Going with the Flo

Florence Welch gets straight to the point.
“The lyrics are meant to be provocative,” she says, pursing her lips. “I wanted to conjure something in the minds of listeners that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with. Do I regret writing it? Not at all.”

The flame-haired ingenue is talking about ‘Kiss With A Fist’, her karate chop of a debut single, the chorus of which declares that  “a kiss with a fist is better than none”. More than one critic had wondered if she isn’t suggesting that it’s preferable to be in a destructive relationship than to be on your own.
“Well, people were always going to read things into it, weren’t they?” she says. “I don’t have a problem with that. As a songwriter, you have to be prepared to stand up and defend yourself. You can’t write something and then moan when people take you up on it.”
Twelve months ago, Florence, who performs as Florence and the Machine, looked a long-shot for pop stardom. With her Wicked Witch of the West dress sense, bonkers stage show and off the wall pop songs, the 23-year-old Londoner screamed ‘cult appeal’. You expected her to send some bloggers into a swoon, scrape into the top 50 and toddle off to wherever it is last year’s next big thing goes to contemplate what might have been.
In fact, the music consuming public has stampeded to her cause, leaving more fancied peers such as La Roux and Bat For Lashes choking on metaphorical dust. By all accounts, she came agonisingly close to scooping the Mercury Music Prize for her debut LP, Lungs, and would probably have shot to number one in Ireland and the UK over the summer were it not for the passing of Michael Jackson, whose albums started to sell by the tonne shortly afterwards (this would have won her a place in the history books – the first artist to reach number one in Ireland on the strength of downloads). Was she left cursing the King of Pop and the unfortunate timing of his demise?
“Not at all. I was honestly delighted simply to have put an album out. To think that this little thing I’d written in my bedroom in Twickenham would actually see the light of day... that’s amazing in itself. I heard Jackson had died listening to the radio at home. It was a bit surreal to be honest. It happened so quickly.”
Freud would have loved to get Florence on the couch (calm down at the back). Her music can be forceful and catchy, but there’s also a nightmarish and surreal quality to Lungs – on the cover she actually poses with a pair of leather ‘lungs’ strapped to her chest. It’s no surprise to learn she has suffered from sleep disorders since childhood, an affliction that has seeped into her songwriting.
“Sometimes,” she confides, “I lie awake at night worrying about my eventual destruction.”
She confesses to being fascinated with death and decay. Perhaps this owes something to the suicide, when she was 10, of her maternal grandmother – or to the long, slow passing of her paternal grandfather from cancer around the same time. She herself is not so sure.
“There’s always been a morbid quality to me. In terms of my music, I’m not sure to what extent any particular events, such as the death of my grandparents, affected me.”
Florence is quick to dismiss rumours that she’s the second cousin of a former editor of the Irish Times (“that’s just a thing that appeared on Wikipedia”) but confirms that she’s related to the British satirist Craig Brown.
“Of course, I know him,” she says. “He’s related through marriage. Obviously, we’ve met. Yes.”
A note of unease enters her voice when the subject of Brown is brought up. That’s the funny thing about Florence – she can be charmingly informal one moment, weirdly uptight the next. In particular she’s been reluctant to elaborate on her teenage years as a free young thing. Having confessed to taking ecstasy in the past, she seems nowadays to regret having been so forthright, presumably for fear of being seen to lead her younger fans astray. In a recent interview she was quick to rubbish stories that she’d been musically inspired by a bad ecstasy trip – and the “black hole” of depression it allegedly plunged her into.
“Everyone has their moments but I’d be loathe to blame that on a 16-year-old’s innocent experimentation with drugs,” she had said. “I do feel things very intensely, so unless I make an effort to keep myself level I can go through periods of feeling disproportionately euphoric and therefore very reckless. And then, inevitably there’s the comedown. I do get darker periods but that’s more the mania I suffer from.”
As to the influence of the esoteric in her music... well, she has always had a passion for things that are slightly left of centre. It’s no surprise to learn that, as a teenager at the middle-class Alleyns school in London (also alma mater to Jack Penate) she started her own coven – or that she dabbled in Ouija boards.
“Nothing happened though!” she laughs. “We weren’t very successful at it. Perhaps we weren’t doing it quite correctly.
Welch’s parents split when she was entering adolescence. She admits to being a bit of a handful as a teenager – “I started going to raves and what have you.” Her mother’s decision to remarry the neighbour two doors up along their terrace in Camberwell did nothing to quell her errant behaviour – her stepfather had a family of his own and she became part of a household of five kids, which gave her license to run, if not quite amok, then a little bit wild.
“When you’ve got all those teenagers under the same roof, you can get away with an awful lot!”
Her rise hasn’t escaped the attention of the UK fashion industry. Having previously frequented Topshop and Primark (the UK offshoot of Penney’s), nowadays she’s the toast of designers such as Hannah Walsh, who’ve been gallantly furnishing her with customised outfits. Speaking to a UK newspaper earlier in the year, she was ambivalent about her burgeoning status as a style icon.
“I didn’t sit down and work out how I wanted to present myself. It was a response to the music. As it got more and more overpowering, I started to feel I needed to compete with it. The more I toured, the less inhibited I felt. And then one day, I found myself on stage in a cat-suit, with a curtain around my shoulders.”
Reading between the lines, it’s tempting to regard her as being rather ambivalent about the fame her music has brought. She’s not sure she agrees. “Firstly I wouldn’t say I’m famous. I mean, if you know my music, you probably know me. But yeah, it is strange when you sit down with someone and they bring up a quote from when you’re a teenager. It weirds me out.”