05.01
SAYONARA
Florence and the Machine: 'I was almost out of control':
Florence Welch's debut album, Lungs, was the break-up record of 2009. But where to next for the glamour queen of goth pop now that she is back with her ex?
Of the "10 Florence commandments" once pinned to the wall of a recording studio by Florence Welch (this list of rules-for-living drawn up by the musician when she was still a precocious teen, teasing out demos), number eight was pragmatic. Appreciate your feet, it ordered in boxy handwriting – a bit of self-counsel from an accident-prone girl who'd too often gone to casualty bleeding into her shoes. Today, descending the central staircase at Observer headquarters, I can see the 25-year-old has entirely failed to follow her old edict.
The giant diamanté heels she is wearing look, to my eyes, not just painful but potentially lethal. Distinctive in most elements of her appearance – skin milky white and hair always washed some conflicting shade of red – Welch is not especially tall. But today, she's been pushed well above the six-foot mark by these sparkly chair legs trussed to her feet, and fittingly for an artist who records under the name Florence and the Machine, she has to tackle the stairs with a series of mechanical swivels, as if she's a robot fresh off the production line, still learning to walk.
It gives her time, coming down, to assess my own outfit, and she points out while manoeuvring off the bottom step that we might be meeting for a really awkward blind date – the kind when neither party has established a dress code and the evening is sunk by each other's apologies for being under- and overdressed. I'm in decaying blazer and end-bin shirt. She's in throat to ankle silk, the gown blinding white and some kind of antique (Florence commandment number four: Support your local vintage shop). Helping Welch into the car outside, waiting to take us from the Observer's photoshoot to a bar in central London, I must look like her butler.
It's been, she says, "a Challenge Anneka day". Except that instead of involving a frantic effort to build a youth centre or an ape sanctuary (as in that venerable and much-missed TV show helmed by Anneka Rice), Welch's beat-the-clock task has been the promotion of a new album, Ceremonials, out this month. It's the follow-up to her 2009 debut, Lungs, a star-making record that spawned ubiquitous single "Dog Days Are Over", lovesick anthem "Drumming Song" and the stunningly recast Candi Staton cover, "You've Got the Love", year-defining tracks, all three, which eventually urged the album to No 1 in the charts.
Most of Lungs was written in the wake of a failed relationship, and was, in my opinion, one of the best break-up albums in years. Not a 13 (Blur) or a Blood on the Tracks (Bob), maybe not even an 808s & Heartbreak (Kanye), it was nonetheless heady and wounded and raw, and it established Welch's utterly distinctive sound, something she describes fairly well as "big, tribal goth pop". Lungs sold well, here and abroad, and won Welch a diverse roster of fans, including various kingpins of fashion (earlier this month Karl Lagerfeld had her sing inside a giant clam shell at his Paris fashion week show) and David Cameron and Ed Miliband, both of whom made their determined walks-to-podium at their recent party conferences to the sound of Welch's music.
But it's a tricky thing, the album that chases a wildly successful first, and generally needs a lot of talking up. So Welch has been doing that, for hours and hours. Earlier she endured a blitz of interviews with the dreaded European press corps, a lengthy chunk of which involved a German reporter reading aloud from her printed-out Wikipedia page, to no discernible end ("It can feel like your skin's being peeled off. Really slowly"). This morning there was a bit of filmed promotion and, later, there will be some glad-handing at a party hosted by Anna Wintour; thus the dress. In between was the Observer photoshoot, which I sat in on for a while.
Welch was grave, focused and silent throughout, only showing a smile at the very end before thanking those present in a voice so small everyone lurched forward, ears first. It wasn't what I was expecting from a singer who once climbed 30ft of stage scaffolding, mid-show at the Reading festival, to dangle among the spots in her hot pants; who used to tell a story about getting so drunk she woke up, one morning, on the roof of a pub wearing only a paint-speckled Captain America costume.
How's it possible, I ask her in the car, to go from being that muted, meek thing in our studio (the middle-distance stare suggesting something like recent and traumatic military service) to the convulsing, crowd-surfing sprite fans know from her live shows? To the chest-flexing nun in the video for "Drumming Song", or the writhing geisha in the one for "Dog Days" – exuberance personified?
Welch ponders the question, um-ing so softly the sound is lost to the purr of the engine, and eventually points to the example of her mum, an art history academic at the University of London. "She's not a performer. But when she gets on stage to give a lecture she becomes this heightened version of herself. She can suddenly hold the whole room rapt. I think that's where it comes from."
Other factors might be at play. Welch seems to have become more disciplined since emerging, three years ago, as a 22-year-old who would sing through her photo calls, then cheerfully babble to interviewers about believing in werewolves or collecting Scottish broadswords. In her very first interview, conducted in an east London pub, she continued speaking into the reporter's Dictaphone even while he was at the bar getting drinks… Inevitably, there followed one or two mean write-ups, mostly from music journalists knocking her un-rocky way of speaking (posh vowels, girls' school cadences) and too-trendy affectations. "Florence listens to music through a Walkman," wrote one early blogger. "Well of course she bloody does."
Three years at the industry's front edge seems to have taught Welch to hold herself back a bit; to get through each promotional marathon by staying quiet when she can. In the same self-governing spirit she's trying hard not to get as almightily pissed as she used to. A recent month-long tour in support of U2, she says, passed totally soberly. "I used to think it was all part of the performance to go out there, go on tour, and get as drunk as possible. Like, oblivion. Oblivion. Living almost out of control. And I think, now, I feel a bigger sense of responsibility to the fans. To the people who come to see me play."
On that list of commandments, knocked up when she was 18 or 19, Welch had written (number six) Never know the actual details – the kind of cheerful boast a kid makes about being flaky and getting away with it. Now she's in her mid-20s, hardly old but no invulnerable teen either. She's a moneymaker in an ailing industry, with a band and a touring choir and a small orchestra to be accountable for. She's got a long-term relationship to tend, and she's trying to buy a house. "It's partly what the new album's about. Do I want to be stuck in teenage land, where everything's free and easy? Or do I want to become more responsible? You know, is it time to grow up?"
The growing up, happily, is a work in progress. Before clambering into the car (photoshoot over, vintage dress for the Wintour party successfully couriered in from the other side of London, a minor emergency about a missing clutch bag solved with a phone call to her boyfriend, confirming he'd be meeting us at the bar to transfer bits and pieces to his pockets), Welch fell into a lengthy discussion with the assistants nearby as to what exactly makes bloody mary the perfect drink. "It has everything. Vitamins, energy." "And alcohol." "Yeah, and alcohol." "And salt." "Love the salt!"
In the car she's been sitting in an awkward position, a kind of flattened "S" with her back on the flat of the seat and her head jutting up, so as not to crease the silk dress. As we drive within sight of the bar, prominent in the middle of Piccadilly, she lets out a big gasp of relief. Huge: I can hear it above the noise of the engine. Bloody mary time, I say.
"Bloody great."
She grew up in Camberwell, south London, eldest daughter of parents Evelyn, the art history professor, and Nick, an ad man. Her upbringing was privileged (the fact of her going to the fee-paying Alleyn's school invariably gets a mention in profiles, and duly does here) but not so exceptional as to spare her the same sludgy skill-sorting everybody goes through. Florence Welch: good at art; bad at fractions; great in the choir, even if she did get glares during favourite hymns for singing so loudly.
In her early teens, Welch's home life underwent an unusual overhaul. Her parents, "always better off as friends", had divorced, and her mum had started a new relationship with a neighbour. When they married, Welch and her two siblings were abruptly melded with this next-door family. "I gained two older brothers and a sister, going from being the eldest to the middle," she once said. "You analyse it."
The step-siblings get on well now, she tells me, but at the time "it was mob rule. We had a lot of fights." She rebelled, putting on black lipstick and telling anyone who'd listen she was a practising witch. Later, she remembers a big argument with her mum about those troublesome fractions and thinking to herself: well, at least singing was "something I could do". Going to gigs replaced the witchcraft as a hobby, and sometimes, if the act booked to perform hadn't shown up, Welch would clamber on stage to work up a song. She learned to crowd-surf.
Her enormous diamanté heels, we discover at the bar, turn out to be ideal for the showing-off of leg wounds. She angles her leg under the dangling lamps to reveal calves spotted with dark marks that have been dulled by concealer. "Without the makeup I look like a leopard," she says. "There's this weird sense of invincibility that comes over you on stage, and I bruise easily."
A glittering buckle on her right foot frames an old scar. "A piece of floorboard got stuck in there when I was 17. I jumped off the bed because a boy I liked had phoned me. He turned out to be my first love, so, I mean, that worked out. But I almost lost the foot. This is the problem with being an exuberant person."
And she is, now – an exuberant person. Drinks in, Welch is transformed. Lively, engaged, she reveals a lovely luxurious laugh that punctuates her disconnected confessions (on a secret enthusiasm for football: "I'm good at distracting runs") and helps her out of trouble when she can't quite finish a sentence. This happens maddeningly often, but it's hard not to forgive someone who ties herself into knots trying to give an emotionally complex answer to my emptiest question of the evening: "I think… I think it comes from a real thing of never… Of not really… I don't know, I'm just so… I think it's the way it makes me feel, it's almost… No: I've just never been a tracksuit-wearer."
She's good-humoured, too, about our increasingly absurd situation in the bar. It's a busy, expensively fitted venue with a beautiful ebony bar in its front salon; inevitably, then, it's the sort of place that's got an arbitrary rule forbidding anyone to stand at this wonderful bar with a drink. Multiple employees tell us this, unreasonably pleased with the prohibition, until it's suddenly waived by a maitre d' who either recognises Welch or recognises that only someone moderately famous would wear such an extravagant frock on a Monday night. "I'll turn a blind eye," he says.
Problematically, the fast-moving waiters and busboys turn a blind eye, too, and for more than an hour, as Welch and I chat, we're bullied all over the place. Alert to the danger of a spillage, Welch has started drinking by bending to her bloody mary from the waist so as not to risk the white silk; her laughter gets louder every time we're interrupted by a missiling tray of Perrier or a barman getting aggressive with his tips tray, and before long we're circling each other while we talk, avoiding staff all but forward-rolling between our legs. (Commandment number five: Wander about a lot.)
The boy who phoned, I say – the one who caused the bed-jumping and the near mutilation; he was the one she'd end up writing Lungs about? Not him, says Welch. Lungs was about a boyfriend she got together with around 2005. "We knew each other through friends." His name was Stuart and he worked in a bookshop; Welch fell in love. By mid-2008, the relationship was over, and Welch was distraught. With her friend and musical collaborator, the producer Isa Summers, she holed up in Summers's small London recording studio.
They'd both been "messed around by boys", Summers has recalled, "and we'd lock the doors and turn the sound system up and listen to Madonna". They wrote, too, sitting back to back in the tiny space, composing music, Welch tells me, "on a £100 Yamaha keyboard and half a stolen drum kit". They were angry, they were often hungover (it was around now Welch woke up as Captain America on a pub roof), and they recorded some career-shaping tracks.
"Enthusiasm over skill," says Welch, who can't read music very well, has only a self-taught half-grasp of the piano, and came up with the irresistible skewwhiff drumbeat for "Dog Days" by bashing her hands against a tea tray. "I'm quite glad I never learned to play the guitar, because I think I'd write songs that were more classically structured. As it is, I've had to create my own way of writing, which isn't typical. Everything's a big crescendo."
It was in the lock-up that the name Florence and the Machine was coined (Summers was "the Machine", the term now encompassing the shuffling crew of musicians Welch performs with), and it was here the list of commandments went up on the wall, with its misleading number nine: Be a country singer. Welch was finding a sound for herself at the time, but it wasn't country. "I'd experimented with so many different types of music. I had these folky songs I'd written and recorded, but something wasn't quite right." There'd been other false starts: some studio time with Razorlight's Johnny Borrell, in 2007, came to nothing; she'd signed up to front a band called Ashok before changing her mind and wiggling out of the contract. "It wasn't until I went into Isa's studio that I knew I'd hit on a sound I loved."
Island Records agreed, and signed her up in November 2008. By the beginning of 2009, she'd won a Brit award, the critics choice prize given to the new year's most promise-plump artist. Lungs, released in July, went on to sell 3m copies.
On the new album, Ceremonials, one of the standout tracks is an introspective ballad called "Lover to Lover", in which Welch sings about "losing sleep… setting myself up for a fall". Is that what it's like, I ask, producing a smash album and then trying to do it again? Welch, hunched, sipping, nods vigorously. "I've been given such amazing opportunities. And it can feel like I'm definitely gonna manage to completely fuck it up."
This is second-album talk. Because it can go either way at this point; look at the example of her contemporaries. Adele's second effort, last spring's 21, confirmed her as music royalty. Duffy's second, the desperately ho-hum Endlessly, seems to have stunted, if not sunk, a promising career. "I'm more satisfied with this one than the last," says Welch. "But I'm still nervous about it. You're never completely happy, otherwise you wouldn't ever make the next one." Earlier, recalling her summer on the under-card of the big U2 tour, she'd said: "It's funny, in a way, I almost prefer being the support band. There's just less expectation."
She'll be fine with Ceremonials. My nerves, if any, are that fans of Lungs, that great dossier of discontent, must have been fans of its fury, its tartness. And on Ceremonials, Welch sounds really quite chuffed. Track one kicks off with a muffled giggle. By track five's foot-tappy harpsichord twangs, the mood is absolutely jaunty. The video for recent single "Shake It Out" even cast a giddy-looking Florence in the middle of a game of blind man's buff.
"I think the first album feels almost desperate. Being really desperate for someone. I was definitely in a more settled place for the second, which was helpful for my concentration because I wasn't, like, crying all the time."
More settled, in part, because she was back with her chap. She and Stuart, the villain of Lungs, patched things up not long after that album was released. Welch has been very funny, in the past, about the "erm, sorry" moments they went through together as her singles trickled out in 2009 and 2010. We all know what it's like to make incautious comments about an ex, our own or someone else's, and the awkwardness that follows should that break-up be reversed. Welch's thoughts on the jilting came blasting out every day on the radio.
"You've got the 10 Florence commandments!" she cries, clapping her hands. The crumpled print-out is laid on the bar for close study.
I'd glimpsed the document in a short film about Welch that her record company released earlier this year; her commandments were pinned up in the background of a segment filmed in Summers's studio, and I captured a fuzzy screen-grab. Now Welch looks over her old wisdoms, helping me decipher the ones I can't make out.
"Number one: Always carry seeds. I don't think that meant, like, to grow things in an emergency. I was just obsessed with eating nuts. Number 10: Climb anything… Yeah. My mum was very upset about the stunt I pulled at Reading; she had to watch it from behind the sofa. No more climbing. Number two: Always have a book…"
Her boyfriend graduated from the bookshop a while ago, and now works as the literary editor at Dazed & Confused. Welch has painted a blurred picture of him during our time together, describing him, variously, as: "Really smart… When I first met him I thought he was terrifying, I was slightly afraid of him… Sharp and witty… Looks good in a tux... Doesn't suffer fools." And, of course, in Lungs he was her great tormentor. So at the bar I keep expecting we'll be joined by a young Jeremy Paxman or Horace Rumpole in black tie, if not some awful winged demon swooping in from Piccadilly.
But here is he is, a perfectly affable and sweet-seeming chap, three or four years older than Welch, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and the advertised tuxedo. He kisses her, tells her she looks pretty, transfers some of her things to his pockets and politely wanders out of earshot to stand at the far end of the bar where he will, I guess, be harassed or even beaten up by the now openly hostile waiters. Welch is visibly bucked by his arrival, stepping from sparkly heel to sparkly heel. I put it to her that after Lungs, the break-up record, Ceremonials is the happily-ever-after record.
"It does feel more joyous, but I wouldn't say happily-ever-after. It's not completely a case of 'Everything's fine, now!' because everything's still… Even if you're in a relationship things are complicated. There's probably lots of things to deal with.
"Touring, and being in a band, it's almost like the other stuff, the other parts of life, get put on hold. And I'm kind of waiting, really longing, for that part of my life to start. But this – " here she gestures expansively, to incorporate, I assume, the interviews and the promotion, the fashion parties and the live shows, the European reporters reading out Wikipedia pages " – this is so all-encompassing, it's quite hard."
It almost sounds, I say, like she's anticipating retiring. Embracing the growing-up plan and settling down.
"But I love singing. I love singing. So I wouldn't want to give it up. I just think, hopefully, I would be able to fit all that in. At some point." The boyfriend wanders back now, some sense, I bet, alerting him to the fact that he was close to being endowed with a kid and a mortgage. It's time for me to leave, and we all say goodbye.
"Be nice to her," says Stuart, meaning the article I'll write, and I almost say the same thing back. But the couple look very happy, off to meet Anna Wintour. And if things do go wrong down the line – well, there's probably a great third album in it.
Ceremonials is out on 31 October on Island
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