A Queue For Nothing

Wolf Howard - A Queue for Nothing

Doledrum Books, 2024

Wolf Howard is an English artist, poet and film-maker living in Rochester, Kent. He has recently released a book of poems titled A Queue for Nothing. The collection opens with a quote from Vincent Van Gogh, “Normality is a paved road; it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”  From here forward Wolf Howard continues to uphold his tradition of unique and experimental art, proving that he is one of ‘my’ artists. I call the artists and musicians I love ‘my’ artists because they are dear to me, rare. They align with the subtle elements of my existence. I turn to them to tell me what life is like from the viewpoint of an untethered observer. They are often creatives who do not find friends in most groups or write cautiously to complete the circle of a current social agenda. Or, importantly, pretend they are happy, ‘Once a black dog came and sat next to me in my freezing dripping studio and said that I was useless at art,’ Wolf writes in The Black Dog of art, and I identify.

I read A Queue for Nothing in one session and couldn’t speak about it until three months afterwards. We all know that feeling when something or someone is so special you can’t look for a bit. I don’t write about culture as an archivist, but as a believer. As a creative, I am sometimes expected to have a list-like knowledge of arts and to admire the apparent ‘greats’ within it, but I mostly don’t. My process of collecting music, books, and art is autistically selective. Or to put it another way, I don’t like that much of anything. My pleasure is to intuitively find and follow work that is created for its own reason, not to suit an outcome or expectation. That is why I am excited about this collection.

When the book arrived, Wolf had placed a personal note inside and signed the cover with a pencil sketch of the face of a wolf. This is the kind of analogue experience I cherish. Yet, art for great art’s sake isn’t the only reason I felt personally attached to the release of his book. It is a marker of time passing and of the right kind of good coming to fruition. Exciting art that you desire and require is the easiest kind of love affair; it gives you what you need to remain involved with living without needing to know the creator intimately. The relationship can never fail.

I first became aware of Wolf during my blackout years of the late 90s and early 00s. I don’t remember having a conversation with him then. I didn’t say much to anyone, too shy, but we would have been in the same tense adjunct atmospheres, amongst others wanting to deliver their best art self to the world, while perhaps thinking it may inevitably be pointless. It was the permission many needed to numb out through indulgences. In Young Wolf Howard, he writes, ‘Young Wolf Howard, see what you think, I’ve bloated up your liver from drinking too much drink.’

Wolf and I would have also known some of the same people. Huck Whitney, the bassist in my first rock band, delicious monster, was brother to Joe Whitney of Joe Whitney and the Tropics of Cancer. Joe lived with She Roccola who together formed the bands Minxus and The Charity Case. Huck and Joe Whitney also played together in The Flaming Stars, some of whom were friends with the cult band Gallon Drunk, (who I sang with a couple of times) and Wolf Howard. Wolf was the drummer in The Buff Medways with Billy Childish for whom it was impossible to be any cooler than, and I went to their shows. Billy Childish was also writing books that would later become books to save my life by, particularly My Fault.

The culturally bruised and biased that would gather at the associated gigs and exhibitions of this era were mostly on benefits, including me, and people rarely asked questions about your wellbeing. This suited me fine because I didn’t do feelings then. They were the years when everything was seemingly available for me to pursue my creativity, due in part to the success of delicious monster, yet I instead came to be drunk on the elated escape of it. I knew what it would require of me to continue to develop notoriety and had no desire for the discipline it would demand or the inner turmoil. I also had no real understanding of why I would want to be anything but a disconnected, mysterious nobody on the periphery of London’s, Camden Town and Soho night life.

Glass in hand, I lived vicariously in the rapture of rock and roll and punk bands, blues, spoken word and Stuckist art. I reasoned that if others were doing it, then I didn’t have to, it was service enough to be present for them. This didn’t work as a solution long term, but for a few years, I lived for the murky and magnificent midnight hours. This subculture was thriving parallel to the so-called Brit Pop years. It provided a space for me to be triumphant in my rejection of what was then termed ‘solo major record label deals,’ following the split of the band.

Wolf is a tall, commanding presence who exudes a quiet gentleness and appears to drift off into infinity while staring into his Guinness. This compelling combination is thematic in A Queue for Nothing. His local processing of events and people leads to an infinite consideration of consciousness. Always the outside observer, he conveys the tender and often accidentally funny stories of his life as he travels, paints, makes music, walks in nature, has conversations with magpies, (this happened) and visits his mom. It allows the reader insider knowledge of someone who creates from how they live.

There is a brutalism in them too. He metaphorically punches walls to confirm he is still physically alive within a technologically swamped environment. In You Ruin My Life, he writes ‘If my computer were a person, I would slip a blade in behind its windpipe and rip it forwards.’  A God he cannot guarantee the existence of, or entirely resist enquiring about, also threads throughout. In More Thoughts on Death, his son, now six, asks ‘Will I be an angel when I die,’ to which he replies, ‘I should think so I say, (not really thinking so),’ and then considers his response with a ‘freshly broken heart.’

Wolf Howard's poetry flowers from the mud of what wider society inaccurately perceives and represents as giving meaning to life. In A Queue for Nothing he considers how ‘Between two nothings we stand in line, for a bus, an ice cream, the doctors, the bank,’  just as he reminds us in Sat Between the Silver Birches, that we are creatures of sensitivity and small things matter such as, ‘Listening to the shush shushing of the leaves watching crows cut across the deep blue gap in the tree tops.’ Each poem holds within it a consideration of the mundane ‘two more days till my next eye injection, I feel I need a better way to mark the passage of time,’ in The Passage of Time, along with the illusive, ‘I dreamt I could fly but only very slowly and only about three foot off the floor’ in I Dreamt That I Could Fly. The reader is encouraged to identify with the deeper truth that none of us has all the answers, but alternatives should always be considered.

I rarely sang or performed in those early years of connecting to Wolf. Disassociation had consumed me. There was one night, however, when becoming aware that I was leaning out of the window of this episodic lonesome season I sang a song I had written titled ‘Take me to God’ at a late bar called Filthy MacNasty’s in Islington. The room, full of hard critics, drunk drifters, and some of the best practitioners of modern expression, fell eerily silent as I performed, my fragility was obvious to all. Pete Doherty of The Libertines happened to be there. He asked my friend Anna Page to introduce us, but I was too withdrawn to accept the invitation and left the nightlife for a daytime experience forever shortly after. 

Having experienced numinous moments such as these myself, I see their potential to shift reality. This is another reason why I consider Wolf Howard’s work so necessary right now. His poetry is rock and roll that has grown up and proven itself to still be relevant and important. it provides an essence of insight that will warm you back up to the potency and urgency of each moment of your time here. Incidentally, Filthy MacNasty’s closed permanently this February, 2025. That identifier of a time is gone forever.

Wolf has moved on too. He is a father and married to Kerry, whom he dedicates the book to and honours throughout. If you consider yourself a little quirky in relationships, you will find your poem here in the deeply moving poem about their love, As sane and strange as me. No spoilers, you just have to read it. You can also follow Wolf's visual art on Instagram. How things have changed, and yet the bold joy of his painting has remained pure. I wait for them to be posted. I own two pieces of his art, they make me happy.

It was an equally life affirming experience when in January 2023, I took myself to The Medway Little Theatre to see Wolf Howard and Billy Childish perform. I arrived early, almost first, to the event. Wolf saw me and warmly said ‘Hello, I know you.’ This attracted the attention of Billy Childish standing nearby who put his arm around me. The three of us were captured for a photograph. I lived through years of invisibility and recovery for an alignment such as this.

I don’t know why Wolf remembered me. There were over twenty years in between, but I like to believe it was due to a resonance or recognition of types. The final poem in his book is titled A Queue for Something. It embodies the message that what makes you feel alive is what matters. It is a homage to the souls who stand at the front of live shows and wait for the curtain to open as they queue for their favourite band. Here the shared sense of purpose and excitement is mirrored by the people who create it, ‘We’re the something they have queued for, the something to help pass the time in this strange ongoing existence,’ he writes. I echo that sense of purpose and gratitude.

Instagram @WolfHowardArtist