Correction: Florence and the Balloons
Swimming through the depths of the music scene, our red haired siren Florence Welch showers us with bountiful elegiac lyrics and her poignant voice, all set to woo us with debut album Lungs. With breathtaking energy, Florence and the Machine have bounced around for the last two years gathering unremitting support from the big dogs at the BBC, and even winning a Brit Award before the release of Lungs. Taking time out to keep SUPERSWEET updated, Florence embodies her fantastical ideas of music, wearing playful florals, torn tights and fidgeting in restless attention. Confessing her “umming and ahhing” about the recently finished record “There was so much I didn’t want to let go of!" Florence scrunches her hands about the final tweaking “to change that one word”. But after receiving the raised eyebrows and quip, “You wanna book a whole day in the studio just for one word?” Florence happily explains that she “just had to let the baby go...” ready for devoted ears.
In using such a stark bodily reference as Lungs, Florence encourages the physical involvement within the songs, removed from the “frilly or pretty” and particularly its “organic” origin in utilizing your lungs in singing. Combining a “mixture of hard and soft”, Florence dives into the conflictions of such entities in her music, even in her name, left ambiguous even to herself as “Florence and The Machine, or just Florence. The Machine”. Even admitting to try and create an upbeat track in ‘Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)’, Florence shaped it into a “weighty and dark” song, in theme with the album: “I was thinking about how you need to be careful what you wish for, you have to make sure who is actually in control of the situation; how you are given this opportunity, but then is it going to be good for you and who is “lamb and who is the knife”. Evidently to her she finds the outcome comic, “It’s still upbeat! It’s just about “what have I got myself in for?!”
Despite a “twee” name like Florence, the artist continues to challenge her personal and music self all to acquire “the sound I wanted” which she blurts “that took like a year!” Revealing her transformation over the last two years, from “gigging and playing with a guitarist in a ‘meat and two veg’ rockabilly soul band” Florence asserts that “wasn’t really the kind of music I wanted to make, When I wrote ‘In Between Two Lungs’ done in a tiny room, with the loose drum track finished first, the piano was done on a £100 Yamaha, the first piano I ever wrote with or ever played. So just with that song, I realised this is the kind of music I wanted to make. Songs like ‘Dog Days are Over’ in the same fashion came after, and the whole album stemmed from there”
With critics ready to categorize the artist, Florence is adamant that her new album will keep them guessing “Some people say, your music used to be raw, now it’s more pop. I don’t think that at all! ‘Kiss With a Fist’ is much more poppy than the new stuff. I didn’t even want to release it because I thought it would pigeonhole me in a certain way, but amazingly people have the same positive response to then next release ‘Dog Days’. Now I really enjoy playing that song because it hasn’t pigeonholed me and it’s a chance to touch back to my 17year old self!” Yet unlike other artists Florence “wasn’t ever consciously trying to do something different” she confirms, illuminating her honest ambition to create “tension between notes and “make something beautiful, touching and emotive”
Willingly declaring how she recreates “feelings you’ve had in listening to songs” within her music, Florence is however quick to defy her likeness to Kate Bush “I can’t listen to Kate Bush anymore because everyone says that! Now I am just too afraid of listening to it...I don’t think I sound anything like Kate Bush!” Vocally Lungs celebrates the strength of her vocals, where she learnt to restrain her voice giving a “more subtle performance, instead of the AHHH!” planned already for something “more shambolic” in the next album.
One figure Florence is happy to associate with is her X-Men favourite, Rogue, “I was obsessed with Rogue!” So after squeals in sharing a love of X-Men hair-dos, the comic book reincarnation flourishes into song as “a little Ariel”, another of her childhood heroes. Laughing that they “all had red hair!” Florence remembers first learning to sing “sitting in the bath going “Ahhhahhh” singing to The Little Mermaid and Peter Pan. When asked if a power like Rogue, absorbing people’s abilities could be on the cards Florence replies “Not really, that’s a quite cheeky power! I think I’d love to be able to fly. I have dreams about flying! Half lucid ones where you can control it...”
Words: Gemma Dempster
Photography: Eleanor Harvey