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Florence Welch on hedonism, personal history and new music

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Florence Welch is nervous. “I get very anxious in interviews,” she says, her pale cheeks flushed, her dark eyes shining. “I’ve always felt overwhelmed by my emotions. Even sitting here now I want to cry and I don’t know why.”

We are sitting side by side on a yellow striped sofa in the front room of the Florence and the Machine singer’s south London home, a small Georgian cottage fitted out in racing greens and walnut browns, patterned rugs and antique fittings. Gilt framed artworks crowd the walls, vintage bric-a-brac covers every surface, and countless books are densely packed on to shelves or stacked in perilous ziggurats around the floor.

Volumes by American writers like Lorrie Moore, John Berryman and Patti Smith rub spines with the poetry of TS Eliot and a handsome edition of Mary Beard’s history of Pompeii. Welch catches me admiring this distinctly esoteric library and laughs. “I hid the self-help books before you got here,” she says.

Dressed in a delicate floral shirt, her (dyed) red hair tied up in braids, she is pale, slender, strikingly beautiful – and evidently anxious. “I find it easier to explain myself in music than in person,” she says. “Songs are like protective talismans. In daily life, I’m much more unsure and shy.”

In person she is unrecognisable as the superstar performer who had the Glastonbury crowds eating out of her hands in 2015. Under the guise of Florence and the Machine (a solo project, despite the name) she has released three critically acclaimed, albums – Lungs (2009), Ceremonials (2011), and 2015’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful – which topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic, a feat that this month earned her an Ivor Novello Award for International Achievement.

Welch’s music tends to be full-blooded and dramatic, driven by vigorous percussion, overlaid with towering walls of sound. Live, she matches the intensity of the music with the exuberance of her performance, coursing across the stage in flowing costumes, her extraordinary voice climbing from trembling intimacy to operatic bravado. Her speaking voice, by contrast, is high, soft and fluttery.

“On stage, something takes over,” she says. “When I sing there is a huge sense of release. I am very in love with the world and quite afraid of it as well; my feelings come on really strong. In real life I have to find a way to shut that down. Stage is a place where it all makes sense and people aren’t going to think I’m crazy.”

She describes her songs as a way of “hiding in plain sight… If I tell you that I’m struggling or in pain but dress it up and make the loudest noise ever, I can get it out. I can tell the truth but still hide behind the noise I’m making.” For How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, producer Marcus DeVries encouraged her to scale things down and expose a more vulnerable side. “The thing that I have had to learn is restraint can be as effective as screaming the house down,” she says.

Music has always been Welch’s chosen form of expression. An acquaintance of mine lived next door to her family when she was growing up, and remembers young Florence always buzzing about, singing at the top of her voice.

“My childhood was just people shouting ‘Shut up, please!’ in the house, all the time. My mum would be trying to write another book on renaissance history and there would be me upstairs belting out show tunes. ‘Florence!’ ”

Welch was born in Camberwell, south London in 1986. Her mother, who seems to loom large in her life – photographs of her are dotted around the house – is Evelyn Welch, an American ex-pat currently Professor of Renaissance Studies and Vice-Principle for Arts and Sciences at King’s College, London. Her father, Nick Welch, is an advertising executive turned camp site manager. The family was affluent and well connected. One wall sports a framed caricature of her grandfather, Colin Welch, a former deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph. Satirist Craig Brown is an uncle.

She has two younger siblings, and three step siblings. In her early teens, her parents divorced and both have remarried. Her father now lives outside London but Welch chose her house on a small street in the shadow of a Victorian gasworks for its proximity to her mother’s home. Yet their relationship is clearly complex.

“My mother is a very intelligent, logical and highly academic woman. I was this unwieldy, freewheeling ball of emotion who wasn’t good at maths or spelling and just liked singing and dancing. This wasn’t my mother’s field of expertise. So I guess there was an early sense of not being quite understood. Where did this strange creature come from? You know, I laugh about it but it has been quite a painful thing. Music has been my source of self-preservation.”

She was educated at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, where she earned a reputation as a high achiever. She briefly went on to Camberwell College of Arts but dropped out to pursue a career in music. “There was a big scene of gigs and squat parties, and I just wanted to join in. I used to sing a cappella at open mic nights. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to see if I could do what all the boys were doing.”

She says she never even considered the possibility of finding international success but when she first took her music to America, she immediately found it to be a very welcoming place.

“I think America finds praise easier by nature,” she says. “England’s sort of like the loving and essentially very supportive parent that also wants to make sure you don’t get too big for your boots. No compliment comes without a slight criticism or a joke.”

This, she says, quite “literally describes my actual parents, so if I’ve just projected on to the whole country I sincerely apologise. Living and working in England is very grounding. I worry if I lived too much in the States I could get rather caught up in myself. I need grey clouds and British reserve to balance me.”

If the musical side has always come easily to her, Welch frets about her lyrics to an almost neurotic degree. In the process of writing her songs, she fills notebooks of squared grid paper with words, phrases and drawings. “Writing on lines reminds me of getting things wrong in school,” she says. “Squares feel more comforting.”

She pulls a clutch of notebooks down from the bookshelf. The first, in which she wrote most of her debut album, is a green pad covered in stars and stickers, with “FLORENCE F------ HATES YOU” spelt out in tiny coloured letters. “I was young,” she blushes. Entire pages are taken up with embryonic lyrics felt-tipped in block capitals. One page sports a sketchy drawing of a bearded man with death rays coming from his eyes, under the phrase “the grey face of Christ”.

“Sometimes a whole song appears by magic, like it has poured out of the sky. And sometimes it’s a scrapbook of things that I’ve collected… a dream, a text message, a memory, and somehow when I put them all together it makes sense. I overthink everything else in my life, to the point of near exhaustion, so I try not to with songs. It’s an impulsive and instinctive process.”

At times, she has struggled with the whirlwind of fame that sped her to the heights of her profession and spun her off on tours around the world. Welch reacted to that first flush of success with heavy drinking and hard partying. “Hedonism was like a disguise,” she says. “I was a shy kid and I had to alter my personality. At first it’s freeing but then it becomes a prison of its own making. I thought you needed a hangover to write.”

After a tempestuous on-off relationship with event planner James Nesbitt ended in 2014, she wrote her third album in a state of heightened emotion, collaborating with close friends. “I’d be crying in the studio in a tracksuit. I really needed a lot of support to get things out.” But she quit drinking on the two-year tour that followed and pulled back from the brink.

“I’ve rediscovered my autonomy. I like riding my bicycle to the studio every day, coming home and cooking for myself, having a low-key life, reading a lot. I feel more creative than ever. The joy and ease with which it comes is unbelievable.”

She has taken a year off from touring and is in the early stages of a new album. She doesn’t want to give away too much about it but says it will explore the “black hole” into which she fell.

“I’m happier now, I’m content, but I’m never going to be fixed, ever,” she says. “I don’t think that’s how it works. A lot of things almost worked for me: partying almost worked, being famous and successful almost worked, the relationship almost worked… but it won’t sustain you. These are transient things. It’s working out how to be OK regardless.”

Singing and writing is her one constant balm. “Music always brings me joy, even if it’s about something very sad, or painful. I’m making my fourth album now, and I honestly can’t believe it. You feel like childhood dreams are not supposed to come true. But mine has.” She grimaces and giggles. “That’s so corny. But it’s nice to end the interview laughing. At the beginning I really thought I was going to cry.”

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/interviews/florence-welch-alcohol-new-music-search-serenity/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw

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She's such a fantastic person cry6

I can't wait for new music. But didn't she already explore the black hole with HBHBHB. Or perhaps she's talking more at large and about other things.

Also mess at them calling her solo, when they are clearly a band

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7 minutes ago, Aidan. said:

Also mess at them calling her solo, when they are clearly a band

The "band" aspects have kinda been heading out the door progressively with each album. Isabella's contributions are lessening (from working on 21 songs on Lungs to 6 on Ceremonials and 3 on HBx3) and the remaining bandmates always came off as session instrumentalists rather than official "members", since they don't appear in videos.

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5 minutes ago, Americunt said:

The "band" aspects have kinda been heading out the door progressively with each album. Isabella's contributions are lessening (from working on 21 songs on Lungs to 6 on Ceremonials and 3 on HBx3) and the remaining bandmates always came off as session instrumentalists rather than official "members", since they don't appear in videos.

This is true. I mean personally I've always kind of considered her solo. Especially considering their albums revolve around her experiences, etc.

The only real constant members seem to be herself, Isabella, Rob and Chris.

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she's someone I could wait for her music and still appreciate.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/interviews/florence-welch-alcohol-new-music-search-serenity/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw

I'm happy she mentioned something about new music but now I'm kinda excited and we all know new album won't come soon


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