With her new album Dance Fever, Florence Welch (florencemachine) is ready to mark her return to the euphoric, stadium size anthems that defined her early career.
In an age that favors—often demands—the constant reinvention of its pop stars, there is a reassuring familiarity to Florence Welch, front woman of Florence + the Machine. Here she is, a Saturday lunchtime in February, nearly 15 years after she crash-landed onto the music scene,
Her laugh—constant and infectious, and covering the spectrum from convulsing giggle to prolonged raucous cackle—ricochets off the walls of a private dining room at Luca, a much-lauded British-Italian restaurant in London’s Clerkenwell, run by her brother-in-law, Daniel. He is here today, keeping us well fed with plates of Parmesan fries, whipped salted cod, roast Orkney scallops and bowls of pasta—carbonara and ravioli .
The photographer and director Autumn de Wilde, responsible for the album’s artwork and Welch’s new music videos, was instrumental in creating Florence’s new liberated world. “She is an electric genius,” de Wilde says of Welch. “I started to feel like the record she was making was very honest, very raw and modern, but also rich with otherworldly fantasy. I wanted to create a visual escape hatch into an ancient fairy tale.
I wonder what it is that makes her feel like she can’t have both—motherhood and a career. She pauses. “I think I’m afraid. It seems like the bravest thing in the world to have children. It’s the ultimate measure of faith and of letting go of control. I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in.… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings. I think I’ve had a stilted emotional immaturity just through having been in addiction and eating disorders for years.
“I feel like as a female artist you spend a lot of time screaming into the void for people to take you seriously,” says Welch. So she stopped. And “it set me free” In the months ahead, Welch envisions her continued return to the world, to touring, to becoming “a larger-than-life person again.” And yet, the past two years have shown her another life is possible. She describes sitting in her kitchen, “looking over at two of my old friends. And I was just like, I’m so lucky to get to have people that I love in my life. Maybe not everything is about work and achievement. There might be other ways to feel fulfilled and grounded.
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