CityLife

Patrick Wolf

AMBLE on stage 25 minutes late on a Sunday night and, no matter how sculpted your ice-white locks are, how feathery your stage costume is or how coquettish your playful manner, adulation is going to be hard earned.

The muted patter of applause that greets Patrick Wolf’s band doesn’t even extend long enough for the man himself to make his entrance.

There’s an embarrassed silence while everyone gets into position before Kriegspiel’s one-minute musical melee provides enough atmosphere for Wolf to sneak on stage without blushes.

Wolf may be a tardy timekeeper, but he certainly know how to dress.

He poses like a victorious Roman soldier styled by Vivian Westwood, and even though the tour is nearly over and the dry cleaning bill has got to be in quadruple figures, Wolf is clearly staying focused on his killer wardrobe.

He begins draped in feathers and a dramatic, striped jacket, dripping in outrageous jewellery, spray painted silver and sporting shoulder pads wider than anything Joan Collins could have dreamed of.

As the show progresses, it all comes off, Wolf eventually stripping back to a partially bare-chest and torn tank top sporting his own ‘Show Me Some Revolution’ slogan.

He looks like an intrepid hero from The Dark Crystal: fresh faced and innocent, alien-like even stood among his own band.

He sings into a Madonna-style radio mic, a piece of kit that facilitates a theatrical performance worthy of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and his sound is retro but sincere: Japan, Roxy Music, a little Atari Teenage Riot.

Fortunately, the physical spectacle of Wolf’s appearance makes up for a fairly appalling first 15 minutes of live performance

Bar flies

Oblivion starts promisingly, its big beats drawing in the bar flies and filling out the half-empty house a little more.

But it and the next three tracks – Bluebells, Count Of Casualty and Damaris – suffer from distinctly untidy endings that suggest more about Wolf’s vanity than his lauded ability to pen a tightly crafted pop song.

Each one draws to a close in the same way – with a lone violin or keyboard, and Wolf belting out his uber-meaningful lyrics in the spotlight.

And OK, he’s the main man (a multi-instrumentalist who does impressive turns on guitar, piano, violin and even a 15th century Appalachian dulcimer during the set), but it’s a tiresome format that needs a serious rethink.

Blackdown, from his current album The Bachelor, provides the earliest real proof of his penmanship.

A big ballad banged out on the piano, and a builder to boot that sucks in the rest of his band for its dramatic crescendo, it’s a belter (albeit it one that does again end with Wolf doing his a cappella bit in the spotlight).

Accident & Emergency gets the first genuinely warm welcome, but the second soon follows, and a third: the noisy call to arms Tristan and then uke-heavy Battle, where Wolf conjures the sound of Japan’s David Sylvian stronger than anywhere else.

Who Will? is given an overblown introduction (“You can’t sing a song from the bottom of your heart with a sweaty face,” says Wolf, reapplying his make-up) that it fails to really live up to, while Theseus (strummed out on a chiming dulcimer), the techno-rock of Hard Times and the wide-eyed pop of The Magic Position recover Wolf’s reputation as a premiere live performer.

He leaves under duress, his 10.30pm curfew blown.

And this time, the applause is suitably rapturous.

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