Patrick Wolf is sitting in a London private members' club, sipping genteelly on a Bloody Mary that is the same colour as his flamboyantly dyed auburn hair. Dressed entirely in shades of navy, Wolf has an elegant manner, and folds his angular 6ft 4in frame neatly into a velveteen-upholstered armchair like a long-legged flamingo. "The thing is," he says, eyes blinking as though startled by the sound of his own voice, "I really don't feel I belong in pop music."
And yet Wolf is set to make quite an impact on the genre. At the age of 27, he is about to release his fifth album, Lupercalia, a work packed full of sweeping orchestration, surges of positive sentiment and oodles of commercial potential. Critics have described it as "immaculate" and "a triumph of romanticism", which isn't bad for an album that features ukulele and has such an unapologetically erudite name (for those of you without a Classics degree, Lupercalia was the forerunner to Valentine's Day: an ancient pastoral festival intended to avert evil spirits and release fertility). Admittedly, it's not the kind of thing you generally associate with the Pussycat Dolls.
Lupercalia is, says Wolf, "hugely confessional" and documents his experience of falling deeply in love with the man he is about to marry. "It was a long process," he says. "Not just the first week or the first year of love, but it's quite a few years before that… feeling the absence of love and then its discovery."
Three years ago, after relationships with both men and women, he met William Charles Pollock, who works at BBC 6 Music, by chance, at a Christmas party. It was "love at first sight". Wolf was at a low ebb, after touring relentlessly and experiencing bouts of depression that led him to contemplate quitting the music industry altogether. His songs at the time reflected his state of mind – melancholic and aggressive, with tortured, complex lyrics – and his performance persona became increasingly outrageous as he took to the stage dripping in feathers and spray-painted silver.
But now that Wolf is engaged to be married, he seems to have rediscovered a sense of simple optimism. His next single, "The City", has already been hailed by the website Digital Spy as "four of the most joyous minutes you'll have this year with your clothes on". The accompanying video features a group of shiny, happy people paddling in the surf in Santa Monica.
"I wanted nothing to feel artificial on this album at all," says Wolf. "I wanted to document my joy as naturally as possible… It was time to grow up and change." Later he adds, almost as an afterthought: "I can't lie about things. I find it very hard." And it is true that Wolf seems to embody an unfettered innocence. He is at pains to express himself clearly in answer to questions, taking time to ensure that he has got his point across as honestly as possible and admitting: "I'd rather be embarrassingly open than embarrassingly guarded."
Both his openness and his creativity stem from a "wonderful childhood", raised by an artist mother and a musician father in Clapham, south London, with regular holidays to visit his maternal grandparents in County Cork, who introduced him to WB Yeats and the Irish fiddle. "My childhood was full of fantasy," says Wolf, stirring his Bloody Mary with its celery stick. "Dad would only talk in fables or metaphor. It would be: 'Let's go find a pot of gold when there's a rainbow', not: 'Let's go kick a football.' It's in my blood to tell stories."
When he was sent to a private, all-boys' secondary school in Wimbledon, he found it difficult to settle in and was badly bullied. "I was suddenly in a male, academic environment, in a place that preached competitiveness through sport and army training, and I was painting my toenails so that when I turned up, they'd send me home… I just wanted to be alone with my four-track. Solitude is one of my favourite things."
Wolf spent his spare time making music and editing his fanzine. When, aged 14, he interviewed Minty, Leigh Bowery's art-rock group, he managed to persuade them to allow him to start playing the theremin on stage as part of the band. Wolf promptly dropped his real surname – Apps – in favour of something altogether more fabulous ("I wanted it to sound courageous," he explains) and was soon reinventing himself as a performer.
When he was 15, Wolf's parents transferred him to Bedales, the progressive boarding school, and the bullying stopped; but he admits it has taken him several years, and psychotherapy, to deal with its impact. Negative criticism, he says, has lost its power to wound – "I'm not comfortable with it but I'm numbed to it" – and now he is keen to move on. "I find it quite strange thinking about myself as a teenager," he says. "It feels like a world away."
Given all that Wolf has packed into the intervening years, that is not surprising. After leaving school, he busked and studied composition for 12 months at Trinity College of Music, before releasing his first album,Lycanthropy, to critical success at the age of 20, citing influences as diverse as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hector Berlioz and Chet Baker. Two more albums followed, featuring collaborations with, among others, Marianne Faithfull and Tilda Swinton. In between recording albums, he modelled for Burberry and attended Elton John's White Tie and Tiara ball. Then, after being dropped by his record label, Wolf funded his fourth album, The Bachelor, by selling shares to his fans through the Bandstock website, generating £100,000 and making it into the top 50.
Such fan loyalty is all the more impressive given that Wolf is an artist who defies easy categorisation, both in his music (which splices folk, classical and electro-pop) and in his transgressive attitude to socially prescribed gender roles. "I really believe that love and respect in any relationship can exist outside the terms 'gay', 'straight' or 'bisexual'," he explains. "There's a kind of reverse sexism these days, where the biggest male pop stars are very booted-and-suited blokes. A man has to be seen as being in control, paying for everything: it's aspirational to have a lot of money and get all the girls."
In a world of pre-fabricated popstrels and identikit boy bands, Wolf is a much-needed iconoclast. "That's something I'm really proud of," he says. "I've never made anything that fits easily into one stream or another."
And for that, perhaps, we should all be grateful.
Lupercalia is out 30 May on Hideout
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/13/patrick-wolf-lupercalia-elizabeth-day
