What would turn out to be a noisy and hectic 2015 for Florence Welch – hit album, hit festival slot – began in muted, meditative fashion. She was in the Nevada desert on 31 December 2014, “watching the sun come up on the new year, in this place called Dante’s View”, says the 29-year-old Londoner, frontwoman of the band Florence + the Machine since 2007. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere, rocks and stones everywhere. Like being on Mars.”
Afterwards, driving back to California, Welch recalls, she ended up checking into a casino-hotel to get some sleep: she knew there was an exhausting year coming. Production work had just ended on her band’s third album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, and Welch had flown from London to California “to try and sort myself out before I had to launch it”. The new year would bring touring, promotion – and the queasy risk of a new album, four years removed from her last, 2011’s Ceremonials, falling flat. “I was nervous,” Welch says.
No need! How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was given a teaser-y launch in the early spring – a nutty little promo video appearing on YouTube, in which Welch twirled around in her pyjamas, kissing and occasionally judo-manoeuvring her own red-wigged body double. A lead single followed: guitars, uncharacteristically for this band, propelling the throbbing, energetic ballad What Kind of Man. When the album proper was released in late spring, it went to the top of the charts in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada and America. Welch and her band had never managed that – a US No 1 – before.
She wonders, looking back, if its success in America was to do with the fact that she wrote many of the songs during trips there, “exploring Laurel Canyon, listening to Neil Young in cars, staring at the Los Angeles sky”. The album’s title was her nod to said sky. Of the 200,000 copies How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful sold, more than half shifted in America. “Maybe they sensed they were a big influence on the record,” she wonders.
Or maybe America felt, in terms of karmic balance, it owed this singer a few extra sales. In April, on the first night of a new world tour, Welch performed at the Coachella festival in California – a night that was wild and feral and ended up putting her in hospital. “We hadn’t played a big show like Coachella for ages,” says Welch. “It was aggressive. Intense. And really cathartic as well, because all these songs for the new album, full of these emotions - I’d been sitting and living with them for a really long time.”
Many of the new songs had been composed by Welch (and her longstanding writing partner Isa Summers) during a period of late-20s introspection. Second single, Ship to Wreck, a track with a fast pulse that underwrote reflective, self-doubting lyrics, had its genesis in Welch’s sense of herself as being prone to catastrophe. “There’s a part of me that’s quiet and nice and shy. And then there’s a part of me that’s pure chaos. And I’ve often been at odds with those two sides.”
Her gigs have always tended to give vent to the chaotic side, Welch having long been known for taking risks with herself on stage. “One of the first gigs I ever did in America, at SXSW [in 2008], I jumped off the stage to a nearby paddling pool. And then I didn’t know how to exit so I crawled, soaking wet, beneath the stage. Which was full of electrical wiring… And at one of the first Glastonburys I did [on the John Peel stage in 2009], I climbed up and hung one-handed on the riggings in a pair of enormous high heels. Really quite pissed. Personal safety has never been a top priority. So it was amazing I’d never hurt myself before.”
At Coachella 2015 she hurt herself. Crazed with energy Welch chucked herself off the stage, intending some sort of crowd dive – and felt a snap. An x-ray of her broken foot went up on her Facebook page the next day with an apology to fans. She wasn’t sure what it would mean for her coming run of gigs through Europe and America. In July her band were booked to play at Glastonbury, in the second-to-last-on-Friday slot, before the headlining Foo Fighters. Would the foot heal in time? “Just!”
Across the world, coincidentally, there’d been another freaky onstage accident. Performing at his own pre-Glastonbury gig, in Gothenburg, the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl had had to be removed by stretcher when he broke his leg on stage.
Welch says her first reaction on hearing the news was pity for Grohl. The two had become friends, years earlier, when their paths crossed on tour. “I really felt for Dave. You want to feel invincible on stage. And then you realise, oh, wow, you can hurt yourself doing this.” Her secondary realisation was that, with Grohl injured, and with no time to heal before Glastonbury, Florence + the Machine might be bumped up. And they were. Headliners!
Welch knows Glastonbury well. She first played there as a nobody in 2007, “an a cappella set in a tent on the last day, when obviously I hadn’t slept for something like 72 hours.” In 2009, the year Florence + the Machine released their debut album Lungs, the band were “at the really apocalyptic muddy one”, playing the John Peel stage. The next – sunnier – year, they graduated to the Other stage. Now in 2015 they would be top of the bill on the Pyramid stage. “As a performer,” Welch says, “you know this is something bigger than you.”
Apprehensive, she sought advice from Jarvis Cocker, who with Pulp had been promoted to become a Glastonbury headliner in 1995, replacing the Stone Roses. He told Welch not to make too big a deal of it. “Good advice,” she says. “Because everyone’s having their own experience at Glastonbury. And what you have to realise is it’s not really about you. His advice really freed my performance. I realised it was so much more about the where-we-were, and being together, in a collective experience.”
Some act is always said to have “won” Glastonbury, and rarely the one you’d expect. A summer ago it was not Arcade Fire or Metallica or Kasabian who drew the largest crowd in Glastonbury history, but a 68-year-old, Dolly Parton. In 2015, Florence + the Machine would not have been picked by many as potential weekend victors – but their thrilling and propulsive set was more coherent than Kanye’s Saturday-night ego-fest, more relevant than the Who’s Sunday-night nostalgia showcase.
“I’ve never known anything like that night,” says Welch, of a 90-minute set during which she charged through eight years and three albums’ worth of cracking songs, bouncing, sweating, writhing, here channelling Freddie Mercury, there channelling Kate Bush. The crowd ate it up, Welch did not so much seize her moment, wrote Alexis Petridis in the Guardian, “as wrestle it to the ground”. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful returned to the top of the charts in the festival’s aftermath, and went on to be nominated for the Mercury prize.
Post-Glastonbury, there was still a multi-stage tour for the band to complete. They gigged through Dublin and Glasgow, New Orleans and Phoenix, winding up back in California where so much of the album had gestated. Welch says she found a way to get past the heady after-effects of Glastonbury and find the special in the (comparatively) smaller shows. “Every gig is different. Every crowd is different. An audience is what makes a show, and that has to be your fuel. I mean, I definitely had a bit of a crash after Glastonbury. I definitely had the on-your-own-on-a-sofa-with-a-boxset-crying-on-the-phone-to-your-mum moment, after that festival. But Glastonbury is such an entity in itself, I wouldn’t be able to recapture it, and I wouldn’t want to try.”
Now Welch is back, at last, in London. Next year will be quieter and her thoughts are turning to how she might celebrate on the 31st. Another meditative desert expedition perhaps? Welch thinks not; she’ll see this one in in more raucous fashion. No album to launch next year, no last-minute gig-of-a-lifetimes. She’ll find a house party somewhere. “I’ll celebrate this one old-school.”
