Go With The Flo

Looking like she’s just stepped out of the pages of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, ‘pagan pop’ sensation Florence Welch is shaking her head in profound, if good-natured, bafflement. “The past six months have been so totally insane. Before my album had even been released I did a mini-tour and everyone knew the words to all my songs,” she says. “Like, how the fuck did that happen?”

Backstage at Oxegen, Welch, front-woman of the year’s buzziest newcomers Florence And The Machine, is chomping crisps and contemplating her burgeoning fame. Released to some of the year’s most ecstatic reviews her debut LP, Lungs – a sparkling collection of highly atmospheric indie-pop – topped the Irish charts and also hit number two in the UK, where it has already been certified silver (the record was only kept off the top spot by a Michael Jackson compilation). Add to this a recent Mercury Music Prize nomination – she’s the bookies favourite – and it’s little wonder that Welch feels as if, in a very good way, her world has been spun off its axis.
With a sartorial sensibility poised somewhere between a Celtic Druidess and Bjork circa her ‘dead swan’ phase, Welch is one of the most singular newcomers in pop, combining the attitude and style of Karen O with the brilliantly imaginative songwriting of Kate Bush. If one were being glib, you might describe Florence And The Machine as sounding like Bat For Lashes – her rival for the Mercury – only catchier and more publicity friendly (you can compare both for yourselves when they play Electric Picnic this autumn).
Face to face, Welch is softly-spoken and slightly fidgety. She’s also impressively direct – her replies are straight-to-the point. Given the critical and commercial performance of Lungs, she must be feeling pretty happy right now.
“I really am,” she enthuses. “It’s the most terrifying thing, to release an album. You have to kind of keep your head down, and you shouldn’t read too much into what people think; you have to do something that you yourself are satisfied with. It’s weird, I go through stages in my life, with everything, where I hate something and then I love it. I’ve gone to a comfortable place now where I actually can say that I’m happy with the album.
“But I’ve become such a perfectionist that I can’t listen to it back. I find myself going, ‘I wish that the drum sound in the last beat was louder’, that kind of thing. Like, really anal.”
Did she find making the album quite stressful?
“It was the weirdest time of my life,” replies Florence. “Really intense, and fun and exciting, but spending two days in a booth doing handclaps and backing vocals sent me mad. Still, something good came from it.”
Welch’s songs have a distinctive narrative style, her aim, she says, being to draw the listener into a different world with each track.
“I feel like each song on this album has a different theme, and that’s what I always go for in music,” she explains. “I really get involved in the theme of the track and the landscape I’m trying to create. I want it to be a musical landscape that you can walk through, whether it’s a gothic one or the pagan rites of spring. I just try and indulge the feeling and go with it to the extreme.”
As a former student of Camberwell College of Art (she departed after 18 months to concentrate on her music career), it’s no surprise that Florence has an interest in many different fields of creative expression. Indeed, one of the singles on Lungs, ‘Dog Days Are Over’, was inspired by an art installation.
“It was an installation put up on the side of the South Bank,” notes Florence, “and I used to see it when I was riding my bicycle. There were ‘70s rainbow bubble letters saying, ‘Dog Days Are Over’, and I found it really uplifting. I still don’t know if that song is positive or negative – I’m not sure what it means to me yet. But I just thought it was a wonderful sentence.
“I always get inspired by phrases, like things I see in shop windows. There was an amazing white and pink neon poster stuck on the side of a church that said, ‘Are you hurting the one you love?’ What an incredible question.”
Given its provocative title, ‘Kiss With A Fist’ (another of the singles) has prompted plenty of speculation about its true meaning, including the implication that it in some way condones domestic violence. Florence herself has said that the song concerns someone who’s giving as good as they’re getting in a relationship.
“Well, I don’t think there are any victims in the song,” she asserts. “There’s no one being abused, it’s more about a couple who find what is tearing them apart the most addictive thing in a relationship.”
Have you known people like that?
“Completely,” she nods. “It was inspired by a couple I knew. They broke-up, but they’re still friends, and I think they might get back together.”
Lungs is also informed by her own misadventures in love.
“I went through quite a tough time during the making of it,” she recalls. “Breaking up with my boyfriend, being too fucked up and just ruining myself. I had to reign myself in. It was good to have to do the album, because it gave me a focus. I reckon it could have been a lot worse.”
With regard to her live shows, Florence is noted for her theatrical performances and elaborate costumes. Was there any artist who influenced her in that respect?
“It’s just who I am,” she shrugs. “I couldn’t do it any other way – I’m excited by beautiful, dramatic things. With live shows, I don’t plan it. The music takes me over, and I don’t know whether I’m ingesting demons or exorcising them. I’m very much ruled by my emotions, and onstage they take hold of me. But it’s better, cos I can kind of control them. In life, I can’t control them, but onstage I can use them to fuel the performance. I get carried away by the music. I used to stand really still and just sing, but as the music’s got bigger I’ve started to move more. As a person, I stay at home and dance manically to music in my room by myself, and now it just feels like I’m doing that in front of a couple of thousand people.”
Sometimes, indeed, the urge to bond with her audience has prompted her to, quite literally, plunge off the deep end.
“I’ve done loads of stage dives,” she laughs. “The leap of faith at Brixton Academy is really intense though. It’s like from that fucking wall (points to far side of room) to here – you have to fly. Basically, I went vertically, face-down into the crowd. On that occasion, I was thrown straight-back, but generally I’m a good crowd-surfer.”
As you might guess from some of the more esoteric moments on Lung – at times, Florence sounds like Kate Bush covering Adam and the Ants – Welch favours unconventional studio techniques. For instance, she admits to recording while being battered by a killer hangover. A splitting migraine, apparently, is just the thing to unleash her creative side.
“When I wrote ‘Cosmic Love’ I had one of the worst hangovers of my life. I was lying on the floor going ‘I don’t think I can move’. I started attacking the piano and suddenly I had this song. There’s a lucidity you get when your brain is a bit out of itself. It’s quite useful.”
She demoed many of the songs that would end up on Lungs in a tiny bedroom studio in Crystal Palace, London.
“Loads of them were just done with my friend Bella. The funny thing is that we first started the band years ago, when I was at school, and it was called Florence Robot Is A Machine – I chose that about an hour before the first gig. But imagine if I had to say that name over and over – it would be so insane and annoying. So, I shortened it to Florence And The Machine.”
Florence’s passion for the esoteric isn’t mere outsider affectation. In her teenage years, she went so far as to start her own Coven at her school, the prestigious Alleyn's College (former pupils include Jack Penate, Chemical Brothers Ed Simons and house-porn dandy Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen).
“We were fascinated with a movie called The Craft, about teenage witches,” she explains. “The idea was to make all the boys fall for us with magic. I wanted to be a cool witch. Like the sort in Bewitched.”
She blanches somewhat when it’s suggested that Alleyn’s would have to be regarded as rather an elite establishment.
“I wouldn’t say it was posh. It’s a normal middle-class school. I’m aware that other musicians have gone there. But I didn’t know them. I was in my own little world most of the time.”
As a teenager, she flitted between different kinds of music like a moth caught between blinking lights.
“My musical tastes really changed over my school years. I got into hip-hop and then I got really into electro and college drop-out bands. I started going to loads of raves. I was kind of absent at school – not naughty in a naughty way. I was more of a dreamer. I was often absent, both physically and mentally. I would go and sign in, then leave and wander around Camberwell looking for trouble.”
Growing up, her domestic circumstances were, to say the least, unconventional. Her father is an advertising high-flyer related to the satirist Craig Brown; her mother, a New York academic, hung out at Studio 54 in her twenties and was a friend of Andy Warhol (she fled bohemian Manhattan for a life of scholarly calm in Britain).
“My godmother tells me a story of my parents queuing to go into Studio 54 when they first got married. Somebody came out and goes to my mother, ‘Evelyn, Evelyn!’ – it was Andy Warhol. She doesn’t talk much about it – she was more of an observer than a participant. She saw a lot of friends go to the dark side. She left and went to England when she was really young. She tried to stay sober so she could appreciate what’s going on about her. It’s weird – she was the same age that I am now when she left New York. She was walking away from that weird showbiz world – and I’m about to enter it.”
Her parents separated when she was very young and, when Florence was a teenager – as if to make things even more intriguing – her mother took up with their neighbour from three doors down!
“I’ve got a brother and a sister, and I gained two older brothers and another younger sister,” she explains. “I mean, fucking hell! One younger sister is bad enough. We all get along really well now. There were six of us crammed into a house. It was weird. It was the same size house except there were six of us instead of three kids. And we are all really close in age, all really hormonal. I think it made me retreat into my own world a bit. My room was kind of separate from the rest of the house. It was like this fucking junk shop. The upside was that I had a lot of freedom. If there are six teenagers in the house, you can get away with fucking anything (laughs).”
Florence had a couple of particularly notable shows recently, when she supported Blur on the Manchester and Hyde Park legs of their reunion tour.
“It was really amazing,” she beams. “At Hyde Park especially, it was a real festival atmosphere, as opposed to just being a support band. It was really fun. I thought Klaxons were great in Manchester, they’re one of my favourite bands. It was such an honour. Before I even had Florence And The Machine, I was going to watch Klaxons at Benicassim and Hoxton Square – we call it the Hoxton Apocalypse, it was when everything went wrong.
“They played in some abandoned church, and I didn’t even go in and see them. There were just, like, hundreds of people rolling around Hoxton Square. I was out of my mind, rolling around outside. And then to be on the same bill as them two years later feels so strange. It’s amazing but odd, when you love a band and then you’re on the same bill as them.”
Did you meet Blur?
“Yeah, they were really lovely. Alex James came backstage after one of the gigs and he was just so nice. He was going, ‘That was amazing. Your voice was made for these big stages – at times that was like the best thing I’d ever seen.’ I was just hugging him so hard and going, ‘Thank you!’ There was glitter and lipstick all over his t-shirt!”