In an age that favours – often demands – the constant reinvention of its pop stars, there is a reassuring familiarity to Florence Welch, frontwoman of Florence and the Machine. Here she is, a Saturday lunchtime nearly 15 years after she crash-landed on to the music scene, still looking as though she walked out of a Renaissance painting: flowing Titian locks, untamed and tumbling around her sculpted, make-up-free porcelain features, a long, floral The Vampire’s Wife dress picking out the grey-blue of her eyes.
Which isn’t to say there hasn’t been an evolution, both artistically and personally. Perhaps owing to the raw emotion of her work, or her adoration of theatrics, but I hadn’t realised how funny the now 35-year-old is. I didn’t, for example, expect “Hoovering” to be her answer to how she occupied herself in lockdown (she became, she says, “obsessed” with a mini Dyson). “Florence and the Machine was Florence and the f**king Hoover,” she says.
Her laugh – constant and infectious, and covering the spectrum from convulsing giggle to prolonged raucous cackle – ricochets off the walls of the private dining room at Luca, a lauded restaurant in London’s Clerkenwell, run by her brother-in-law, Daniel. He is here today, keeping us well fed with Parmesan fries, whipped salted cod, roast Orkney scallops and pasta – carbonara (for Florence) and ravioli (for me). In fact, it’s a full family affair: Florence’s younger sister, Grace, is in to see friends and comes to say hello with her new baby boy and energetic five-year-old daughter. Welch dotes on her niece. “She’s like me when I used to drink,” Florence deadpans, “fun, but she wants to destroy everything and maybe ruin your life.”
This wry, gently self-mocking sense of humour runs through Dance Fever, which sees Welch return to the euphoric, stadium-sized anthems that defined her early career. After the success of the band’s debut, Lungs, in 2009, each Florence and the Machine album (Dance Fever will be the fifth) has sold in the millions. They have played all the major festivals, been nominated for six Grammys, and Welch herself has performed with everyone from Drake to The Rolling Stones. “Lungs with more self-knowledge,” is how she describes the new album. “I’m kind of winking at my own creation,” she says. “A lot of it is questioning my commitment to loneliness; to my own sense as a tragic figure.” Cue cackle.
Take the opening line of the Kate Bush-esque “Choreomania” (named after the compulsive collective dancing mania that erupted across Europe in the late Middle Ages): “And I’m freaking out in the middle of the street / With the complete conviction of someone who has never actually had anything really bad happen to them.” Or that of the lo-fi electronica number, “Free”: “Sometimes I wonder if I should be medicated / If I would feel better just lightly sedated.”
“I feel like as a female artist you spend a lot of time screaming into the void for people to take you seriously, in a way that male artists just don’t have to do,” says Welch. She was “so tired of trying to prove myself to people who are never going to get it”. So she stopped. And “it set me free.”
The photographer and director Autumn de Wilde, responsible for the album’s artwork and Welch’s new music videos, was instrumental in creating Florence’s new liberated world. “She is an electric genius,” de Wilde says of Welch. “I started to feel like the record she was making was very honest, very raw and modern, but also rich with otherworldly fantasy. I wanted to create a visual escape-hatch into an ancient fairy tale.”
The pandemic was looming when Welch started working with producer Jack Antonoff in New York, having just finished a gruelling tour for her 2018 album High As Hope. “It’s almost like an addictive cycle,” she says of her need to constantly record. “You forget the pain so quickly.” Plus, she was 33 (her “resurrection year”, as she puts it) and felt she was at once “finally growing into herself as a performer” while also increasingly aware of that all-too-familiar “rumbling panic that your time to have a family might suddenly just–”, she clicks her fingers like a magician. “I had this drive underneath me and I was like if these songs want to get out, I have to get them out fast, because I do have other desires…”
It is the push and pull of these “other desires” – namely motherhood and the impact child-bearing can have on a career, a body, a mind – that “King”, the album’s opening track, explores so affectingly. You can already hear its refrain, “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king”, being bellowed by thousands of women on this summer’s festival circuit. “The whole crux of the song is that you’re torn between the two,” she says. “The thing I’ve always been sure of is my work, but I do start to feel this shifting of priorities, this sense of like,” she drops to a whisper– “maybe I want something different.”
I wonder what it is that makes her feel like she can’t have both – motherhood and a career. She pauses. “I think I’m afraid. It seems like the bravest thing in the world to have children. It’s the ultimate measure of faith and of letting go of control. I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings. I think I’ve had a stilted emotional immaturity just through having been in addiction and eating disorders for years.” She admits she has a “really complicated relationship” with her body. After years, she is finally comfortable in it, but the idea of the change it would undergo is one she finds terrifying.
Welch has been sober for eight years, but lockdown was hard. “When you’re sober it is unfiltered reality all day every day. You don’t get a brain break. I really f**king empathise with anyone who did relapse in those two years because I think it was probably the closest I’ve ever thought about it.” She says it is “a miracle” that she didn’t fall back into her old patterns with food.
“There were moments when I was like, ‘Should I be starting to cut back on my sugar? Or should I do a cleanse?’ And that for me is just a slippery slope. Anorexia provides a feeling of certainty, because you’re just like, I’m going to control this. Luckily, I have people I can talk to and that’s one of the most important things for anyone – to keep talking about it. And not to be ashamed if those thoughts come up.”
She spent the time at home in south London with her partner, a relationship she is reluctant to talk about – the only time in our interview she momentarily clams up. Recently, she explains, she came across a magazine at her sister Grace’s house “from, like, five years ago and it was just a photomontage of everyone I’d ever been out with”. It dredged up “a lot of bad experiences [with the media] when I was young”, though, she laughs ruefully, “when you get into your thirties, they care so much less about who you’re dating.” What she will say is that she now realises “you don’t have to date bad people to make good songs.” Indeed, she no longer has “the energy to be in a huge amount of emotional distress and make work”.
Which is partly why for six months after flying back to the UK (“Free” was, “ironically”, the last track she and Antonoff created before the pandemic forced her home), she wrote nothing. Without live shows, she felt lost. “Gigs have always been my sense of spirituality,” she says. “In my daily life, I am just wracked with racing thoughts and anxiety.” Hence the Hoovering, and whiling away the days in cosy clothes (“I’m not in the house wielding a flaming sword,” for anyone wondering) and, for the first time, she got into horror movies: The Shining, “all the Suspirias”, everything by Jordan Peele.
When she finally got back into the studio in London, this time with Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley producing, Welch would project horror films on to the wall while they were working. The references found their way into the music, and the videos too. In “King”, a nightmarish version of Welch snaps the neck of her lover and floats off with a group of ghostly women, who resemble, as de Wilde says, “dead cancan girls… roaming the earth together, broken and brave”.
It symbolises, says Welch, her continued return to the world, to touring, to becoming “a larger-than-life person again”. And yet, the past years have shown her another life is possible. She recalls sitting in her kitchen, “looking over at two of my old friends. And I was just like, ‘I’m so lucky to get to have people that I love in my life. Maybe not everything is about work and achievement. There might be other ways to feel fulfilled and grounded.’”
And with that, her niece bursts through the door, followed by the rest of the family. Something tells me, as Florence takes her nephew in her arms, our time is up. Two days later, I receive an email. “There was a song that didn’t quite make it to the album,” she writes, “that contained the line ‘the creep of domesticity it both horrifies and calls to me’. Even with all my logic that my life is in so many ways probably not suited for children, it is creeping up on me despite myself. Haunting me almost.” For now though, she is still Florence, still king.
Dance Fever is out on 13 May
Hair: Odile Gilbert. Make-up: Sarah Reygate. Set design: Stella Fox. Production: Allegra Amati & Fraser Stannage at Image Partnership. Lighting design: Dustin Stefansic. Polydor Records uk. Social distancing rules were followed throughout this photoshoot.
