In the multiplatinum, in-at-number-one, Glastonbury-headlining world Florence + the Machine inhabit, the Royal Festival Hall represents a low-key comeback gig after a couple of years’ absence. That said, low-key isn’t the phrase that immediately springs to mind when confronted with their performance. The stage is bedecked with so many flowers and so much foliage it looks less like the Royal Festival Hall than the Royal Horticultural Society spring show. The band numbers eight, including two keyboard players, two percussionists and a harpist who occasionally diversifies with glockenspiel, and the venue’s enormous pipe organ – usually concealed behind boards at the rear of the stage – is on display and primed for use during the encore.
It’s intended as no slight on the organist to say it that doesn’t make much difference to the overall sound. One of the effects of cramming a band used to playing arenas into somewhere smaller is that they invariably sound immense, as if the venue is struggling to contain their sound. So it is tonight, which fits Florence + the Machine’s music. Their – well, her – stock-in-trade is high drama, heavy on the rumbling drums and roaring vocals. It says something that a song as breezily anthemic as 2015 single Ship to Wreck, complete with its Fleetwood Mac-like chorus, represents one of the more subdued moments. A handful of songs from the band’s forthcoming fourth album, High as Hope, seem to dial down the ostentation slightly – such things are obviously relative, but there is a folky simplicity about current single Sky Full of Song – at least until they get to 100 Years, a track so gung-ho in its theatrical swoops from gentle piano ballad to tom-tom pounding and violin scraping it makes the other gung-ho theatrical tracks they’ve come up with thus far sound as if they were merely warming up.
It can all be a bit much on record, but it gains an appealingly visceral force live. The same is true of Florence Welch’s voice: what sounds histrionic coming out of a pair of headphones makes more sense amid the tumult of the band’s live sound. The stagecraft designed to reach the nosebleed seats at Frankfurt’s Jahrhunderthalle looks a little nuts close up. There is a great deal of creeping around on tiptoes and a preponderance of expressive hand gestures. At one juncture, Welch crouches at the front of the stage, blank-eyed, apparently lost in the moment – one slightly spoiled by the fact that the stage is low, and the spotlight picking her out illuminates a security guard, blinking and looking as mortified as it is possible for a person to look.
Welch – who can’t swig a bottle of water at the rear of the stage without twirling around and waving her arms about en route – cuts a wildly OTT figure. But you’d be hard-pushed to suggest she isn’t entertainingly OTT, compounded by the feeling – again not always obvious on record – that she doesn’t take herself quite as seriously as you might expect. At one point, she earnestly implores the audience to put their phones away and their hands in the air. “This moment is going to disappear, and we’re going to allow it to disappear,” she says, then reconsiders. “Unless you come to another show, and then obviously, we’ll do it again.”
- With the Rolling Stones at London Stadium, 25 May. Box office: 0333-321 9999.
