Culture
10 Jul 09

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.

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.
“I was aware the lyrics were quite suggestive. I knew people would say something about it. It was alright – I knew the song wasn’t about domestic violence [it’s actually about unrequited love]. I didn’t feel as if I was exposing some deep trauma. I don’t mind the lyrics being a bit ambiguous. I think it’s good that people question what a song is about.”
It’s no surprise to learn that Welch had quite a bohemian upbringing. Her father is an advertising high flyer related to the satirist Craig Brown; her mother, a New York academic, hung out at Studio 54 in her 20s and was a friend of Andy Warhol (she fled boho Manhattan for a life of scholarly calm in Britain).
“My godmother tells me a story of my parents queuing to go into Studio 54 when they first got married. Somebody came out and goes to my mother “Evelyn, Evelyn!’ – it was Andy Warhol. Mum doesn’t talk much about it – she was more of an observer than a participant. She saw a lot of friends go to the dark side. She left and went to England when she was really young. She tried to stay sober so she could appreciate what was going on around her. It’s weird – leaving New York, she was the same age I am now. She was walking away from that weird showbiz world, and I’m about to enter it.”
Welch’s parents split when she was a child. A few years later, when she was 13, her mother got together with their neighbour. The family moved to his house, three doors down, presenting Welch with a gaggle of new siblings.
“I already had two brothers and a sister. I gained two older brothers and another younger sister. I mean, fucking hell – one younger sister is bad enough. It was weird. We were all crammed into the same house. Only now there were six kids instead of three. And we were all really close in age and very hormonal. It made me retreat into my own world a bit. I became a bit of a tearaway – if there are that many kids under one roof you can pretty much do what you want. Nobody is able to keep tabs on six teenagers. In my first year in school I was already going to punk gigs and getting into hip-hop. I’m not sure if I would have done that had I been in a smaller family.”
With a name like Welch, you might assume Florence is of an Irish background (certainly that’s what her Wikipedia entry claims). Not so, she says.
“I’m actually Scottish. And you know what ‘Welch’ means – don’t you? Someone who is always scrounging off other people. Presumably, I came from a family of scroungers! Hah! What a disturbing thought.”