Crying The Neck, Patrick Wolf’s seventh album, is shaped by the folklore of the county of Kent and inspired by the lessons learned and home truths discovered during his 10-year absence from releasing music. As has widely been reported in the press around the release of this excellent record, it was a fraught period of bankruptcy, addiction, and over it all is the death of his mother from cancer. Sometimes the narrative can overwhelm the music, and in this case it oughtn’t overshadow a record that’s a culmination of his work to date, mixing the lo-fi experimentation and naïve exuberance of his debut Lycanthropy with the rich folk of Wind In The Wires and, crucially, succeeding in the more accessible spaces that The Magic Position et al strove for yet didn’t quite reach.
The new album is also one that feels like the sum of Patrick Wolf’s lifelong musical interests. He grew up in a creative house. His mother was an amateur artist, his father a jazz musician who had put away his instrument. Music was encouraged as a hobby, but nothing more: “It was very much like choose your own adventure, but to do it on a vocational level – don’t go down that path. Can you do something sensible with your life, please?’”
Every now and then, his dad would play saxophone, but stopped if he heard anyone coming. Music, he says, was almost “a forbidden thing.” But Patrick and his sister Jo (who features on Crying The Neck) would go through their parents’ vinyl collection, which he describes as “a museum that we could go into and explore.”
Some of the albums Patrick Wolf has chosen date from this time. There are connections with his late mother, and some of the artists who he discovered on his own, and many records that have provided comfort in fraught phases. All have brought him to where he is today. “I mainly chose albums that are either shaping where I’m going, or I wouldn’t be doing what I do right now without them,” he says.
Patrick Wolf’s new album Crying The Neck is out now via Apport/Virgin Music. To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
