Alexander Wolfe, Life, and the Universe
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Wolfe has that gift of good songwriters: an ability to make lyrics sound like conversation, and vice-versa. I’m not sure that it’s a technique you can learn, but there are a few people with a genuine ability to live their personal life in song. At the same time, arguably from Nick Drake onwards, there seems to have been something nihilistic, fatalistic, running through contemporary lyrics.
Alex Wolfe
Talking of Nick Drake, there seem to be few modern singer/songwriters that don’t acknowledge a debt to him, and I’m sure Alex Wolfe would too. Drake’s death was clearly a tragedy, but it’s the kind of tragedy that seems indelibly entwined with modern song. Themes of death, suicide, pointlessness, run through the lyrics and the actual lives of musicians like Tim and Jeff Buckley, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Chester Benington, Michael Hutchence and many more.
DEAD MEN SINGING
Wolfe’s final song Talk (a performance which held the audience mesmerised) goes further: ‘We love the dead men singing on our radio, romanticise their fears/but we can’t talk about the kid next door, who killed himself last year,’ is a statement about society as well as a plea for the intercommunication that most of us crave but rarely achieve. Wolfe’s own musical survival technique is to objectify, in song, personal emotions that would otherwise be unbearable. This is his strength – so the paired works The Toughening and The Softening on the new album, are about grief and loss but also about being told to be other than what you are, to suppress emotion, and addressing the disconnect between how you feel and how you think you ought to behave: ‘I almost drowned myself in a bathtub rather than admit I was scared.’
The concert last Saturday, in Christ Church St Leonards, was the official launch of Everythinglessness. His music sensitively addresses issues such as masculinity and mental health. Despite the nihilism there is, in most of the numbers, an ultimate gleam of hope. His lyrics, like the best poetry, address the existential through the personal.
DRAWING PEOPLE IN
It’s a fine album, accomplished, authentic, and well produced, and the whole of Saturday’s performance was similarly well-planned. Wolfe plays electric and acoustic guitars and a mandolin. A string quartet were on stage, four very talented women who all also have clear admiration for Wolfe as an artist. His voice and instruments are perfectly tuned; he addresses his audience with an egoless directness and clarity that draws people in. He knows, in other words, how to sing. He communicated with, and held, this most diverse, wonderful, multi-generational example of Hastings audiences.
Wolfe’s long-time friend Spencer Jones was the support act; many people clearly did not know he was going to be there so he kindly explained why he was. (I recognised him but couldn’t think where from, until today when faithful Wikipedia reminded me that he played William Kempe in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow, one of the wittiest and cleverest series ever produced on TV, in my opinion). His stand-up routine is unique – he does a lot of voice work with a looper and introduces, towards the end, a vibration plate. He invites the audience to present soup recipes and ladles out imaginary soup, which he refers to as imaginary soup. He also introduced a large talking home-made COVID virus. Altogether, very interesting and unexpected, and the audience enjoyed the whole thing.
More and more I see one-off, world-class performances of everything in Hastings, in the unique environments of our churches and secret venues in ancient houses and the back rooms of pubs. This was a home-grown concert – Wolfe lives part of the time here and part in London. Local musicians are named in the album credits. Once again I feel lucky to be living in the middle of this joyfully creative environment – despite any cultural Angst, Art is life-affirming.
Alexander Wolfe officially launched his latest album, Everythinglessness, at Christ Church St Leonards on Saturday 24 January. More details, dates, and teeshirts at alexanderwolfe.co.uk
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