Singer Florence Welch often finds herself in awe of the prescience of the songs she writes – to say nothing of the transformative power of performing them.
This sense of wonder fuels Everybody Scream, the brutal and mystical sixth album by her band Florence + The Machine, which was further forged by her near-death experience two years ago.
The first single from her previous album, ‘King’, explored Welch’s inner conflict between pursuing her art and starting a family.
In August 2023, 18 months after that song’s release, she experienced a pregnancy loss. A week later, she felt unwell and started to bleed heavily while performing in rain and howling wind at a festival in Cornwall.
A scan the next day revealed the pregnancy had been ectopic and her fallopian tube had ruptured.
Welch announced the cancellation of a handful of shows on social media, telling fans that she had undergone emergency surgery – which had saved her life – for reasons she didn’t then feel strong enough to reveal.
“Suffice to say, I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions,” she cryptically wrote in the post. She would be back on stage 10 days later.
Now, as Everybody Scream drops and with the benefit of hindsight, Welch believes that “going through something quite extreme” steeled an uncompromising attitude and “sense of toughness” in her songwriting.
But processing those feelings through her art didn’t exactly offer this inveterate worrier any life-changing revelations for achieving resilience.
“I’m fascinated so much by the prescient power of songwriting, and performance itself, and what you can put the body through,” Welch tells Stellar from her home in London.
“It is sort of miraculous to me what I can perform through. But I don’t think it has made me more resilient; I actually feel quite wounded in life.
“You think you’ll have some revelation, but I’m just as worried and obsessive as before, maybe worse.”
Florence + The Machine broke big in 2009 with their debut album Lungs; every offering since has peaked in the top 10 worldwide, and the band has ticked off all the big milestones: Brit Awards, Grammy nominations, headlining at Glastonbury and performing at Coachella.
Welch collaborated with Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann on The Great Gatsby, and was a featured artist on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department album.
She joined the superstar on stage to perform their song ‘Florida!!!’ during the Eras tour, which was, she says, “pretty f***ing cool”.
The stage is where Welch feels bigger and bolder, her balletic leaps and whirling dervishness powered by the energy of her audience. The new record’s title track is testament to that symbiotic relationship – and the fact a gig is one of the few places in society where it remains perfectly acceptable to scream your lungs out.
“The song is also about why do I keep going back to the stage, what compels me to return when it’s a place that exhausts me, that has wounded me, where I’ve injured myself,” she says. (Indeed, Welch broke her foot during a Coachella performance in 2015.)
“It’s a place where something other takes over, and I can be sort of absorbed into something bigger than me, with this bond with the crowd. It gives me something I can’t get anywhere else.”
Welch also takes aim at the sexism and inequalities in her industry, where greater expectations are placed on female artists to look dazzling and deliver a killer show, while men can often get away with wearing a T-shirt and staring at the ground.
When Stellar quotes a line from her new song ‘One Of The Greats’ – “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can” – Welch laughs.
“I was being quite uncharacteristically bitchy,” she explains. “I thought it was really funny. “The song is about effort; I’d love to just look hot in a suit. And it’s about the level of performance I feel you have to give.
“Did I make it good enough? There was a pint of blood on the stage, I broke my foot … and [the critics gave the show] four out of five. I grew up in a very male-dominated critics’ sphere where I wasn’t to their taste. You think that’s about you. I’ve managed to process that and be like, ‘Oh, it’s not for them.’ But you feel quite wounded by it as a young artist.”
Everybody Scream (Universal Music) is out now. Read the full interview with Florence Welch inside Stellar on Sunday, via The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (Victoria), The Sunday Mail (Queensland) and Sunday Mail (SA). For more from Stellar, click here.
