Florence + The Machine talk ahead of gig at Birmingham's Genting Arena
When Florence + The Machine returned to live action, their shows were greeted with the highest praise.
Critics described their performance as being one of the most thrilling of the year and said they were bringing poetry and power to the stage.
Now Florence + The Machine are back on the road and will headline Birmingham’s Genting Arena tonight as part of their High As Hope Tour.
The band enjoyed a meteoric rise after forming in 2007 when vocalist Florence Welch and keyboardist Isabella Summers hooked up with other musicians.
They were part of BBC Introducing and at the 2009 Brit Awards received the Brit Awards Critics’ Choice award. Their debut album, Lungs, was released in the same year and held the number-two position – eventually going to number one after being on the chart for 28 consecutive weeks.
The band’s two subsequent albums, Ceremonials and How Big How Blue How Beautiful, both went to number one while this year’s fourth album, High As Hope, was a number two hit in the UK and USA.
Lungs won the Brit Award for Best British Album in 2010 and Florence + The Machine have also been nominated for six Grammy Awards including Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Album.
On High as Hope, singer Florence explored themes of heartache, family, and finding comfort in loneliness. And having roared through the music industry during the past decade, headlining Glastonbury in a silver suit, she’s calmer than she once was.
“That’s when the drinking and the partying exploded, as a way to hide from it. I was drunk a lot of the time, on extra dirty Martinis – my way of drinking three shots at once. I was never interested in a nice glass of wine.”
“The partying was about me not wanting to deal with the fact my life had changed, not wanting to come down. It always felt like something had picked me up and thrown me around various rooms and houses, then gone ‘boom!’ It happened every time, and every time it was shocking.”
Things have changed.
“When I realised I could perform without the booze it was a revelation. There’s discomfort and rage, and the moment when they meet is when you break open. You’re free. Mundane moments become incredibly profound. The performing, the transcendence, then sitting watching TV – all can coexist, and the mundane makes the magical. Maybe I’m trying to hold on to normalcy. Maybe because being onstage has become normal, the pockets of peace seem really wild. But I treasure them.
“Before, I thought I ran on a chaos engine, but the more peaceful I am, the more I can give to the work. I can address things I wasn’t capable of doing before.
“I haven’t drank for a while now, it’s been like four years, so for me it’s kind of, it’s more normal now. Putting How Big, How Blue together, I was a mess, making every song was painful. It was all so painful, I was heartbroken, couldn’t figure out my stuff with booze. [High as Hope] was so free, and I don’t think, because I had not been drinking for a while, so it’s almost I wouldn’t say this was a sobriety record, but it really comes from a place of even getting underneath that because when you put the drinking down, all the other stuff is going to show up.”
The band’s new album won lavish praise for delving into private depths. Welch looked at loneliness and pain – but coated her ideas with hope. “I was gonna call it The End of Love, which I actually saw as a positive thing cause it was the end of a needy kind of love, it was the end of a love that comes from a place of lack, it’s about a love that’s bigger and broader, that takes so much explaining. It could sound a bit negative but I didn’t really think of it that way.”
The record also addresses her grandmother’s suicide, a topic she has previously explored on the Ceremonials track Only If for a Night. And it gave Florence the opportunity to embrace her femininity – as well as a teenage eating disorder.
“At 17, I started to starve myself. I never thought I would talk about it,” she says. “I didn’t really talk about it with my mom until really recently. So to put it in a song — it’s like, what am I doing?
“I made myself more vulnerable and made a step away from the metaphoric. It created a creative bravery. I was like, it’s OK to put yourself out there.”
