Born Florence Leontine Mary Welch in 1986, the Machine's frontwoman had a decent start in life. "We were always in fancy dress," she told Vogue's Lynn Yaeger last month about her bohemian upbringing in Camberwell, south London.
Welch’s singing lessons, taken from the age of 7, included French and Italian arias, but the privileged childhood that some people have flagged up in an attempt to nix her rock and roll credentials had its trials, too.
When she was 4, her Harvard-educated, art-historian mother, Evelyn, and advertising-executive father, Nick, divorced. Nine years later, her mother moved in with a neighbour she had fallen in love with. Flo and her two younger siblings went, too, sharing space with the neighbour’s three kids.
"We all really hated each other," she told The Telegraph in 2009.
Educated privately at the elite Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, London, where she was diagnosed with a form of dyslexia known as dyspraxia, Welch went on to study fine art at Camberwell College, but dropped out to pursue music.
The name of her first band, The Toxic Cockroaches, signalled a strong rebellious streak, but the only time her father really worried about her, she told the Daily Mail in 2010, was when Pete Doherty of The Libertines proposed to her.
Building the Machine
Though Welch’s talent, ambition and natural flamboyancy were evident from the get-go, there would be no Machine without her right-hand woman, Isabella Summers. The band’s keyboard player, Summers used to babysit for Welch’s younger sister, Grace, before growing into a gifted songwriter, producer and remixer.
In 2007, while Welch was dating guitarist Matt Alchin, she and Summers began writing together. Summers was remixing tracks for Alchin’s band, Ludes. Welch, impressed by her flair for electronic music, dubbed her “Isa Machine”. Welch briefly became “Florence Robot”, and the pair played gigs together as a duo. Only later, as their line-up expanded, did they become Florence and the Machine.
Legend has it that Welch approached her influential future manager, Mairead Nash, in the toilets at a nightclub in Soho, London, treating her to an impromptu version of Something's Got a Hold of Me by Etta James.
“I had never heard anyone with such a powerful voice, ever,” Nash said.
BBC Introducing, the brand the British broadcaster uses to promote new talent, soon gave Welch plenty of airplay, hailing her as the latest in a long line of great, arty British eccentrics.
Florence and the Machine's debut album, Lungs, largely inspired by Welch's break-up from her literary-editor boyfriend, Stuart Hammond, reached number 1 in the United Kingdom in 2009, and the die was cast.
What’s under the lid?
With its Pre-Raphaelite-like cover art and dark Gothic humour (witness My Boy Builds Coffins), Lungs packed a dark, compelling intensity. Yet, for all its lovelorn harp and elegiac strings, it was also the stuff of epic pop, as evidenced by Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) and Welch's inspired cover of Candi Staton's You've Got the Love.
The band's 2011 follow-up, Ceremonials, was even grander in scale, with songs such as Only If For a Night and What the Water Gave Me conjuring Kate Bush and PJ Harvey – but arguably overdid the production tics.
Lessons were learnt and this year's How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful dripped with maturity and self-knowledge. Flo's inspirations included fellow redhead and late outsider artist Vali Myers – a woman who once lived with foxes in a cave in Portofino, Italy – while the songs were sparser, stronger and more soulful. The album topped the charts in the UK and the United States.
The leap to mega-stardom
It takes guts to make serendipity seem like destiny, but when Dave Grohl broke his leg at a Foo Fighters gig and Florence and the Machine became de facto headliners on the Friday night at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, Flo shone – and not only because of her silver trouser-suit.
Nash subsequently tweeted a photo of Flo’s Glastonbury slot rendered in Lego, but Welch was playing with the big boys and girls now. Like her feverish performance at California’s Coachella Festival two months earlier – in a weird precursor to Grohl’s mishap, Flo broke her foot leaping from the stage – it was a pivotal moment.
What Welch’s fans – and the media – like most about her, though, is her unpredictability.
In 2013 the Daily Mail reported that, having boarded a London Underground train after attending a Kendrick Lamar gig, Welch sang a gung-ho version of You've Got the Love for fans who recognised her.
And as The Guardian's Sophie Heawood learnt in June, Welch once partied too hard with rapper Kanye West, then woke up in her hotel to find "she had chipped a tooth and set the room on fire".
Whatever happens at du Arena on Saturday, one thing seems certain: Welch’s lust for life will continue to shine through.
• Florence and the Machine perform at du Arena on Saturday, November 28, at the third F1 after-race concert. Doors open at 7pm. A three-day race-day pass that includes entry to the show (as well as the Arab all-star, Enrique Iglesias and Blur concerts tomorrow, Friday and Sunday) costs from Dh2,080. For more ticket options, visit www.yasmarinacircuit.com
artslife@thenational.ae
