Florence and the machine

On 'Dance Fever,' Florence + the Machine explores her fractured desires · Michel Martin, · Florence Welch: · I need to play [your song] "The King." · Did you intend ...

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As a new Florence + the Machine album is released, Florence Welch talks about the irresistible 'monster of performance', the conflict between career and ...

Today she tells me: “She jumped from her apartment in New York. She sat on the window ledge for a while, I think. Around 2015, she started to experiment with suits on stage – “through osmosis, watching male performers, it was the physicality that I took on board” – and noticed that once she did so, she started getting headline slots, including 2015’s Glastonbury festival. “I keep thinking that what I really want is to be in a room, on my own, with my dreams and fantasies and my weird house-slash-art-installation. Instead, she says, “being in the flow of making a song is one of my absolute favourite places to be. “I think we’re still at the very beginning of women not dropping out,” she says. “For someone who drank so much,” she observes, “it was so clear from the start I wasn’t suited to it. “We had made it through the pandemic, everyone was so happy to be working again, and the general sense from the team was of freedom, of celebration,” she recalls. Lately, she has been musing on what she calls the “monster of performance” – how it comes round every two years and swallows you up for a world tour. The whole of Ceremonials [her second record] is just an album about someone being under so much pressure that they want to be at the bottom of the ocean.” Welch told her mother: “I don’t really want to exist in a world where I can’t do the thing I feel like I was put on this Earth to do. In the video for her latest song, Free, she plays herself, while Bill Nighy has a cameo as her “anxiety”. Interviews are hard work, she says – she likes to schedule a day off afterwards to lie down. Her first bedroom had been decoupaged right up to the ceiling – an attempt to externalise the contents of her head: “I would have been 10.