What is a Wolf Alice?
“Know who I am, that’s important to me,” Wolf Alice sing on their storming tune, ‘White Horses’. But do you know something? We really don’t know who they are.
Of course, you can also take that with a pinch of salt. This is a band who have been on the sonic conscience for the better part of the last 15 years, and has only ever continued growing from strength to strength as they indisputably take the crown as one of the biggest acts to emerge from the UK in recent memory.
But it seems that we have largely let this happen without ever truly considering the mechanics of what made it happen, not least the name which we have taken for granted. Wolf Alice – what does that even mean, and what is it referring to? Emblazoned on world stages and TV screens, it’s a title that’s certainly catching, but doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Yet to find the answer, you have to look to the literary great Angela Carter. The author, famed for her feminist, often dark and spectral, reimaginings of classic fairytales, has been a muse for many a thoughtful, introspective person out there. For Wolf Alice themselves, they could definitely pretend this was the case.
However, the honest truth is that when frontwoman Ellie Rowsell’s mother came across Carter’s short story Wolf-Alice, they simply thought the title sounded cool and decided to adopt it for their band. It was an impeccable move of naive foresight, because as much as they didn’t understand the meaning at the time, it would go on to change them forever.
How were Wolf Alice inspired by the Angela Carter story?
Carter’s original Wolf-Alice, published in 1979, centred on a twisted retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, where a feral child is raised by wolves and comes up against formative arcs of life. In a covert sense, it was the perfect allegory for a band that would have to endure a cutthroat business in order to eventually rise from the ashes.
Yet within the story, where the child is feared by humanity for her raggedness and wildness, it also spoke to an aspect of the sonics that Wolf Alice have always been seeking to channel. Rowsell commands an ability to switch from innocent and ethereal sound to a totally rabid, forceful front of rock and roll. In itself, that change is venturing into the territory of the wild.
That sense becomes particularly relevant in the context of their latest album, The Clearing, with the rasping wrath of songs like ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ presenting an electric edge to the band, to the magical and spiritual tones of something like ‘Midnight Song’, casting an incantation or spell over the audience to completely bind them into the Wolf Alice universe.
In some ways, Wolf Alice is nothing: the concept is completely figurative, fictional, and beyond physical grasp. On the other hand, you only have to see the band in the flesh to realise that they embody something totally real and visceral, and you cannot easily tear your eyes away from that. It’s testament to the power of a good literary muse – except they didn’t even know that at the time.
