How quickly they grow up. This year marks the tenth anniversary of Florence Welch’s first festival performance in Ireland. It was at Oxegen 2009 that the flame-haired soon-to-be-megastar fluttered from the wings for a low-key mid-afternoon show. Thus began a grand pop romance.

The tent was tiny; the crowd, if enthusiastic, not exactly heaving. With a little effort you could push to the front. It was the perfect vantage from which to see Welch go sailing over your head for one of the stage dives already becoming her trademark. Nobody present was in any doubt but that they were witnessing the arrival of a superstar.

These were heady days for the boho 22-year-old. Her debut album, Lungs, was blowing up; the song ‘Dog Days Are Over’, in particular, on its way to becoming one of the anthems of the time. Yet as she makes her festival return at Electric Picnic 2019 much is changed. Some of her more naive early tunes have been quietly dropped (‘Kiss With A Fist’, anyone?).

And she’s fallen out of love with the rock star lifestyle that, at Oxegen 2009, she was just becoming enraptured by. That is the message delivered loudly, clearly and affectingly, on last year’s High As Hope.

Florence’s fourth LP was, in the most endearing and moving way, her early midlife crisis album. It spills over with nostalgia for her years in the fast lane. But there is an acceptance, too, that you can’t carry on as if you’re 22 forever. Especially when you’re about to turn 33 and are arguably much older in pop star years.

What’s remarkable is that she distils this essentially downbeat message – all good things come to end, including your wild child days – into an upbeat record that is about moving on and learning to accept your new position in life.

Here at Hot Press it has us breaking out in goosebumps too. We were the first Irish publication to predict big things for Welch. The first, too, to interview her. How chatty and forthcoming she was in those early days. Back then, one of the points of interest was her unusual family dynamic.

Her mother, having separated from Welch’s father, got together with the nextdoor neighbour. Cue: Brady Bunch-type shenanigans on Planet Florence. “I already had two brothers and a sister. I gained two older brothers and another younger sister. I mean, fucking hell – one younger sister is bad enough. It was weird,” she told me back then. “We were all crammed into the same size house. Only now there were six kids instead of three. And we were all really close in age and really hormonal.

“It made me retreat into my own world. I became a bit of a tear-away – if there are that many kids in a house you can pretty much do what you want. Nobody can keep tabs on six teenagers. In my first year in school I was already going to punk gigs and getting into hip-hop. I’m not sure if I would have done that had I been in a smaller family.”

She laughed as she explained all this. It was one of those moments when you catch a star as they are in the process of being formed. In subsequent encounters she would be just as friendly, but rather less playful. More guarded too, as was only sensible given she signed-up to the rock A-list.

But she’s gone through all that and comes to Electric Picnic older, wiser, a little battle-hardened perhaps.

“I tend to look back on that time with a mix of nostalgia and terror,” Florence wrote in an essay published in British Vogue this year.

“There’s a part of me that is in awe of that girl, her total disregard for self-preservation, how she could run at the world headfirst, eyes closed, with no care for the consequences,” she said in a subsequent interview. “But I also want to hold her in my arms, say, ‘It’s OK, you’re OK, you can come down now. You’ve been screaming at the top of that tree for a bit too long.”