'Complicated situation' of an unlikely pop star

Cork-born Patrick Wolf is not the fey singer-songwriter you would think from reading about him in certain sections of the English music press. According to some of these publications, Wolf is your typical doomed romantic, cast out of his home by his beleaguered parents for having an extremely poor taste in clothes and a rather ripe attitude towards authority, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.

"People don't ever dare to ask the right questions," he says of this image "problem". "They then come away thinking I'm enigmatic; yet the fact is I'm totally truthful." So he's not Aubrey Beardsley, then, drawing erotic, arabesque shapes in the sand, waiting for his next shot of absinthe?

"That's the kind of image I hate," he spits. "It's very easy for some to pigeonhole men who have romantic ideals. If they have a poetic soul - or maybe they just don't want to be like the Gallagher brothers - then they're portrayed as someone like Oscar Wilde or William Wordsworth. To be romantic in their eyes is to be pathetic. For me it can be quite pagan, or bloody. I'm more for a gypsy eastern European style than the Wilde/Beardsley business. I'm not a big fan of that style of writing at all."

The facts as we know them are these: Wolf is not Patrick's real surname (more about which anon); his mother is an O'Donovan, from Cork, and, he says, quite a lot of his summers were spent gallivanting in and around Clonakilty. "My grandparents used to live there; we always talk about going back - it was my starting point. My Irish side outweighs my English side by 10 times in terms of experience."

Such an imbalance works in Wolf's favour. "I think growing up in England as an artist or a musician, you're always constantly having to look past the Beatles or the Rolling Stones to find something of beauty or magic. The English mentality, their art and poetry, is stagnant. WB Yeats adopted his Irish heritage for a reason, you know."

Yet most other aspects about Wolf - his music, for one - indicates a peculiarly English experience, albeit one that is far removed from city life. It fits perfectly that his favourite English writer is Thomas Hardy.

"My perceptions of what England is are not wrapped up in tea and cakes in upper-middle-class patriarchal society, the aristocracy, or the colonial empire. For me, England is more about dark rolling hills, the seabirds, the cliffs, the wilderness - perhaps the more gothic heart of the countryside. My Irishness certainly shadows my nature."

Wolf's starting point in music was as a violinist and sometime choirboy. He then went to junior music academy, where he studied as a composer. At 16, his life - depending on which side of the divide you sit - either deteriorated or blossomed.

"I left home and decided I wanted to be a pop star," he says. Wolf has described this period of flitting between London and Paris as one of "hardcore survival", but is not forthcoming as to the exact nature of what happened, either at or away from home. I tell him I read that he half left home, was half thrown out.

"It's a complicated situation," he offers. "It was a mutual decision, but it was the best decision I could have made at the time. Let's leave it at that, shall we?"

He now lives in Hackney Wick, east London. A large marsh area nestles close to his digs (the instant image is a retro-Gothic scene from the movie Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events). "From where I live it's about half an hour into the centre of London, but two minutes away from the middle of nowhere."

This is as an apt description of Wolf as any will you read. Metaphors of the elemental kind feature strongly in his work, notably his latest (and very fine) album, Wind in the Wires, which holds up well under the weight of songs about West Country longing, windblown harbours and the crackle of "wild electricity".

Which is all very well, good and unaffected; but when and why, Patrick, did you relinquish your birth surname (whatever that is; he's not for telling) and choose Wolf? Is it true, I ask, that the surname was given to you by a spirit medium in Paris? It sounds fanciful. No, he says, it's true. But there's more.

"The name Wolf came from a lot of different signs, really," he explains, "and the spirit medium was just one of them. Perhaps the biggest influence was the writer Angela Carter. Someone gave me her book about fairytales, and from then the entire grammar of my songwriting, and what I wanted to do with pop songs, totally changed. It was a wonderful moment - forever changed, as they say."

And so we take our leave of Patrick Wolf, a lad not half as ambiguous or frail as you might think. His primary aim of "writing lyrics that are beautiful to read and listen to" is not far off the target. As for living in London - well, we can't have it all our own way. And besides, despite notions to the contrary, he's really a country boy at heart, isn't he?

"Very much so. I'm waiting for the moment to leave the city, but I'm only 21, so I think it would be a bit cowardly of me to have a chalet in the middle of nowhere and just write. While I have my youth and my energy, it's best for me to be a communicator and work hard. For that, being in a city works best right now. But I'm always planning my escape route to the middle of the country."

Wind in the Wires is on Tomlab Records