Patrick Wolf review – a moon-lit marvel lights up the Minack theatre

Minack theatre, Porthcurno
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of his album Wind in the Wires in the Cornish landscape that inspired it, Wolf claims his status as a goth-folk pioneer

Patrick Wolf walks on stage at the Minack theatre, straddles his stool backwards, and it immediately collapses. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make an entrance,” he says, then jokes: “In many ways, that’s like a metaphor for my whole career.”

Wolf is at the Minack, a theatre carved into a cliff in Cornwall’s outer reaches, to celebrate 20 years of Wind in the Wires, his second album. He made it in the Cornish harbour town of Hayle, near St Ives, having left London to pursue a man he later likens to Bluebeard, and a relationship that created a lot of tears and panic attacks. It is a beautiful record: folk and piano-led reveries, troubled by staticky electronics, sharing a sense of gothic romance with both Tori Amos and Daphne Du Maurier.