Patrick Wolf: I go through six BlackBerrys every two weeks – throwing them at people

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The philosophy of Patrick Wolf

On technology: I embrace modern technology but I don’t rely on it. I go through six BlackBerrys every two weeks – throwing them at people.

On paparazzi:I love being papped. I treat it as a performance piece. The world is far too conservative to treat it seriously. I don’t believe in vanity.

On money: I’d rather be poor and creative than rich and boring.

On acting: I was actually asked to play the part of Fagin in a Broadway version of Oliver! and I was up for the Mad Hatter in the Tim Burton film, but if anyone saw me acting they’d run a mile.

On fame: I’ve been on prime-time American TV, The Charlotte Church Show, and have eight-year-olds coming to my shows: where do I go from there? Turn in to Cliff Richard or become more like Siouxsie Sioux.

On Mark Ronson: I think he’s lovely and a real genius. He came to the studio and we had a nice few days working together, he was like: “Oh Patrick, I like what you’re doing,” gave me some support and went on his way.

In the hour or so I spend chatting with Patrick Wolf in his Southwark flat, we scoot from the sublime to the ridiculous more often than the 25-year-old changes hair colour.

Along with talking about his remarkable new album, The Bachelor, his first since parting with Universal Records, he tells me about bunking off school with Lily Allen, getting pissed on cider in the back of a limo with Agyness Deyn, saving seals and wetting himself at The London Bridge Experience.

In case you haven’t sussed it, Patrick can be a beautiful mess. A cyclone of talent that looked like it might destroy itself – but he found love and made a cracking album instead. His fourth LP was partly funded through Bandstocks, a website where fans invest in projects in £10 increments, supporting artists in the ­

"On stage I was like Liberace, but after it was gin and tears"

old-fashioned way by parting with actual money.

And The Bachelor is very much the return to form diehard fans were waiting for after the pop-ification of Patrick on his last and only major label release, The Magic Position­, which drew Mika comparisons, criticism and adulation­ in equal measure.

“I was feeling anti-establishment,” he explains. “But on stage I was becoming­ a little bit like Liberace­, white teeth smiling, but when the curtain came down it was bottles of gin and buckets of tears.

“If we had done this interview a year-and-a-half ago [when he was in the throes of new-found (minor) celebrity] there would be fruit flies everywhere­, bin bags of rubbish piling up, no food in the kitchen. I’d lost the plot. I was Miss Havisham, sitting there wasting away, not answering the phone and becoming a lot less of a nice person.”

Sensing this, some feared The Bachelor (originally a double­ album, Battle) might be a totally unlistenable two-fingers-up at the music industry­ that dropped him.

“Oh, I have that version,” smiles Patrick, swinging his legs over the side of his armchair. “It was me, [software app] GarageBand and seven bottles of whisky. I looked like an absolute­ tramp and sounded like a tramp and it’s unbearable to listen to.”

Talking about pop, I tell Patrick how happy but shocked I am that La Roux has had such a hit. “I’m not shocked,” says Wolf, before plonking a conspiracy theory into my lap. “The week I was dropped they signed her, and all the money that had been going into me was going into her. The same photographers and styling team. It was like they took Patrick Wolf and put it into a girl.

“She’s lovely and she’s a great singer with good songs but, where I’m from, it’s not challenging. If people are taking from the past then they have to be futuristic with it. It’s easier for them to go straight to doo-wop or 80s templates and regurgitate.”

Patrick isn’t against pilfering ideas from the present, though, citing Britney Spears’ Blackout album as an ­influence. “I’d never worked with a producer like Alec [Empire from Atari Teenage Riot] before, but I wanted him to be like my Timbaland and give me a Gimme More kind of track and he came up with something from that ­German punk aesthetic – it’s quite an extreme sound.”

It is extreme in parts but also surprisingly accessible, pairing furious with gentle; electronic dance music, samples and beats with folk fiddles, Celtic whistles and choirs – oh, and there’s Tilda Swinton, too. Patrick always wanted the Oscar-winning actress on his record, but never dreamed he’d get her. He turned up to a Q&A session she was giving at the Ritzy cinema armed with a CD and crossed his fingers.

Amazingly she emailed him and turned up at his Brixton studio the very next day, saying: “Hey dude, let’s do it.” And they did. Made a pretty good job of it too.