Patrick Wolf has “itchy feet”. Walking across the Thames to his home by the river, the singer is telling me how he hasn’t performed live in nearly ten months…

“I haven’t done a show now since March,” he says. “It will be good to get in front of an audience again. I’ve been raiding karaoke parties. Every time I go to a gig I have to steal a microphone and just annoy people, so I’m very excited to be back.”

The impending return to the stage is The Barbican’s Twisted Christmas on 12 December. Billed as a “deliciously dark evening of twisted Christmas songs”, the night will also feature performances from Jarvis Cocker, Sandy Dillon and Daniel Knox. With its emphasis on dark humour, chilling atmosphere and theatre it should provide the perfect setting for Wolf (whose live shows have always encompassed such themes) and the 25-year-old tells me he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be part of the event.

“I’ve been making my album all year and I was meant to really not do anything until February, but David Coulter (the night’s director) is a really great friend. He plays a lot of musical scores on my album and we have really collaborated a lot on this last record so it’s kind of like a real family project for me and I love working with David so it’s really exciting to be doing The Barbican show.

I’d definitely like to collaborate. I think it’ll be difficult because I’m mixing the album literally from this Sunday right up until Christmas and I’ll be coming down from the North just for the day. I think all the other artists are having three days to prepare or something and because of my schedule I only have the day to come down, but I definitely want to do some spontaneous collaborations on the day. I definitely want to work with the children’s choir.

“I think the last time they did it at The Barbican there was lots of little spontaneous collaborations between sound check and the actual show, so I think there’s gonna be some surprises definitely. I like it that way.”

As nauseating as it may sound, there truly are some people who were put on this planet to perform. Patrick Wolf is one of them. Having grown up in a musical family and played numerous instruments since a very early age (he made his first theremin when he was 11 and began recording at home on a four track aged 12), Wolf was never really destined for an office job.

“It’s just something that’s been part of my life since my balls dropped, you know… Music, being on stage and performing. My whole life has either been based in performance or writing music. They’re definitely the two most regular rhythms in my life. That’s why it’s been so strange and frustrating for me to spend all this time off the stage.

“It’s not like I come alive on the stage though. I’m always the same, whether I’m on the stage or on the street. Always full of this spontaneous energy.”

Patrick Wolf could have gone one of two ways. Thankfully he went neither. With his background, his passion for performance and his “bubbly” personality, you get the impression he’d have made a perfectly acceptable stage school brat. But with his musical aptitude (the list of instruments he had mastered by the time his “balls had dropped” is frankly ridiculous”) he could have just as easily been a classical, childhood prodigy.

The route he took though was an altogether different one, and by the age of 18 he was playing his first gigs as Patrick Wolf. By the time he was 22 Wolf had two albums behind him (2003’s debut Lycanthropy and the 2005 follow-up Wind In The Wires), but it was not until his third release, 2007’s The Magic Position, that he started to get really noticed in a major way.

His first two albums were pretty DIY (at the time Wolf explained Lycanthropy in the following terms: “the rhythms and noises were made from old four track tapes, late night Atari sessions, first sampler experiments, field recordings from Trafalgar Square, l’Eglise De Saint Eustache, Wandsworth Roundabout, Cimetière De Montmartre, St Martins in the fields, Primrose Hill, St. Ives Bay, The National Portrait Gallery… and Wind In The Wires as a “celebration of the natural energy that comes from electricity”), while The Magic Position was much more polished, poppy and accessibly packaged.

With catchy singles like ‘Accident And Emergency’ and ‘Bluebells’ Wolf suddenly found himself playing to larger audiences than ever before, and experiencing for the first time the true glare of the media spotlight.

“At first it was really interesting and something I really enjoyed, but after a year and a half I wanted a private life again,” he tells me.

And was there anything he regrets about that period? He was once quoted calling Mika a “twat” (we’ve called him far worse...).

“I’m really proud of everything I’ve done and all the music that I’ve made. I’ve obviously made a lot of mistakes and I’ve said a few very stupid things, but I think that is just part of me you know. Being a teenager when I started out it was kind of in my nature and I tended to fuck things up a bit from time to time.”

Patrick Wolf’s fourth album (the one that’s kept him off the stage all year) will be out early 2009. He tells me it’s a lot darker than his last, but avoids discussing the sound in depth until the “album promo time comes around”.

One thing that is made clear, though, is that the new shows will take a different form, with Wolf – who used to play four or five instruments in one show – concentrating more on the vocal side of the performance.

“Letting others take over the instrumentation is something I’ve been learning over the years,” he tells me. “When I did the first shows as Patrick Wolf when I was 18, I didn’t have a proper record deal or anything. I was just scraping things together independently, and I couldn’t afford to bring any musicians on the road with me across Europe or America, so it was just basically whatever I could fit into a Samsonite hard back case.

“Obviously since I’ve gone on and grown in venue size and tour size then I’ve been able to get a wonderful band of musicians together. I plan for the next album not to play one single instrument for the whole hour and a half. I’ll do a full on proper singing performance. I’ve grown as a singer too actually. I’m now able to maybe focus more on being a singer.”

Let’s just hope he never forgets about the theremin…