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Jan 25, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Kim Jacobsen-To

After a long hiatus from music, Patrick Wolf is releasing a new EP, The Night Safari, on April 14 via his own label Apport. Now he has shared its second single, “Nowhere Game,” via a music video. Joseph Wilson directed the video. Watch it below.

In November, Wolf announced the EP and shared its first single, “Enter the Day,” which was his first new song in a decade and was one of our Songs of the Week.

Wolf had this to say about “Nowhere Game” in a press release: “On the way home from a concert on a stage facing the Black Sea in Crimea I recorded a melody into my laptop and started programming on the plane home, trying to make a portrait of the storm rolling I had watched sat backstage on the beach with an armed security guard. Many years later as I was finishing The Night Safari EP I discovered that unfinished project and then the new string section and lyrics of a period of life I named ‘nowhere game,’ a few years where I stopped singing altogether apart from, I realized, to record ‘happy birthday’ down the phone to my friends and family. Ultimately the song to me is a slow realization of being trapped in any manifestation of vicious cycle and a long way yet from knowing how to ask for help. The viola and violin parts on ‘Nowhere Game’ and across the EP are played by myself for the first time since my first two albums, proof to me that I had broken one of my own vicious cycles in the end and returned to my craft”

Of the song’s music video, Wolf says: “This video is the second part of a film directed by Joseph Wilson that journeys through the first two tracks of The Night Safari EP this second part opens with me rowing down the black frozen river of the previous song into the ‘Nowhere Game’ that Joseph and I imagined up inspired by our own mutual experiences of nowhere. Every stitch of clothes and costume in the video from my own to the nowhere creatures too was handmade by me and the visionary Marco Tullio Siviglia, our collaboration, as it came to pass with every creative and dancer involved on the video became as magical as it was accidentally emotional. As we all began to enter past the midnight hour it soon began to feel like an act of solidarity filming in the abandoned Beacon Hill Fort on the coldest night of 2022.”

Director Joseph Wilson adds: “Aside from our creative vision, we share a lot of similarities growing up as outsiders and both overcoming our own traumas through the pandemic. I had come across Beacon Fort a few years ago (I’d been saving it for the perfect project) and this felt like the perfect setting for the ‘Nowhere Game.’ Located at the very edge of a quiet coastal town in Essex, the cold concrete structures and its prolific history of war, battle and invasion created the perfect setting for the ‘Nowhere Game.’ Many of the cast and crew were lifelong Patrick fans which made the shoot feel even more worthwhile. I remember looking up to the sky and seeing a dozen shooting stars as the performers pulled rocks around Patrick whilst he played the viola. It was such a moment! Regardless of the fact there was no electricity and it was the coldest day of 2022! It was all worth it.

“I worked with movement director Ted Rogers to direct the performers or the ‘gloms’ as we named them. Their story was inspired by the Greek Myth of Sisyphus who is condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top. Patrick spoke about how he had learnt to let go of his resentments, lifting a great weight off his shoulders. So the idea was that the ‘gloms’ were pulling around their resentments (which start off as small pieces of coal) and develop into large heavy boarders as the story goes on.”

The British musician was a regular staple of Under the Radar’s coverage in the 2000s and early 2010s, but then he just stopped releasing music. Wolf’s last album was 2012’s double album Sundark and Riverlight, although he returned to touring in 2018.

The release date for “Enter the Day” was no accident, November 11 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Wolf’s debut EP (simply titled The Patrick Wolf EP), released on November 11, 2002.

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