I find it a really thrilling way to live, giving away little bits of yourself,” says Patrick Wolf, convinced that frankness is a good defence against the trouble that comes with fame. “It’s always been that way, since my first few songs, just wanting to rip my chest open and get it all out into the world. You’ve got nothing more to lose that way.”

Wolf isn’t a household name, even in his native England, but he is a pop idol of sorts. His success has been more critical than commercial—none of his records have really ascended the charts but he’s got one Mercury Prize nomination under his belt, for 2005’s Wind in the Wires. And yet the British paparazzi have been on his trail all year, he’s traded barbs with Perez Hilton and he’s been forced to defend his statement that “Liam Gallagher should be dead”—he only meant that Oasis’s music is “cowardly” and Gallagher’s demeanour is “an archaic form of being a man.”
More importantly, Wolf is engaged in a style of orchestral and electronic music that’s as vibrant, flamboyant and poetically pretentious as the hairdos, clothes and make-up he performs it in. Add to that his nakedly emotive lyrical reveries, combining theatrical fantasy with pieces of the 24-year-old’s life story, with all its Dickensian, Smiths-esque drama, and it’s a given that the young, female cornerstone of Wolf’s fan base is borderline obsessive (he calls them “passionate”).

His being bisexual and androgynous helps to attract the girls, as does having a unicorn tattooed on his chest, and having recently dated a lady, Canadian artist Ingrid Z. They’ve since split up, but she inspired the “major key” epiphany related on Wolf’s latest, The Magic Position, a blend of joyous, swelling pop tunes and ballads that ebb and flow with quiet melancholy and acute passion, pitting his versatile vocals against samples of chanting kids and a cameo by Marianne Faithfull.

www.montrealmirror.com/2007/100407/music1.html