“Who the hell was playing there tonight?” On the post-gig drive back into town, my cabbie can’t work it out. “There were piercings and tattoos, people who look like my wife, old hippies, smart young kids neckin’.” Florence + the Machine, I say. “Oh! ’Er with the hair and the voice. She’s all right, she is.”
Eight years ago, I wrote about the mainstreaming of indie for the Observer, and watched “a confident, bluesy band far removed from the winsome indie template” play a tiny label’s club night. This summer, that band headlined Glastonbury. Once a merely ostentatious, internet-age pre-Raphaelite with a holler arresting enough to divert ocean liners, Florence Welch is now a massive star too, on both sides of the Atlantic (latest album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful got to No 1 in the US and the UK). Tonight, on the second night of her How Big? tour, she shows us why.
The 29-year-old’s formula? Part-rock star, part-Cleopatra. Before showtime, late 60s classics boom from the speakers: Love’s My Little Red Book, Led Zeppelin’s Ramble On. This is the world Welch wants to be in. The simple stage set – five round risers for the band, banks of white lights pouring from behind and, above, a silver, glittery backdrop – offer no bells and whistles either, just ballast for her.
Welch enters from arena floor level, from among her fans, wearing an updated version of her Glastonbury outfit: silver silk trousers, matching waistcoat, and billowy, chiffon shirt in burnt ochre, presumably nicked from Stevie Nicks. It’s not the get-up many would wear for 90 minutes of stage callisthenics, but sweat patches aren’t her thing. You question her humanity.
Striking a pose like an Egyptian hieroglyph, one knee bent just so, Welch then launches into a pummelling version of 2011 single What the Water Gave Me, its chorus haunted by Virginia Woolf’s suicide (“let the only sound/ Be the overflow Pockets full of stones”). Then she pogos. Pirouettes. Sprints backwards and forwards like she’s doing time trials at school. With her long, mussy hair flying everywhere, you notice how minimal her makeup is: long gone are the floral headbands, or any whiff of delicacy. This is unkempt stuff, to which all the rockers, wives, hippies, and necking kids erupt. All thrown together, they’re romantics at heart.
We live in the age of the Grand Gesture, where every emotion is amplified online. Welch is its evangelical leader. Doing crucifix poses for her worshippers, her hands weaving their own interpretive dances, she takes Madonna and Kate Bush’s stage work somewhere brasher and brassier. What saves it from silliness is the person speaking in between songs.
Before playing her new album’s title track about a broken relationship, Welch describes writing it before playing Dublin on her last tour (“It was mine, and now it’s yours,” she says). The story teems with detail that is obviously genuine. Before similarly weighty recent track Long & Lost, she daftly mentions the bras that keep getting thrown at her on stage (how rock star is that?). A bra follows, then some knickers. By the encore, there’s a pair of trousers too.
Welch’s new songs sound like soul jams tonight, which isn’t a bad direction for her voice. Not to everyone’s taste, it’s a surprising instrument tonight, with genuinely impressive pitch control and spot-on enunciation: Ewwww Goh the Luhhh becomes, finally, You’ve Got the Love. But it remains more pleasant when subtler, especially on older songs such as Rabbit Heart and the thoughtful Cosmic Love. “I’m always in this twilight,” she sighs, and a thousand vampires swoon.
The night ends with the white lights dazzling off the glittery backdrop, their reflections like heavy rain on the stage floor. We’re asked What Kind of Man “loves like this” (the best song of the night, if not Welch’s career so far), and are sent home with a spirited Drumming Song. A rock-star smile beams to the back of the room and the audience remembers to breathe.
