It has to be said that Florence Welch has come an awfully long way since making her Electric Picnic bow in 2008.
The three gazillion people who’ve subsequently laid claim to being in the Crawdaddy tent that Sunday afternoon are, I’m afraid, mostly lying, with at best 250 hungover souls seeing her play a frenetic set, which even a two-bit hack like me recognised as being a bit special.
“Florence is achieving the impossible by wearing a gold lamé dress that’s even shorter than the one sported last year in the same tent by Jenny Lewis,” I noted, aspiring Vogue journalist that I was, in my review. “Equal parts Aretha Franklin, Sandy Denny and Kate Nash, Ms. Welch and her band The Machine peddle a neat line in shouty, folk-inflected pop with the politically incorrect ‘Kiss With A Fist (Is Better Than None)’ a hit waiting to happen.”
With the release of her breakthrough Lungs album still ten months away, the then 21-year-old was in feet-finding mode and totally unaware of the superstardom waiting round the corner.
Her shock at becoming one of the biggest pop acts on the planet was evident when I met Florence backstage at the 2010 Meteor Awards in the RDS where she picked up the ‘Best International
Band’ gong.
“The speed at which things have been moving recently is insane,” she said just a few minutes before belting out a Gale Force 10 ‘You’ve Got The Love’. “One minute you’re playing tiny club gigs, and the next you’re singing with someone you barely know on a TV awards show that has 5.8 million viewers. The good thing about it being such a whirlwind is that you don’t have time to worry about screwing up in front of so many people.”
Those 5.8 million viewers had tuned in the previous month to see her Brit Awards duet with Dizee Rascal. Since then, Welch has also collaborated with Calvin Harris, A$AP Rocky, Drake, David Byrne, Elton John, The xx and Baz Luhrmann; conquered America; depped for the Foos at Glastonbury; sold another 10 million or so records and generally become both a music and fashion icon with Chanel, Gucci, Givenchy and cult Aussie label Willow keeping her impeccably frocked.
It hasn’t all been number ones and designer clobber, though, with Florence admitting in J une this year that she spent a sizeable portion of 2013 blotto.
“I definitely have a very self-destructive streak,” she told our man Olaf Tyaransen. “I wrote ‘Ship To Wreck’ after I ended up on MTV News drunk... I chucked a shot over my shoulder and then crowd- surfed off the stage at somebody else’s gig. I was like, ‘Oh, shit...’ I wasn’t really working, I was writing, I was in LA back and forth, but without structure. It was like, ‘This party could go on forever!’”
Thankfully, she managed to regain her artistic focus with ‘Ship To Wreck’ and its parent How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album a reaffirmation of what makes her such a very special talent.
“I’m in a much more peaceful place than I was at the start of making the record,” she reassured Mr T. “There were a lot of things I needed to try and understand that were difficult... and actually things are much calmer, which is nice.”
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since, but Florence still vividly remembers her first Picnic and the oenophilic hi-jinx that accompanied it. “We ended up sleeping in this tent that had all these old four-poster beds in it, and someone found this massive crate of red wine,” she reminisces fondly. “We played really early on, and had a blast!”