Petal machine music
Though her hippyish sensibilities are a throwback to the flower-power era, Florence Welch - aka Florence And The Machine - is one of the year's most hyped new artists. She talks about domestic violence, Andy Warhol and why sometimes hangovers can be good for you.
Ed Power, 10 Jul 2009
Stretched corpse-like on the floor of a recording studio recently, Florence Welch had an epiphany: hangovers can inspire truly mind-blowing pop.
“When I wrote ‘Cosmic Love’ I had one of the worst hangovers of my life,” says Welch, leader of buzzy London debutantes Florence and The Machine. “I was lying on the ground going ‘I don’t think I can move.’ I started attacking the piano and suddenly I had this song. There’s a lucidity you get when your brain is a bit out of itself. You’re there, but you’re also sort of somewhere else. It’s quite useful. I get quite manic hangovers – sometimes they make me really hyperactive. I’m walking down the street thinking, ‘Oh my god, I don’t feel I’m in the world any more’.”
Along with La Roux and Little Boots, Welch, who has just released an engaging debut entitled Lungs, has been been hyped as one of the young British females poised to sweep all before them in 2009. In contrast to her compatriots, however, there’s something reassuringly uncalculated about her music. Rather than slavishly referencing faddy sounds such as ‘80s electro-rock, she harks back to the tree-hugging piano whimsy of Tori Amos and Kate Bush. If that makes her sound like an unreconstructed earth chick... well, maybe that’s because she is.
“At school, I started my own coven,” she says with a disconcertingly girlish giggle. “Me and three friends, we decided we were witches. We would write spell books and try to make the boys in the other classes fall in love with us. We had seances... the whole thing. I wanted to be a cool witch – like in Bewitched.”
She wasn’t quite a problem child she says – more of an absent spirit.
“Some days I’d sign myself into school and then go around Camberwell looking for trouble. I wasn’t naughty. I was a bit of a dreamer – both physically and mentally.”
Welch says she isn’t the sort to go looking for controversy – but it’s managed to sniff her out all the same, thanks, in large part, to her early single ‘Kiss With A Fist’, a song many have taken to be about domestic violence.
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