CityLife

Interview: Florence Welch

Florence Welch minus her machine

'VANITY’, Al Pacino once joked, ‘is my favourite sin’. But, it turns out, it’s also Florence Welch’s worst characteristic.

“I really hate the fact that I can’t stop looking in mirrors – vanity!” she yells with Withnailian enthusiasm when CityLife catches up with the frontwoman of Florence + The Machine.

“If there’s a mirror around I’ll just be looking in it, not in a kind of, ‘Oh, you’re gorgeous’ way, just because I can’t not look in the mirror. It’s really frustrating. It really irritates me about myself.

“I can be very prone to over reacting, too, I think that’s a pretty bad trait. Panic. And then worrying I’m going to panic.”

Behind the overwhelmingly confident performances this flame-haired Pre-Raphaelite beauty puts on, then, there’s a self-conscious little girl fretting in the wings. But as the crowds grow larger and their singing moshpit gets louder, Flo is finally putting her anxieties aside.

She always said she wanted her music to feel like an amble into quicksand – dense, engulfing and inescapable. It’s a goal her debut album Lungs achieved, and it no doubt would have achieved a No.1 spot too if only Michael Jackson hadn’t died.

So her commercial timing isn’t perfect. But her musical timing is, and finally seeing that people don’t want to run away from her shows has been a bit of a revelation.

“It’s satifying to see people becoming a part of it, enjoying the whole thing together,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like I’m attacking people with music any more.

“When you’re first doing it, you feel like you’re shocking people almost. Now it feels like people understand it, now they can enjoy it with me. I’m no longer barraging people with it.”

'Chaotic family life'

Expressiveness is something Flo has never shied away from. She was raised in an arty household – her mother is an author and arts dean at the University of London, her father is in advertising and her grandfather was a satirist and editor at the Telegraph – and lived in a slightly unconventional family unit after her mother remarried a neighbour with three kids.

Flo says the result was ‘mob rule’ every weekend. “They gave us a lot of freedom,” she remembers. “They just had quite a laissez-faire attuitude to parenting.

“With the space they gave me, and having a quite chaotic family life, it was quite easy to slip under the radar.

“We kind of had the house to ourselves every weekend, so there was quite a lot we could get away with and they wouldn’t know. We used to go all out with our parties.

“I remember having to wash the whole floor on my hands and knees with towels trying to be a human mop. In the morning, there’d be someone asleep in the garden, five people in each bedroom and someone alseep under the fridge and you’d have to shoo people out and begin the epic tidy up.

“Then my mum and dad would come home and you’d be kind of sitting there innocently in front of the television trying not to think about the 15 bags of bottles outside the house.”

Flo admits she was a bit of a tearaway. She suffered with night terrors, dyslexia and dyspraxia, which affects coordination, and bunked off school (hold onto your hats, Flo fans) to go reading in the library.

“I always had that weird sense of excitement about being hidden and being out of reach of people,” she smiles. “I read a lot, and that probably has informed my lyrical style: Emily Dickinson, Raymond Carver, obviously. I read a lot of ghost stories growing up, a lot of Victorian Horror. I got really obsessed with Jack The Ripper,” she laughs. “Weird kid. That’s probably why I couldn’t sleep at night.”

The last 12 months have given her very few opportunities to sleep. As well as releasing her acclaimed debut, she’s worked her way through three UK tours, squeezed in a pile of international dates and staffed a support slot for Blur’s reunion gigs.

Her previously evolving machine – the band – have been a fairly steady castlist since the wheels started turning rapidly, but she says it’s still by no means a fixed line-up. “We’ll have to see how the next album sounds,” she dangles, revealing that she has started writing it.

'Incredibly exciting'

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“I never thought I was going to win, so I didn’t feel any pressure,” she says, reflectively.

“Now I’m looking at the media for next year and I picked up a paper that said ‘The New Girls’, and there were five artists going through the same thing.

“To me it just seems like an easy way to classify people.

“I never felt it was a competition. It’s nice, we’re all going through the same thing, and when we saw each other around we could talk about the shared experiences of getting into the music industry.

“It’s a very strange thing to start in music and it was really nice to have girls in the same position who could talk to you about it.”

Capping off the year with another sold out tour of ever bigger venues just proves she’s top of the pops, though.

“It’s been incredibly exciting but I think as I come to the end of the year I realise what’s actually happened,” she laughs.

“It just seems like all the touring melded into one, but it was punctuated by really special moments.

“Everyone was so much rowdier. As we’ve toured people have learned the words and the crowds have got much more excitable.

“We’ve actually had moshpits,” she shreiks, all girlie and charming.

“That’s what’s really exciting.”

Florence + The Machine are at Manchester Apollo on December 10, 2009.