There must be about 30 musicians outside the Athens Hilton, but it isn’t
difficult to spot Florence Welch. While the others are gathered in a huddle,
Welch is standing about 20 yards away from them in high-risk Louboutin-style
stacks, the night breeze blowing straight through her black chiffon dress.
Much later, the Brit Award-winning Florence and the Machine will play almost
every song from their imminent new album at the annual Synch festival, then
an almighty wave of self-doubt will ruin her mascara. But that need not
concern us right now. Right now, the singer cuts a formidable dash. A
Gothic, glitter-eyed Barbarella with an improbably effective soupçon of
Sarah Ferguson, who thinks she might have OCD, ADD — “and dyspraxia. I mean,
I couldn’t tell you if that wall is 5ft or 50ft away. Don’t know, don’t
care”. (Given that she doesn’t care, you don’t point out that the inability
to judge distance is dysmetria).
Certainly, the ticker-tape flurry of thoughts never relents. Gazing through
the bus window at the Athens skyline, she’s reminded of why she has no
interest in taking photos of the things she finds beautiful. “The sunset is
f***ing massive! It’s the biggest thing ever! And the sea! Oh my God! But
take a picture of it and it’s dead, a bad reproduction at best.”
To meet Welch is to understand why, lately, her fortunes have picked up with
such unnatural speed. Over the past 12 months she has dictated the pace at
which things have happened around her. In June 2008, Welch was 21, recently
out of Camberwell Art College with just one 7in single to her name — the
sexually charged indie ruck of Kiss With a Fist. Uninvited, she
walked into the East London studio where the Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons
producer James Ford works and persuaded him to work with her. On her second
visit, Welch used the shower in an attempt to obliterate a hangover and
smashed the glass door trying to force it open. “I looked like Carrie by the
time they took me to hospital, blood pouring out of my arms and chest.”
Despite it all, they still managed to record a single together. By the time Dog
Days are Over appeared in December 2008, Welch’s name was being engraved
on the second Brits Critics’ Choice Award (Adele won the first). Now there’s
the album. Still three weeks away from release, Lungs has already
been hailed by the unhyperbolic industry bible Music Week as a likely
album of the year. Welch is reluctant to concur. “If I was completely happy
with it there would be no reason for me to make another one,” she says.
Nevertheless, it’s a bold beginning, an album of twisted morality tales
concerning ritual sacrifice (Rabbit Heart) and coffin-building
boyfriends (My Boy Builds Coffins).
Considering the childhood that helped to fill her lyric book, it’s hard to
imagine the album turning out any other way. Encouraged by her mother — the
American art historian Evelyn Welch — Florence read Victorian murder
mysteries and Egyptian mythology, “stories where people get their eyes and
liver pecked out by vultures, only to have them grow back”. She remembers
her mother taking her to Renaissance churches and staring “long and hard at
St Agnes, who had her breasts cut off and was holding them on a plate.
“My imagination was always leading me to awful things and I could never
override it,” she says. “When I was about 9 I remember my mother leaving us
in the house for a few minutes to check on the neighbours’ burglar alarm.
She was delayed for some reason, which was enough to make me totally freak
out. I was cowering behind a bush, hiding and screaming.”
When she was 13, Welch’s mother and her children moved in with the next-door
neighbour. Florence, the eldest of three, discovered the Clash, Ramones and
Green Day and duly turned skater girl. In a new home environment in which
she acquired three stepsisters and a stepbrother, punk rock was a sanctuary.
Conscious of being “the weird girl at the back of the class” she longed for
a best friend, but it wasn’t until a sixth-form art class that she met
Sophie, whose nickname Sad Sack is tattooed on Welch’s forearm. “We were
told to draw each other. I drew her as a pre-Raphaelite beauty. She painted
me with a hard face. Not at all how I saw myself.”
How did she see herself? “Oh, way more vulnerable,” Welch says. And sure
enough, as the evening’s show progresses, there’s no missing the
vulnerability in Florence Welch. At times, it eclipses everything else you
think you know about her. Halfway through the show, having already scaled
the scaffolding during the pagan funk of Rabbit Heart, she struggles
to fight back the tears in Cosmic Love. An enthusiastic response from
the black-clad indie teens of Athens leaves her momentarily exhilarated. But
when she comes off and asks her soundman how her voice sounded he gently
points out that Welch strayed out of tune in a couple of places.
In an instant, she looks less like a pop star and more like the little girl
who fluffed her lines in assembly. Welch’s keyboard player Isabella
empathetically squeezes her shoulder. Her guitarist Robert Ackroyd shoots
her a friendly gaze. Hastily the soundman adds: “But when we get the in-ear
monitors and you can hear yourself it’ll be fine.”
But Welch appears to be in freefall. Later she explains: “I just want to make
people happy. So if someone tells me I’ve done something wrong, I’m just . .
.” She stiffens her lip and stares into her rum and Coke. “It’s just hard to
move around onstage and stay in tune all the time, you know?”
I blurt out a hastily conceived theory in the hope that it might make things
better. It concerns the computerised voice correction software Autotune. The
reason Autotune-treated vocals sound so odd to us is that the software is
doing something we ourselves automatically do when listening to singers.
It’s the imperfections that tell us we’re listening to a human being.
The notion sparks something in her. “I feel that it doesn’t matter what you’re
singing as long as the emotion is there. I mean, don’t you think that sounds
without words have the most force? You hear a soul singer letting rip
without words and . . .”
In the backstage area of this disused gasworks, Welch sings loudly and
wordlessly, her voice resounding through the vast pipes that go through one
room and into another. “I mean, Dog Days are Over [her second
single] means nothing.”
In a second, though, the defiance of that admission (the song was inspired by
phrases randomly borrowed from an art installation) brings more uncertainty.
“Sometimes I feel guilty about how flippantly I choose lyrics. If I like a
phrase I just put it in. And then it means something to people.”
All but the most thoroughly drilled, dead-eyed stage-school prodigies would be
left feeling like an imposter by such a swift career trajectory. Sure
enough, winning a Brit unleashed all sorts of conflicting emotions in Welch.
Two months before the awards ceremony, on hearing she had won, she had a
panic attack in a branch of Caffè Nero. “Why? Because I had done nothing
and I was getting an award for it. Even on the day of the Brits the only way
I felt I could stand up there and receive it was to thank the people who had
helped get my music out and put it on the radio.” She also managed to cram
in a primetime swearword (“F***! I just touched Kylie!”).
If Welch is no longer haunted by the macabre art and books in which she
immersed herself as a child, it’s probably because make-believe demons have
been supplanted by the real nightmares grown-up life has to offer. Last year
she and her boyfriend Stuart separated. Some time later, Welch went to a bar
with her friends and, by chance, saw Stuart there with another woman. She
practically relives the moment she saw them kiss and, in doing so, looks
like a petrified child. “You don’t realise how hurt you can be until you see
them with someone else. Seeing that . . . it made me insane.”
They’re back together now. “Girls have a tendency to ignore what’s great about
who they’re with,” she says. “But at the moment I’m doing really well. I’m
with a great guy who isn’t mean to me.” She wants to be married to him by
the time she’s 26. Two years later she hopes to start a family. “He’d be a
great father,” she coos.
Before all that, however, there’s work to do. The first album may not yet be
out, but Welch is already focusing her energies on the second. “I can hear
it in my head already,” she says. “It’s like a really droney, intense house
beat with a really deep undertone of bass and shitty electronic drums, mixed
with beautiful choral vocals that sweep and dive and then go to nothing.”
Once again, Florence Welch’s voice cleaves the air in free flight, singing
along to music that, right now, exists only in her head. Long may words fail
her.
Lungs is released by Island on July 6
