Florence the Magnificent... Welch's whirlwind year

Florence Welch’s whirlwind year has seen her mainlining Mezcal in Mexico, duetting ‘Gimme Shelter’ with Mick Jagger and throwing a celebrity sleepover at the Chateau Marmont, but this Christmas she’s coming home to Camberwell. By Craig McLean

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Craig McLean

11 January 2013

In her San Diego hotel room, Florence Welch is reflecting on the year that was. And the morning afters to come. "I’ve got to stop talking about hangovers," the South Londoner says, while simultaneously acknowledging that the theme of the artwork for Florence + The Machine’s second album Ceremonials was a lost drunk chanteuse.

"But," she grins, "they are a large part of my life. I had an epic hangover last Christmas. I was wearing pyjamas and jewellery — it’s a good way to do Christmas I think. It’s Christmas and you should be able to lounge. And I dress up most days of the year anyway, so Christmas should be the one day off."

To date, the 26-year-old’s album Ceremonials, the follow-up to her four million-selling, Brit-winning debut Lungs, has sold three million copies since its release in October 2011. It continued into this year with a bang — a British number one in the summer for the album’s fifth single, ‘Spectrum (Say My Name)’, winging its way to the top via a Calvin Harris remix. And, over the past few weeks, there was an O2 double whammy — appearances at the 20,000 arena first with The Rolling Stones, followed by two headlining nights under her own billowing steam. And in between, concerts. Lots of concerts all over the world. In clubs, stadiums, beaches, parks, convention centres, tents, fields.

"Hackney [Empire, last October] was the biggest trip," reflects Florence with something like a sigh. "It felt like the transformation was under way, in the sense that I was moving from the Lungs era into the Ceremonials era, which was almost like moving from the Pre-Raphaelite decoration of the stage, all silk and floral, bunting and fairy lights, into something that was grander and sleeker — almost reminiscent of Art Deco artists such as Erté and Klimt."

Spring 2012 brought another stratospheric high. For one night only, Florence + The Machine became Florence + The Classical Machine at the Royal Albert Hall. The event: a concert in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, a charity with personal significance for her ("for reasons I don’t want to go into"). The result: baroque’n’roll of the most beauteous, transporting kind. ‘It was a dream come true. Can you imagine that the me from the early gigs — drunk, in black lipstick, a screaming child singing about bats and banshees — that that kind of performance could have been transformed into an operatic night like that?’ gasps the one-time Camberwell College of Arts student.

We first spoke in California back in September, on another American tour. Followed by Mexico. ‘I did have a hangover that was transcendental,’ Florence says, wide-eyed. One month after our San Diego encounter, we are talking in her plush red dressing room at the Grade II-listed Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, a mere four miles from her family home in Camberwell. Tonight she’s performing a special show for the benefit of Radio 2; her guest duet on ‘Gimme Shelter’ with the Stones is three weeks away and, at the time of our meeting, top secret. But right now she’s talking about the events surrounding the concerts that followed our previous interview.

In Mexico City, the last show before a short holiday in the remote jungle coastline near Ixtapa — ‘It was Jurassic rehab; Florence + The Machine go wild!’ — she and her band mainlined Mezcal. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it!’ she hoots. ‘I felt like I wanted to peel off layers of my own skin. I felt like I couldn’t hear or talk or see… And then the next day I did feel like I was floating in and out of myself. And me and Iso [Isabella Summers, keyboard player and the original The Machine] nearly got chucked out of the airport because we were asleep on the floor.’

There was a similar bedtime fandango in Los Angeles, where the band played two sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl. ‘We did slightly over-celebrate the first show,’ she says gingerly. ‘Terrible schoolgirl error. We decided to have a sleepover at our hotel, so we ordered extra beds — and thought they would be cots. But, power to the Chateau Marmont, at four in the morning, seven full-size single beds turned up. We moved all the other furniture on to the balcony so the whole room was just bed. Then I fell asleep, and no one ended up using them — everyone petered off into the night.’

Might one of these party animals have been her new best friend Blake Lively? ‘No, no, she wasn’t involved in the Night of the Seven Beds. I performed on Gossip Girl a couple of years ago, and she’s always been a fan. She came to my very first show in New York. She was so sweet, she brought everyone pizza at the after-show, and we’ve been friends ever since. We both love music, and she is a good influence. She’s very savvy, and a good American girl — she helps me with my more cynical British side.’ Is she an occasional party girl? ‘No, that’s the thing, she can party but she doesn’t drink. So she’ll go till four in the morning but she can make sure I’m in a taxi. That’s a good friend!’ Florence laughs. ‘She’s got such a big heart. She’s far more in the public eye than I am, and she’s a good, grounded, wise person to get advice from. She’s been a really big support when I’m in that big, crazy Met Ball scene — having Blake there to be a partner in crime has been really lovely.’

Of course, the elegantly tall and old-world glamorous Florentine Leontine Mary Welch is also able to call on her sartorial scenester pals. Her current stage wardrobe is drawn from Gucci’s A/W 2012 collection, and she must be the only celebrity about whom Karl Lagerfeld hasn’t been rude. ‘He’s actually really warm and funny,’ Florence insists. When she performed (in a giant shell) on the Chanel catwalk at Paris Fashion Week a year ago, the designer ‘really worked to put me at ease. He’s friendly but he is very frank,’ she concedes.

Florence’s year of globe-trotting, chasing the international success of her second album, has meant she’s been absent for key capital events. There was the Olympics, of course, at which, surely, she would have lit up the opening and closing ceremonials… ‘I was away for the whole thing,’ she says. ‘We watched a lot of it from airport lounges. I think I would have been really nervous — those big things are terrifying. But it was an amazing spectacle, and the opening ceremony had me on the edge of my sofa in Denver. I was like, “YES! COME ON ENGLAND! WOOHOO!” I just loved it. It was like a big British musical. But I turned it on halfway through, at the stovepipe hat bit, and I was like, “What the f*** is going on?” It was so mad.’

She also missed the success of her old Alleyn’s schoolmate Jessie Ware, whose debut album was released to rave reviews in the summer. ‘Ah, Jessie!’ beams Florence. ‘She was two years above me but we were in musicals together: Bugsy Malone, Anything Goes, Guys and Dolls — I was in the Salvation Army in that. I had one part that I really hammed up: I got to deliver a tray in the background of a Sky Masterson scene. But Jessie played Adelaide — she had an amazing voice. Really, really amazing.’

Anything else she’s missed out on? A love life, perhaps? (She split with her last boyfriend, events organiser James Nesbitt, over the summer.) ‘Ha!’ Florence goes uncharacteristically silent. ‘Um,’ she says eventually. ‘No comment,’ she smiles. Perhaps it’s best: her previous, on-off relationship with Dazed & Confused writer Stuart Hammond inspired the emotional torment of Lungs, but they reunited last year, only to break up again around the release of Ceremonials. In the forever fast-forward Flo-world, it seems like there hasn’t been room for both emotional contentment and artistic advancement.

‘To me, Ceremonials feels very much like a battle between safety and freedom, or chaos and control,’ she offers. ‘And at that point I’d gone, “Right, I want freedom and chaos.” I ripped myself from the safety. And it was in the midst of that madness that the album was released. It was almost as if, in order to make the songs real, I had to live them. And I had to throw myself into this year, with all of myself.’

But now, finally, the end is in sight. On the horizon: a festive season with her extended family. Her parents — her American mother Evelyn is an art history professor, her English father Nick a one-time ad man — split in her early teens. Her mother began a relationship with a neighbour, which threw Florence and her younger brother and sister together with three step-siblings. Her late paternal grand-father Colin was deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, and her uncle is the columnist and satirist Craig Brown. Is he as funny in the flesh as he is in print?

‘Yes!’ she shoots back. ‘Christmas with Craig is the best. We had New Year with him last year in Aldeburgh in Suffolk where he lives, and he wrote a spoof of Downton Abbey that we all performed for the village. (It wasn’t filmed.) We sent my little brother out leafleting, and so people came into the living room and I made a poster. I drew Highclere House, and we stuck it on the door. Craig was the Earl of Grantham, and I was the Dowager Countess. I don’t really watch it, so I spent the whole afternoon catching up with Maggie Smith’s performances, trying to get her accent right and the pursed lips and rolling eyes. I had some great one-liners — Craig’s satire of it was really, really good. It was called Brownton Abbey.’

Next year she shows no sign of letting up. Florence has talked of writing a musical with old school pal Sophie Hart-Walsh, a costume designer, and there are also rumours of a collaboration with another friend, playwright Polly Stenham. But the self-confessed workaholic has other plans, too.

‘I’m going home!’ she says, either referring to the family pad she was still living in at the start of the year, or the South London house she’s bought but has barely had time to visit. ‘But secretly I’ve had an idea,’ she adds in a stage whisper. ‘I want to make two albums. I’ve got it in my head: an orchestral album and a crazy, experimental, electronic pop record. Two records at the same time!’ she beams. ‘I haven’t written the songs yet — that’s the easy bit! But if I can get four albums knocked out by the time I’m 30, that’ll be good.’

Before the year is out Florence is powering through her final tour dates of 2012. Olympian drinking aside, she’s been ring-fencing her health by judicious juicing — backstage at The Rivoli Ballroom her rider resembles a Borough Market goodie bag. Does she always request a selection of root vegetables? ‘Yeah, because you can drink them. The beetroot makes your mouth bright pink, though, right before the show. But there’s no way you can get to the end of the tour without being completely f***ed. I start off my tours really well, then the wheels fall off like they did in Mexico. I began this one at Bestival in September with a really bad back. It feels like it’s been a year of jumping up and down, so I have a lower back problem, literally from constant impact. Ballerinas get it. They get to 30 and everything just goes kaput. I feel like I’m heading that way.’

Ever the good (melo)drama queen, she is, of course, lying. The spotlight is where she belongs. Later tonight, on stage in front of the small Radio 2 audience, a full year since she began touring Ceremonials, she gives it her arena-wowing all. Like a proper, old-school trouper, they’ll have to drag Florence into the wings, kicking and singing ‘You’ve Got The Love’.

‘The stage is a place where I can be wholly myself,’ she says. ‘Even though you’re in front of people almost to be judged, it is a place without judgement. I have this sensation of being in flight all the time, but being on stage is like creating a sanctuary in which you can completely lose yourself. The bits of your personality that you keep under wraps in ordinary life, you can let them run free…’

And to have lift-off, the naturally high Florence Welch doesn’t even need that Mezcal. Still, she probably won’t say no. It is the party season, after all. ES

Florence the Magnificent... Welch's whirlwind year

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