Patrick Wolf, London Palladium
Patrick Wolf
November 15 2009
For all the flack he gets for being gay, posh and dressing like an idiot, you can’t fault Patrick Wolf’s drive and work ethic. This time last year, he was without a record company – he took his half-finished forth record and completed work on a double album, before splitting it into two discs. The first of these, The Bachelor, was released in June this year, with Wolf having funded the remaining recording work and subsequent promotion through the website Bandstocks. Ever the individual, the album featured dark, camp dance-pop songs and string-drenched epics, managing to end up on the right side – just – of overblown.
So he can be forgiven for wanting to cap what has been a year of triumph, struggle and controversy with a spectacular show at London’s Palladium on Sunday night. There was a majestic string section, backing singers, the Voice of Hope (not Tilda Swinton, alas, but some other tall woman in a floaty dress), Florence Welch minus her machine, Alec Empire, glitter and, inevitably, costume changes. What was interesting though was the certain amount of restraint and focus Wolf put into his performance, for the first two-thirds at least, making this one of the best performances I’ve seen him give in some time.
Before all that however, came Micachu and the Shapes. The band sauntered on quietly, heads bowed, in stark contrast to what was to come. The trio are hardly ones for grand statements, and they stood in a triangle in the centre of the stage, looking in at each other. Micachu was picked out by a spotlight in the middle, throughout a set comprised of material new and old. Often she doesn’t sound quite like she’s singing, more like she’s shouting at someone on the other side of the road, but it works within her short, startling songs that sound as cobbled together as the instruments she plays. Their debut Jewellery is one of the more fresh-sounding records of the year, and the set hinted at more pop experiments to come.
When Patrick Wolf did emerge for the start of his set, it was with a slightly different emphasis than we’ve become accustomed to. As the safety curtain moved up to reveal the night’s full line up of musicians, Wolf stood in the centre of the stage, clad all in black. He gave an energetic but still slightly muted performance during the first few songs, allowing the string section to fill out songs like ‘Overture’, ‘Wolf Song’ and ‘Wind In The Wires’. It was a night where he seemed to turn back to confront the introverted, thoughtful Patrick Wolf of old, though there was still plenty of the bravado and drama that have become fixtures of his newer material – his Palladium show found him reconciling his many ‘faces’ for the first time, largely with success.
Some songs that are rarely played live got an airing – ‘Thickets’, written on a bike ride along the river near Hackney Wick, we were told, as well as Wind In The Wires ‘Epilogue’ and ‘Shadow Sea’, the latter as a lead in to the spectacular ‘Bluebells’. As promised prior to the show, some special guests put in appearance – Florence Welch, described by Wolf as one of the best singers in the country, joined him on ‘The Bachelor’, while Alec Empire dominated the latter stages of the night with ‘Battle’, ‘Hard Times’ and the punishing ‘Vulture’.
The night closed with an emotional encore of ‘The Magic Position’ and ‘The Sun Is Often Out’, originally written for one deceased friend, Wolf dedicated it to another that had recently passed away. Promising to return in 2010 (The Conqueror is due sometime next year), Patrick Wolf took in the applause for what he described at one point as the best show of his life. Looking back to his first London show of the year in March just underlines how far he’s come – there was a sense that he had something to prove at that point, but all these months on, his show at the Palladium found him on the cusp, suitably, of some kind of personal and artistic conquest.
