The ghost in the machine

IF EVER Florence Welch creates her own fragrance, it should be called Vintage, and for authenticity its top note would be the musty tang of second-hand clothes.

It is the scent that hits you as you enter her bedroom, emanating from a wardrobe so crammed that dresses, scarves and bags dangle from its doors. Her bed, with a scarlet quilt, is a mattress on the floor. Every surface is crowded with candles, old shoes, postcards, gilt birdcages, strange objets d’art, a book about Frida Kahlo; it is as if an entire flea market has been purchased wholesale. The only clue that this is no longer the retreat of an arty, angsty teenage girl is hanging outside in the hall. Under dry-cleaner’s plastic is the full-length couture gown that Florence wore when emerging from a giant clam shell to sing at the Chanel show in Le Grand Palais, Paris.

This is not even a proper bedroom, but the front room of her mother and stepfather’s house. Yet in between touring America as Florence + the Machine, promoting her second album, Ceremonials (which sold 1.5m copies in its first two months), shooting the cover of Vogue, singing at the Oscars, the New York Met Ball, on The X Factor and Saturday Night Live, it is to where she returns. In this corner of southeast London, where comfortable houses like hers are ringed by vast council estates, a pop star may stroll unrecognised. The paparazzi rarely stray south of the river. Only a bunch of Camberwell art-college students (where Florence once studied) have discovered her address: “They wake me up singing You’ve Got the Love while drunk at 3am,” she says, and laughs.

Florence Welch’s face can appear different at every glance. We first met in October, 2011, on the eve of the Ceremonials release and she looked almost mannish in a wide-brimmed russet hat, skinny jeans and unstructured jacket. Her strong jaw and Roman profile make her resemble a female Noel Fielding. But, at other times, her large, down-turned green eyes and that hank of red hair — which is not her natural colour, but suits her pale complexion — lend her a misty beauty. She has an actress’s ability to mutate: from aristocrat to festival raver, from the Lady of Shalott to futuristic she-bot. Karl Lagerfeld, who has often photographed her, says: “She’s so Pre-Raphaelite, and yet at the same time she’s like a little girl or an English lady from the Edwardian days.” Her lifelong love of the dressing-up box, together with her light, angular build, have made her a fashion-world darling.

As we walk through Camberwell to lunch, not a single head turning in recognition, Florence tells me her mother longs for her to move out so that she can reclaim the living room. But I’d wager she’s in no hurry. Florence also adds that Evelyn, professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, likes her daughter home, where she can make sure she eats and sleeps. Her two younger siblings still live here, although Grace, 22, now working as Florence’s PA, is often on tour, and their brother, JJ, is off on a gap year in Romania. Two of her three step-siblings are also still in residence.

Her parents — her father, Nick, is a former advertising executive who now runs an organic campsite — divorced when she was young. Then, when Florence was 13, her mother fell in love with a widower four doors down. The two families merged, six teenagers under one roof: a tribal collision and a terrible squeeze. “We felt displaced, they felt invaded,” she says. “We came with different rules about untidiness and whether you were allowed to touch each other’s stuff. It was The Royal Tenenbaums meets The Brady Bunch.” Until a summer house was built in the garden, Grace and Florence shared a room, while JJ slept in a converted airing cupboard.

Now, as young adults, apart from disputes about loading the dishwasher, they get along well. Florence, 25, seems to find the normality of family life — the old rhythms of her childhood, their cat, Mao, washing hanging in the kitchen, the nightly family dinners — reassuring after months of audience acclaim and anonymous hotel rooms. This base also, she says, keeps in check her wild, reckless, shamanistic side: the Florence who scaled the stage rigging in high heels at the Reading and Glastonbury festivals, or who would stay up partying all night and find herself covered in bruises, her shoes lost.

“I can be a person of great excess and I can really throw myself into situations that are out of control,” she says. “I think if I’d moved out, it would have been much easier to spiral, because you remove yourself almost entirely from things that you have grown up with that have grounded you.”

As we order our lunch in a tapas bar, she pulls out her diary, covered in doodles of gravestones and crucifixes, together with her printed schedule for the next three months. The Ceremonials launch gig at Hackney Empire will begin a global promotional whirl. Her life is mapped out for the next two or three years. Florence seems to deal with this by mentally scaling down things that frighten her. She scores off each day with a neat cross. She tells herself that the venue won’t be very big or the song she will sing at the Oscars, say, is a nice calm one, so the magnitude of it all does not overwhelm her.

I ask what it is like to walk out onto the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and look out at 100,000 faces stretching into the horizon, all singing back your lyrics. “I blanked it out. I can’t remember parts of it, because I was so overcome,” she says. When she is performing, she feels protected: “To me, singing is such a catharsis, you kind of lose self-awareness and you feel very free. You could be in front of anyone then: you are just existing in this moment of expression. It’s only when I stop singing and I’m like, ‘What do I say?’ That’s always the hardest thing for me. I feel very embarrassed about speaking on stage.”

Indeed, Florence’s music has a visceral force, a muddy emotional palette that mixes melancholy and euphoria, joy and apocalypse. Dog Days Are Over, from Lungs — her first album, which has sold three million copies — has come to denote the triumph of female fortitude: “Happiness hit her like a train on a track/Coming towards her, stuck still no turning back.” It was used to herald both Julia Roberts’s epiphany in Eat Pray Love and David Cameron’s entrance last year onto the Tory conference platform. A week before, Ed Miliband made his exit from the Labour conference to Florence’s honking, happy version of Candi Staton’s You’ve Got the Love. Lately, Florence’s new hit, Shake It Out, has been employed everywhere from Strictly Come Dancing to The X Factor at moments of heightened drama.

In a world of crotch-thrusting Rihannas, Florence is quintessentially female without being crudely sexual. “I never really wanted to dress to please guys,” she says, noting she didn’t have a boyfriend until she was 18. “On stage, I would rather look scary than sexy. Witchy, in black chiffon with my eyes rolled back in my head. Like I’d put a hex on them.”

As a child, attending Alleyn’s, a fee-paying school with a liberal reputation, Florence felt an oddity. She tried to fit in but was an uncomfortable, sensitive, insecure girl, the type who now sends her pretty collages with notes saying, “People at school say I’m weird, but I listened to your music and now I don’t care.” She felt a radio was constantly playing music inside her head, occasionally “leaking out,” so she’d be chastised by teachers for singing in class. She was diagnosed with dyspraxia, which makes her clumsy and prone to losing things. There was a dark, four-year period in which all her grandparents died — her paternal grandfather lingering in a coma for a year and her maternal grandmother, a long-term depressive, committing suicide. Florence sang at their funerals. This, combined with many trips to Italian churches as part of her mother’s research, all contributed to her wild, Gothic imagination.

Although Grace is three years younger, Florence says she always acted like the older child. “She was born with everything I wasn’t: the boobs and the organisation. She has always been much more logical and calm than me. She’d be six and I’d be nine, but it would be me getting into bed with her saying I was scared of werewolves,” she says. Grace — blonde, open-faced and cheerful — doesn’t seem fazed by her now famous sibling. She has graduated from Sussex with a first in film studies and, unable to find a job, has taken up Florence’s offer of following her around the world. She will put her earnings towards a law-conversion course.

Grace is sense to Florence’s sensibility, practical to her fey, upbeat where Flo — as her family call her — is prone to “creeping doom” on tour, when she just sits, sobbing for hours. Grace steers her away from excessive behaviour and makes sure she doesn’t lose her keys. Later, as we finish lunch, Grace collects Florence and takes a final scan of the bench where her sister was sitting: “Just doing the idiot check,” she says. “Oi, I can hear you,” calls Florence good-naturedly.

At Alleyn’s, despite her huge voice and love of drama, Florence never won a leading role. But music was her refuge from school and her chaotic household. She was devoted to the neo-punk of Green Day and the grunge of Nirvana . At Camberwell College of Arts, she created music with her friend and soul mate Isabella Summers, the ‘Machine’ of the band’s title. Florence would perform in pubs, drunk, often to an audience of a few friends and barflies. She had offers to join other bands, but says creating her own work was more important than fame. Eventually, she persuaded club promoter and DJ, Mairead Nash, to be her manager, by cornering her in a ladies’ loo and singing for her.

There followed a summer touring small festivals in a camper van driven by her father. His influence sounds at once supportive and critical: “Dad does an impression of me getting a melody and trying to stamp the tune out of it. It involves him stamping his foot across the kitchen. He’s constantly having a go at me to write something happy,” she says.

This period coincided with a split from her boyfriend, Stuart Hammond, a skinny, tall hipster and the literary editor of Dazed & Confused magazine. Florence adored him and yet, she says, pushed him away with her relentless partying. The break-up sent her into emotional free-fall. She says she was lucky to survive her hedonistic self-destruction: “I did crash in a massive way,” she says. “It was basically elation or total devastation; there was no middle ground. It was this massive whirlwind of festivals and it was intensely fun and intensely frightening. It could have gone…” she frowns. “I could have really messed things up, basically.”

The break-up provided the emotional fuel for many tracks on Lungs, including the hit Dog Days, and eventually the couple reconciled. But when I begin discussing her forthcoming tour, Florence says she and Hammond have again split up. “I felt like it was getting really unfair, like I was constantly asking him to fit his life around mine,” she says. It was awkward taking a boyfriend on tour, feeling that she could not wholly belong to the audience while he was present, that he’d find her beloved touring rituals odd and annoying. Before a gig, she and Grace like to trawl vintage shops and art galleries. Florence makes her sterile hotel room more homely by strewing her clothes around, covering the furniture in silk shawls.

What about the possibility of another emotional free-fall? “It’s different now,” she says. She’s signed to a major label, has a large band — she has added a harpist and two backing singers — that depends upon her. She waves her foolscap itinerary: her life has a structure to underpin her creativity and wildness. And she has Grace.

A few days later, at the Ceremonials launch, I sit in the dress circle of Hackney Empire filled with Florence’s extended bohemian clan. Her mother is there — the same strong profile — watching her daughter with absolute attention. And the satirist Craig Brown, her uncle, looks incongruous among the cool Shoreditch crowd in his tweed jacket. Florence appears, glistening in a copper Alice Temperley satin coat-dress worn with matching camiknickers and towering shoes, which she kicks off after the first song.

“I never feel worried when she’s on stage,” says Grace. “She’ll never mess up. But when we’re at home, I’m like: ‘What are you doing’?” The rather vague girl with the faraway look is replaced by a woman of poise and dramatic presence. Yet when she starts dancing, she is as free and unselfconscious as a child.

But then the song ends and, as she said, Florence nervously struggles to speak to the crowd. Her song All This and Heaven Too is about her very English reticence: being unable to say what she feels, not just to audiences, but those closest to her — to boyfriends, in particular.

“It’s about wanting to invent a language. Instead of saying ‘love’, I wish it could just be one long note,” she says.

A week later, Ceremonials is number one in the UK album charts and Florence is off touring the world. I catch up with her again in south London three months later. It is two days after Christmas and Florence is snuffly, her voice faint with fatigue. That morning, she was up at 5.30am to open the Harrods sale, singing in a grey Chanel wool cape from an open-topped bus. But she has changed back into the same silk pyjamas she has barely taken off since she got home, exhausted yet triumphant, from America. Still in this morning’s full hair and make-up, she looks languidly beautiful, like an off-duty 1930s movie star.

The past few months have exceeded her wildest expectations. Ceremonials went to number six in the US and she played to full, 6,000-seat theatres. She did an acoustic set for MTV and — her highlight — sang with the Muppets. She was called on stage by Green Day and told she was wonderful by lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong, whom she once believed she would marry.

But she seems more grown-up than before. This was a “tour of temperance,” she says — no alcohol, few late nights, except for the time she drank tequila shots with Josh Homme of the rock band Queens of the Stone Age . Grace says that their after-show ritual was making fruit smoothies. “Not very rock’n’roll,” says Florence.

In the past, she lived excessively, drank and partied because she believed every tour was her last.

“Now you see more longevity to it,” she says. “Hopefully. When I first started out, there wasn’t any music behind me and I got put under scrutiny for my personality and how I looked. Now there are two albums and I wouldn’t want personal things to be more important than the music. I think I am more aware of my need for self-preservation.”

* Florence and the Machine play the 02 on March 3.