“The Electric Picnic?” laughs Florence Welch, beaming delightedly. “I’ve played at the Electric Picnic.”

Perched on a couch in a luxurious suite in London’s exclusive Covent Garden Hotel, looking like a gorgeous, witchy, female country star, in a fetching all-black ensemble, replete with wide cowboy hat, the 28-year-old redhead is recollecting her last appearance in Stradbally.
Just about! Florence speaks in enthusiastic fits and starts, half–forming sentences before ripping them up and starting again...
“I ended up sleeping... there was a tent that had all these old four-poster beds in it... we played really early on and then someone found this massive crate of red wine, so I ended up having a really... we ended up having...”
Clearly a good time was had by all! She claps hands and shrieks with infectious laughter. “I remember lining up all these chairs. I don’t remember where this tent was – it might have been the catering tent – but there was a four-poster bed in it, and we ended up, like, living in it. And lining up all the chairs and the game was that you had to walk on all the tops of them. I remember that. But yeah, I had a great time.” 
I presume you’re looking forward to going back then! 
“Oh, I am, yeah. I really am! Hopefully I can find that four-poster bed again! It’s great. There were about four people sleeping in it!” 
Sounds like Hot Press should have been invited...
By the time the delectable Ms Welch returns to the Electric Picnic, she’ll be a few months into touring her hugely anticipated third album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. It’ll be her first release since 2011’s mega-selling Ceremonials.
“The song ‘How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful’ was written towards the end of the Ceremonials tour so it’s almost like I did a full circle back to the first song that was written,” she explains. “I had a bit of time, to try and have a bit of a life outside of touring and travelling – and I sort of finally moved out of my mum’s living room! [laughs]
“I was writing songs throughout the whole period, here and there, and then Markus [Dravs, producer] got me in and was like, ‘Let’s do a track!’ Because I’d been living and writing for like a year, and me and Markus had been talking about making a record together. We hadn’t solidified anything, but in February he was like, ‘Come in to the studio and let’s do a trial run or whatever for a month or something.’ And I got there and he’s like ‘Alright, we’re making a record!’ ‘OK!’ And then it took a year. That’s the longest record I’ve ever made, and that wasn’t like fluffing around. But I did spend quite a bit of time in LA as well, writing there.”
Were you actually writing in LA or were you just convincing yourself that you were?
“Ha, it was funny,” she smiles radiantly. “Like, it’s almost too nice there, because you’re like, ‘Ah, I’ve written this three, four minute song that’s all chorus’ – and then, of course, it doesn’t make it onto the record! But we did get a few songs out of that. It was more, I think, the feeling of LA translated into the music, that sense of driving a lot in cars, and seeing these big skies. The more American feel of the record I think comes from spending that time there.”