As the first Florence + the Machine album in four years is released, Florence Welch talks about the irresistible ‘monster of performance’, the conflict between career and motherhood, and sounding like ‘Nick Cave at the club’
The other night, in an unusually high spring wind, Florence Welch’s electronic doorbell malfunctioned, repeatedly ringing through the small hours as though pressed by the finger of some ghostly hand. Sleep has always been a sensitive issue (her manager used to have to wake her very carefully on tour), so she went out and ripped the entire unit off the wall. As a child – in fact, not only as a child, but until she was 26 years old, had two No 1 albums and had performed with the Rolling Stones – Welch slept on a mattress on the floor of her mother’s living room, with books stacked around her head and three of her late grandmother’s paintings forming a makeshift headboard, which would regularly fall on her.
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. Some girls at school were being mean to me and I just remember sitting at home thinking” – she affects a melodramatic voice – “‘If they would just see this room, they would understand and they would love me!’”
