CityLife

Take a trip with dippy hippy Florence

NME DATE: Florence Welch

"MY album's going to be a concept album based on time travel and The Shining," announces Florence Welch - the riot of tousled hair and honed wackiness behind Florence And The Machine - before swiftly pulling the rug away.

"Not really. Just joking. Though I thought it would be funny to have the album cover with me standing in a cardboard box looking over the walls, with 'This Time Machine Sucks' written on it."

Lately, pop music has been all about the girls, with record buyers not giving a four-X about the Y chromosome.

From the one-woman Hotter Chip of Little Boots to the Lapp-dance of Robyn, Lykke Li and Ida Maria, it's been (sound the klaxon!) the fairer sex who have been leading the way in inventive, technicolor music, suffused with genuine personality.

Continuing this trend is Welch, whose mind scarpers around cartoonishly like an animated kitten playing a keyboard, and is likely to top the Tips For 2009 lists in January.

Eccentric art-pop

Part slum-posh indie chick, part Kate Bush-style eccentric art-pop minstrel, the 22-year-old is a self-confessed "art-school drop-out", who spent her teenage years at Camberwell Art School College, in between bumming around East London haunts checking out "pirate bands and squat raves".

"I was never a model student," she says in a RADA Cassie from Skins spaced-out drawl. "I just liked being in a place where you were surrounded by creative people. I once put in an installation of fake flowers which was six foot-high and spelled out 'You're a t***' just because I was so annoyed with myself."

Well, if nothing else, she's given us some ideas for the wreath at our grandmother's funeral. With a voice like a nightingale (albeit one that can shatter glass), Florence has released two singles on Moshi Moshi - the old stomping ground of Kate Nash and Hot Chip.

Rockabilly

First, was the rockabilly Kiss From A Fist and Dog Days Are Over, a collision of yodelling and Adam Ant drums. Now signed to Island Records, she's currently working on her as-yet-untitled debut album with ubiquitous producer James Ford.

As a child, she was blessed and cursed with an overactive imagination. "I was always really scared of what was under the bed and the dark and stuff like that," she remembers. "My head still instantly moves towards the negative. Your fears manifest themselves differently. Whereas when you're a kid, it's like a burglar, a ghost, a vampire, now it's like, 'Oh my God, I did this last night! What will they think of me?'.

"Writing songs for me is a distraction because if I spend too much time inside my own head without getting something out, I would probably throw myself out of a window."

From 16, she was flexing her voice wherever she could ("performing in squat parties, and weddings and funerals and street corners in the middle of the night"), but things took off when she was discovered drunkenly belting out Motown covers in a nightclub toilet by Mairead Nash, of DJ/groupies turned radio presenters Queens Of Noize, who became her manager, introducing her to Dev Hynes (aka Lightspeed Champion), who accompanied her on guitar on her first tour, and even enlisted her to record a covers album of songs from the Green Day album Nimrod.

Schlepping

"When he should have been recording his own album, he was just schlepping around with me at these little gigs," she remembers. "He was brilliant.

"But because I was in my weird South London arty bubble, I missed a lot of what was going on in new music a couple of years ago," she laughs.

"So it's funny, because now I'm meeting everyone and I don't have a clue who they are. With Dev, I knew nothing about him, had never heard his music before, so it was just like making a new friend."

Her mother, she says, "hung around with Andy Warhol. She was part of the whole Studio 54 set, but she left that to come to England to lead a quiet suburban life".

Her dad, meanwhile, drove her round on her first tour. "It was funny pulling up at MGMT's massive tour bus in our Winnebago," she chuckles.

It's fair to say that as a support act, she blew the Brooklyn psychonauts-du-jour off stage, with her Tasmanian Devil-in-a-dressing-up-box performances.

At South By Southwest last March, Florence broke off mid-song to leap into a nearby swimming pool, before clambering back out again to finish the song.

So goodness know what will happen when she joins melancholy Spector-throwbacks Glasvegas, ultra-hip indie-dance kids Friendly Fires and Joy Division spiritual offspring White Lies for NME's annual awards charabanc next February.

Admittedly though, her hippy-trippy Kooky with a capital K personality can fall into the pop deadzone of being A Bit Too Much, but with the songs and stage presence, next year could be hers for the taking.

Just don't expect her to agree. "Whenever I release something, I don't like it anymore," she sighs. "If everyone loves it, it's like, 'I ****** hate it now!'."

Dog Days Are Over is released on December 1. Florence And The Machine play the ShockWaves NME Awards Tour at Academy 1 on Friday, February 6. Call 0161 832 1111 to book tickets.