After 13 years on hiatus, Patrick Wolf is coming back with a brand new album, Crying The Neck. The album is the result of a long creative process, inspired by literature, travel, and… cinema. The British singer-songwriter told us about three films that had a significant impact on the writing of the album.
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Penda’s Fen
A meditation on the outsiders’ path of discovery to a sense of belonging in nature and folklore, wonder and melancholy, a search for national identity and lost heritage. In the final stages of lyric writing, I spent a week watching as many films as possible I could find on the subjects of grief, legend, folklore and any end of summer or daylight, rural set “folk horror”. It helped me see where my album had cousins and siblings in other artists work. Penda’s Fen felt like an old brother to my album when I watched it.
The Last of England
The title of track three on Crying the Neck is named after this film. Filmed in Kent, as my album is set in Kent, here the question seems to come – Am I a symptom of a diseased country, or am I part of the disease? Who is the remedy? Am I the remedy, or is the remedy to accept the diseases and make beauty and celebration of the decay? So too does my song on the album. Tilda Swinton appears as her character “the bride” toward the second half of the film. I asked her advice and blessing of the song and the direction I was going in by reading out the first half of the lyrics to her to check I was in alignment with this incredibly beautiful Derek Jarman film. Then continued on to finish it.
The House of Mirth
I was thinking a lot about the female protagonist, Lily Bart, when writing the final version of the opening track of the album ‘Reculver’. Although the song is a form of biography of the last decade for me, I needed the companionship of characters like Lily to give me the strength and solidarity to finish the lyrics and be unabashedly honest about my experiences. Lily, shunned by society for not living a life hemmed in by the rules, slides into destitution and ostracization and misery, although I see her as heroic for making choices to be uncompromising of heart and mind. This movie led me to the work of Edith Wharton and also became a big talking point between my psychotherapist for a long time during the writing of the album