heart. The great thing about good sex is that you feel liberated and beautiful afterwards, and all your energy and chemicals are flowing in the right place, and you’re not so tight-arsed. I had no fear about doing that lyric at all. And I understand a lot of people think that I like bumsex, but you know what, I’m gay, so of course I like it! It’s fine. And with the video, I’m really enjoying male nudity at the moment. I think it’s still quite a shocking thing for a lot of people to see a display of male vulnerability and nudity. It’s fine for a woman to do that, because there’s a whole heterosexual pornography thing that is very well excepted. But when men do it, especially when I’m playing a very submissive role in that video, people got very uncomfertable with that. And I’m happy to explore that with people. Only by displaying these things, people will eventually digest them. But you should have seen the first edit of the video! [laughs] There was a full-on bumhole shot, where I was thrusting and spreading my legs. It was right on time, I thought it was really good. It might get released one day.
How does your boyfriend handle being with someone like Patrick Wolf?
PW: He sees through my madness. He’s extremely dominant and can just snap me out of a fit. He’s very tolerant and patient with me. He came into my life at the end of 2007. I never went on dates, because I wasn’t getting any real communication. People got on their Blackberry, looked me up on Wikipedia before they would start a conversation. They knew more about me than I did, in a way. It must be weird to go out on a date with somebody, where you can look at 60 YouTube clips of drunken interviews and stuff like that. William came into my life on a human level, and changed it. He wasn’t afraid to say the way I was living and thinking was bullshit. Get out of bed, clean your house, call your mum, wash your clothes, he’d say. He saw a human being deep inside of me and restored that. And we did it for each other, too. It has been a wonderful time. We moved in together about 10 months ago. Of course there were some problems in the beginning, but most relationships should be worked for. Not everything comes naturally.
So in your life, he basically played the part that Tilda plays on the album?
PW: Yeah, definitely. And I think it will become clearer on The Conquerer. There’s the idea of a solid, more adult relationship. With a solid base to live in and work in, more domestic. When we first met we never looked at the FUCKING fdfghjkKITCHEn. We were the most undomesticated people in the whole world. But we helped each other out, and now we’re cooking chicken dinners. Super domestic.
So you guys sit on the couch and watch TV together?
PW: Yeah! And I’m happy to discuss it as well, because I still find that there is this misunderstandig that, to be gay you have to be cruising the whole time, or sleeping around with 6 people while having a boyfriend. I’m sure that has existed for a long time, but I think people are starting to celebrate more traditional marital values between two people. I’m sure there are some 13-year old gay boys, who think their life will consist of logging onto GayDar. And it doesn’t have to be that way, you know?
So you’ve pretty much turned into a big advocate of Gay Pride issues?
PW: I worked out my opinion on this in London, last year. There were all these cool fashion kids who did this anti-Pride gay club. They were like ‘”Fuck pride, it’s bullshit, why ram it down people’s throats?” I just thought… One of your friends, this boy Ollie, is now a paraplegic because he got stabbed by a gang of Pakistani boys. In their culture they still preach intolerance towards homosexuality. It happens in every day life, you are bullied in school. So it’s absolutely ridiculous to say ‘fuck pride’, because if you have no pride of your sexuality, then how are you going to command respect form other people, and preach tolerance? So I think, now more than ever, that it’s a really valid way of communicating to the world that you’re not going to be marginalized and put in the position where everything has to be secret. Maybe a gay pride celebration can be backed up with queer rights history, a good political discussion, petitions and campaigns to get things back on track. I think any public display of identity helps. So I’m very pro-pride.
Bonus questions, that won't be published for sure:
What happened to Teratology, the album that was going to be released about a year ago?
PW: I was going to release that on my own label. It’s funny you mention that, because when I started to put Teratology together, it was meant to be a collection of… You know, I started making music when I was 12 or 13, and went through many different periods of music making, from trying to be a composer to the noise music I made with my first band. I know it’s a bit stupid as a third album- but a lot of artists release a Greatest Hits, or a retrospect or a collection of B-sides and rarities. I never really released a single for the first album, so there were all these b-sides that never got heard, and I thought it would be really lovely to make a smakk collection of oddities and rarities. But making that, I realized that there were so many sounds that I had explored but I never really used. That inspired me so much. It was all from a time when I was quite fearless and raw, experimental and had no thought of an audience or any form of criticism. I wanted to get back to these noises and not be so scared. So I brought a lot of the things I found by uncovering all these songs into this album and the next. So rather than people to hear those things, I’d almost reinterpet those noises for this album. The song Count Of Casuality is actually an instrumental I did on an Atari when I was 14. So I wrote new lyrics over the top of that. It was important to make Teratology, but I knew it was better to transform it into a new work instead of focusing on the past.
So we’ll never get to hear those rarities?
PW: Maybe in another 5 or 6 years I’ll get the urge to uncover things again, but I’ve got a lot of hard drives and mini discs full of work. I’m not sure whether it’s important for people to hear it. Maybe it’s better that I just keep on creating right now. And people can pick up the pieces when I’ve left the planet, or something.
Especially after the release then disappeared into thin air. So I'm glad he has not confirmed it, even though he decided not to release it 
