Domestic Jukebox: Patrick Wolf

When we caught up with the fantastic Mr. Wolf for our Domestic Jukebox feature, he ended up talking the ears off us to the point we didn't have enough space to print his entire, quite charming rundown. Here then, in its entirety, is Patrick's complete list:

BUFFY SAINT-MARIE: Illuminations

"I discovered this album when I was going on a research mission to discover the roots of the singer-songwriter tradition. She’s one of the most original singer-songwriters of the last 100 years. She was groundbreaking because she was the first folk singer to kind of start actually singing her own songs at a time in the 60s when you were either a songwriter for other people or you were a folk singer of traditional songs or a singer of songs written for you and given to you. She was, along with Bob Dylan, one of the first to start sneaking in her own songs into her set. She was very brave in pioneering the singer-songwriter thing and also in moving away from folk music.

With this album she went to a university where they were pioneering working with electronics within classical music and she worked with a few electro/acoustic composers. It’s the first real electronic/classical/folk crossover record and it has all these amazing experimentations with tape loops and samples and synthisizers and really beautiful lyrics. It’s only about 10 tracks long but it’s a real beautiful journey through someone’s imagination and a real pioneering, beautifully dark album. It’s not talked about enough really, how brave it was at the time and how beautiful it still sounds."

KATE BUSH: The Dreaming

"I heard this when I was living in Hackney in East London and I needed an album that reflected those dark winter months, those dreary days of November and February and having no light and living in a city. I love the cockney accents on ‘There Goes A Tenner’. I remember just walking through a lot of wind and rain and listening to this record. It’s always got a place in my heart that no other place can touch in terms of a song for those really weird months in the winter and the autumn. People don’t really write for that kind of time of year. Nobody really dares to tread that territory, sonically. It’s quite a claustrophobic album. I like the story of it, it was the album where everyone wrote her off and said that she’d gone absolutely too far this time, that it was too claustrophobic, too crazy.

"She directed all her own videos during that period and they were all rejected consistently by the label and were never shown on TV. 20 years on, luckily they found their way onto YouTube and I think they’re the best kind of music videos I have ever seen. It’s kind of that merit of an album that at the time is very much misunderstood but is now regarded as one of her best and most celebrated works. It gives you strength as an artist that you can be perceived to make mistakes or you can be happy being misunderstood because maybe in 20 years time people will catch up that what you were doing was actually the best thing you’ve ever done."

THE BREEDERS: Last Splash

"A record that really made me fall in love with guitar music. Kim Deal was a really big inspiration. I got into The Pixies first and then discovered The Breeders after that. I fell in love at the time, my first ever romantic affair was to the soundtrack of that record and I used to swop all my Breeders records with this person. It was the sound of being 11 years old and falling in love and meeting after school and kissing in the park. It represents a real innocent time in my life. They were such a liberated band and I loved their production and that album just sums up innocence."

SALLY POTTER AND DAVID MOTION: Orlando OST

"When I was 17, I ran away from home and saw this film. I fell in love with the cinematography and the story, but the music was really standout. I found out that the director Sally Potter had written it and sung it mostly herself and worked with a really amazing contemporary classical composer in David Motion. When I was working all different kinds of jobs before I got my first album out, I worked in a bead shop selling beads to craftspeople. I was working on the tills with David Motion’s daughter and that was a really weird moment. I got to hear all about the behind the scenes stories of the film and how Sally worked and I just really loved the idea that she directed the film and wrote the soundtrack. It opened my mind that you shouldn’t really limit yourself as an artist in life and if you feel you need to do something then you don’t have to pigeonhole your role in a creative project.

"It influenced a lot of my album Wind In The Wires and it let me to work with Tilda Swinton on The Bachelor and it really has influenced a lot of my life, being confident not to be afraid of gender or the barriers of gender, if you feel like a girl one day then be a girl. If you feel like a boy the next day then be a boy. And you can live in between and reincarnate yourself many times throughout your life, and that record sonically represents that as well."

JONI MITCHELL: Ladies Of The Canyon

"I love the simplicity of the work and the claustrophobia of the record. I could mention every single Joni Mitchell album for my top five but I think this one stands out at a time when I really decided what I wanted to do as an artist and a musician after Lycanthropy and it was just to really focus on songs and telling stories. And each song on this record does tell a story but as a whole it’s like a compendium or a short story book.

"I guess that influenced Lupercalia a lot too, because I wanted to write an album about the four walls around you in home and the mile radius around the house, and Ladies Of The Canyon was all written in Laurel Canyon. It’s her speculation on the world and her internal world. There’s very few albums in the history of music that have painted such a really specific personal honest picture, even of the mundanities of life. It’s a perfect, beautiful, melancholy and happy kind of record. A priceless album."

Patrick Wolf plays The Academy on Monday October 24