The cultish novel that inspired Wolf Alice’s ‘Formidable Cool’
The field of influence Wolf Alice turns to is wide and varied; from classic literature to local pubs, anything at all can find its way into a song.
One is right there in the name. After forming in 2010 as an acoustic duo between Ellie Rowsell and Joff Oddie at first, they chose their name from Angela Carter’s collection of short stories, ‘The Bloody Chamber’. A tale about a young girl raised by wolves before being dragged back into human society, Wolf Alice felt like the perfect choice to name the group, as their sound became more and more wild.
From then on, through their four albums, nods to literature, cinema, pop culture and beyond have floated in and out. On their debut, they call out their namesake story, reference Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, and reference a Simpsons’ episode. On their latest records, everything from Marilyn Monroe nods to mentions of Camden’s Dublin castle come in.
But on their second album, Visions of a Life, things got truly referential. They always say, you have your entire life to make a debut, and that’s why the second album is so famously a struggle, as time pressures mean that a band often have to go actively looking for inspiration, having to make their writing process more purposeful as they don’t have another decade or so to pull it together.
For their sophomore, Rowsell seemed to turn more towards culture, wandering over to the bookshelf and the DVD collection. For ‘Beautifully Unconventional’, the movie Heathers gave her a language, stating that while it was still a personal song about a friend, “My feelings towards her reminded me of the film Heathers, where everyone is a Heather and you find your other non-Heather…a ‘you can be my partner in crime’, sorta thing.”
On ‘Formidable Cool’, she was inspired by a book she was reading at the time. During a Q and A session on Twitter, a fan asked about the song’s origins, to which Rowsell replied, “I was inspired by the book The Girls by Emma Cline”.
Out of all of the band’s songs, this might be one of their most impassioned. Singing about those types of guys who have an allure so strong it feels dangerous, who draw girls into their orbit only to leave them shattered, it hits a fever pitch climax as Rowsell screams, “And if you knew it was all an act / Then what are you crying for?”
But when diving deeper into the lyrics, the man in this song takes on a more sinister role than just your average fuck boy. “I believed what he taught us,” the chorus wails as the lyrics spiral around things like “God never needed another stand-in”. Taking on a truly frantic voice of someone coming out of a delusional daze of belief, Rowsell was inspired by Cline’s novel, which was inspired by the Manson Family.
In her novel, Cline writes about a fictional young girl who is bored and looking for a place to belong. Soon, she falls into the orbit of a wannabe musician who takes Manson’s shape. All reflected on by the girl in her older age, slowly the vision becomes clear that she was, in fact, in a violent cult, mirroring the experience of the Manson Family girls undergoing therapy in prison, and which is mirrored in the panicked voice of Rowsell’s song.
