As the pandemic loomed over London in 2020, Patrick Wolf was living in a Lewisham tower block where he cut the desolate figure of the Arthurian Fisher King. A wounded protector surveying his barren kingdom, gripping onto the Holy Grail of his voice as he drank himself into oblivion. Neither alive nor dead, a man very firmly on the edge.
Twenty years before, when Wolf first emerged, he was seen as the next break-out star alongside Amy Winehouse. His first two albums Lycanthropy and Wind in the Wire were an almighty deluge of high-octane fucked-up acid folk, cut with a classically trained balladry that absorbed a cosmos of instruments and was supremely suffused by Wolf’s baritone. Others elsewhere such as Animal Collective may have been playing…