FEATURE:
Various Storms & Saints
Florence + The Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful at Ten
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THIS incredible album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
was released on 29th May, 2015, so I wanted to mark its upcoming tenth anniversary. Florence + The Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful won critical acclaim and reached number one in the U.S. and U.K. Her next studio album after 2011’s Ceremonials, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is more stropped back and diverse in terms of its genres. Recorded across multiple studios, the album does not lose any focus or consistency. Some of the finest songwriting and vocal performances from Florence Welch. Ranked alongside the best albums of 2015, it is only right that I investigate this stunning album in more depth and detail. Go and watch this incredible film/visual album. I will get to some reviews of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. Prior to that, there are a couple of interviews from 2015 with Florence Welch that I want to highlight. I am going to start out with an interview from NME. Florence Welch addresses, among other things, turmoil, Hollywood, witchcraft and her new album:
“After the touring of ‘Ceremonials’ finished, Florence had a year off to rest, so she could come to a new album completely refreshed. Out of the cycle of gigs, she found herself adrift, searching for who she was when she wasn’t that Florence. A difficult on-off relationship compounded her confusion, and she cocooned herself in the house where we meet today, a beautiful south London terrace with a fairytale garden of thick hedges and sprawling roses. The cosy rooms are filled with antique, heavy wooden furniture, trinkets, endless books and prints, butterflies in glass cases and domes. There is a heavy bureau overflowing with papers, a collection of crowns catches my jumper. In the toilet is a sequinned dragon tail, to be worn round the waist.
“When you come off tour… it’s hard to know what you like,” she explains, happy and relaxed in jeans and a white long-sleeved top. “You’re this big, like (spreads her arms wide like goddess-Florence), but then that’s not here, in this house. I was trying to figure it out, like, do I like partying? I’ll just do that loads. Do I wanna have a relationship? That’s not working either! What is it? What am I looking for? I had to contend with my own feelings for the first time. I couldn’t just be swept away and do a gig. Gigs have this magic thing of absolving. As long as you did a good gig, no matter what’s happened, no matter what’s going on in your personal life, it’s such an exorcism for me that it just resets everything.”
In an interview shortly before ‘Ceremonials’ came out, Florence talked about how songs such as ‘Seven Devils’ and ‘Shake It Out’ were about exorcising old demons, using hexes to ward off the self-destructive side of herself she used to call, around the time of ‘Lungs’, the Chaos Robot (echoed in the original name for her band, Florence Robot Isa Machine; Isa Machine being Isabella Summers, her songwriting partner and bandmate). She also spoke about choosing whether to be swept away by that indulgent chaos, or trying to grow up. This time around, a drained Florence found herself feeling shy at parties and awards ceremonies, wondering: “But I like this stuff, don’t I?”
Looking back now on ‘Ceremonials’, she says, “It was all like (makes dramatic, expansive arm gesture) WHAAAAAAH, y’know? Turning things into spells, and finding other ways to express things so that they wouldn’t be as clear. Because I didn’t feel clear. But with this, I felt clear. It was a humbling feeling. How I usually approach feelings or things that are happening is to translate it into this fantasy… and then having a bit of time away, suddenly like my actual life became something that I had to contend with. It wasn’t like a fantasy… it was like, ‘Oh, shit’… But it felt quite like a new, pure feeling as opposed to kind of like the big whooshy confusion.” She gestures back to the images of whirling Amaterasu. “I still love all of this stuff. But you don’t ever wanna feel like you have to be something.”
All this existential wrangling can be heard clearly in the lyrics: ‘How Big…’ finds Florence standing, fighting, questioning, rather than surrendering or being swept away by her emotions. “I’m gonna be free and I’m gonna be fine/But maybe not tonight”, she sings on ‘Delilah’, acknowledging that there’s “a different kind of danger in the daylight”. Where once she was worshipping the water, calling out from the depths, now she looks to the sky referenced in the title and invokes saints (even if one of them is St Jude, patron saint of lost causes). Most revealing are ‘Mother’ and ‘Third Eye’. In the former, she finds herself at a party, not feeling it. Couples kiss around her, but she leaves, walks out into the night and puts her feet in a fountain. So far, so Florence, but instead of a font of absolution, she comes to a frank admission: “No use wishing on the water/It brings you no release”.
‘Third Eye’ was written by Florence on her own (as well as Summers, she often writes with long-term collaborator Kid Harpoon): “You deserve to be loved/And you deserve what you are given”. Talking to herself? “Sadly, yes,” she says. “I didn’t think I was at the time. When you reach a level of fame and attention, it can make you feel quite unworthy. To be compelled, to need that catharsis and exorcism, there’s obviously going to be an underlying dissatisfaction… it was trying to learn to just be happier in my own skin.”
Florence crafted the words from not just personal emotions but ideas from her voracious reading, snippets from newspapers, titles of artworks. A quick scan of her living room reveals a framed print of contemporary dancer Pina Bausch, a huge ornate volume on the Ballets Russes, and prints, patterns, books, books, books everywhere. Her fans joyfully scour her more literate references and puzzles – a bit of Greek myth here, a biblical reference there – writing essays on her videos, and in the case of some, forming a book club that took suggestions for its reading from the lady herself. “There’s a lot of quite literary kids out there,” Florence enthuses. “Poetry and reading books has played such a big part in the making of all the records, and it’s nice because it’s not as personal, and you can connect with people.”
Musically, ‘How Big…’ was inspired by her songwriting trips to Jamaica and to LA, where, like many before her, the sense of space and warmth and light seeped in (“We’ve opened our eyes and it’s changing the view”, she sings on the title track). She knew she wanted something that sounded “big, but not heavy”, inspired particularly by a late conversion to Neil Young (whose Bridge School benefit concert she also played at in October last year), plus listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty and Springsteen, in search of a “tougher” sound. Also key, though, was Fiona Apple’s last album, which Florence admired for the mixture of strength and vulnerability in its emotional frankness.
Florence does seem comfortable in herself (and in her foot, which has healed from the break it suffered after a Chaos Robot-esque moment at Coachella, when she threw herself from the stage). Recent live shows have seen her eschew the usual stage sets and costumes, “actually just allowing things to be quite raw, and as they are. Again, I think a lot of it was not me wanting to be prescribed to do anything in a certain way, just to be completely liberated. And breaking my foot has been quite good as well, in a way, because it’s forced more intimate performances that I perhaps wouldn’t have done. I was inherently forced to be myself!”
Soon, she’ll be taking the new-style Florence live experience to the Pyramid Stage, and though she doesn’t share my outrage that she wasn’t Glastonbury’s third headliner (“I think I’m quite happy with where we are! It would be wonderful to headline, but I also don’t know how I would be dealing with that right now. I would probably be back in the anorak”), she’s clearly looking forward to the festival of which she’s practically the spirit animal. She refuses to make predictions. “I’m not really planning what’s going to happen at Glastonbury, because I just don’t know. It’s almost quite hard for me to remember gigs sometimes, because I just don’t know what happens. It’s almost like something else completely takes over. So if I’m back in my full-charged-feet mode, I’m nervous for what’s going to happen. Because that’s what happened at Coachella: I hadn’t performed in a really long time. And it was like whoosh… and then the crowd were all taking their clothes off, I had my shirt off and I threw myself off. It’s this sense that anything could happen”.
I am going to move to an interview from Billboard. After breaking her foot at Coachella, there was this enforced period away from the stage. Triumphantly storming Glastonbury a few months later, 2015 was this strange and slightly turbulent year for Florence and the Machine. How Big, How Blue. How Beautiful arrived sort of in the middle - after Coachella but before Glastonbury:
“Welch demurs when asked about the commercial pressure surrounding the new album. (Says Jim Roppo, executive vp marketing and commerce for Welch’s label, Republic Records: “We’re aiming for a No. 1 album.”) “I try not to think about it,” she says. “I’m a strange kind of ambitious, because I never cared about having a No. 1 single.”
Shows have been the focus. “I remember being 20 at the Glastonbury festival. And I had been invited to come and play the Sunday Tea Tent, and I was in my anorak and I had no Wellies, and it was one of the muddiest Glastonburys of all time. I remember looking at the Pyramid Stage and thinking, ‘I wish I could perform there just one time.’ ” And in fact, Welch will play the Pyramid this June, as one of her first sets after her foot is healed. “It’s hard to imagine that you think about something you’d like to have happen in your life and it happens,” says Welch. “For a pessimistic British person that’s very hard to deal with. Whereas in L.A.,” she continues, referring to the city she retreated to while she was off the road, “they would say, ‘You’re manifesting.’ But I obviously wasn’t there long enough to feel I deserve any of this.”
Welch honed her voice singing in her small bedroom in Camberwell, London. Her father, a British advertising executive, and her mother, a Renaissance Studies professor from Boston who moved to England in 1981 and still lives in London, divorced when Welch was 11. When her mother began dating another man, Welch and her two sisters moved in with him and his children down the street. Her maternal grandmother, who suffered from bipolar disorder, committed suicide when Welch was 13. Welch responded to all this upheaval by retreating back into herself, inventing fantasy worlds and warbling in her room. She also suffered from dyslexia and anxiety, and poured her frustrations into songs.
At 18, Welch began writing music with her younger sister’s babysitter, Isabella Summers, who is six years older and remains Welch’s co-writer, keyboardist and best friend. They called themselves Florence Robot/Isa Machine before settling on Florence & The Machine, and recruiting the current core of the band (guitarist Robert Ackroyd, drummer Chris Hayden, bassist Mark Saunders and harpist Tom Monger). Welch dropped out of college to pursue music full time, playing London’s bars and clubs, and convinced her now-manager, a London DJ named Mairead Nash, to book her for a big industry Christmas party after she tipsily sang Nash a few bars of an Etta James ballad in a nightclub bathroom. After getting signed in 2008, Welch went to South by Southwest to play showcases and met MGMT, who brought Florence & The Machine on tour as an opening act and helped kick off the band’s first major run of shows. In the run-up to releasing its debut, Welch dyed her hair a fiery red (she’s naturally a brunette) and began to experiment with glamorous costumes. The band made its first big splash stateside performing “Dog Days Are Over” at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2010; in 2011, Welch joined such stars as Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Hudson for Aretha Franklin’s Grammy tribute.
“She’s one of the few amazing musicians who has a strong eccentric streak,” says producer Markus Dravs, who worked with Welch on How Big How Blue How Beautiful. “I would put her next to Stevie Nicks, Bjork, Kate Bush. What struck me over the years is the commitment and conviction that she has in her art. It goes beyond the songwriting into her visuals.”
Welch admits that a lot of her early costuming and theatrical flair was a sort of defense mechanism. “I did my first press shot when I was 20, and it was the first time I ever saw myself in a newspaper,” she recalls. “I was in shorts, with a goofy grin, and I was terrified. I saw that and was like, ‘No way.’ It was too raw, too exposing to be that real. And so over time, I found ways to protect myself: The hair went bright red, my eyebrows went bleached off, my clothes were completely black and goth. I had a Siouxsie Sioux phase — I looked like a kind of bat. I was always climbing the rigging, always super drunk, yelling and crowd surfing. It was my way of dealing with all the attention.”
Welch’s striking image caught the eye of fashion designers. She performed at a Chanel runway show in 2011 and even served as a muse to Mulberry — models wore red wigs for a Welch-inspired show (also in 2011). She was devastated to miss the Met Gala in May due to her foot — she had planned to wear a “gorgeous red lace dress from [Alexander] McQueen.” (The heavy boot she has to wear while healing, though, “kind of looks like a Birkenstock. So at least it’s chic.”)
But Welch increasingly feels like “there’s something about me that’s more feral and unhinged than a gown. I love gowns, I love dressing up — but there’s something about a cape or a gown that almost dictates how you will move and stand, and you feel like you have to live up to the dress.” And on How Big How Blue How Beautiful, she wanted to dig deeper. “This new album comes from a quieter place, one that is less grand and more vulnerable, and it wouldn’t feel right to try to put up walls again,” says Welch. “Although I love all that fashion stuff, it is also a way of guarding myself. I decided f— it, it was time to let it all go.”
For Welch, the break from touring in 2014 was “supposed to be when I rested and had a lovely time” writing the band’s third album. She decamped to Los Angeles with Summers. “We lived in a crazy doll’s house on a mountainside,” she says. “L.A. was all big blue skies, driving and listening to Neil Young. I got fully into L.A., the way I go full throttle with everything.” But the downtime left her at a loss. “I had kind of a breakdown and washed up a bit of a mess to the studio. I had just wore myself out.
“Without the structure of touring, you have to face your own chaos,” says Welch. “I was playing gigs nonstop since I was 21. When I was left to my own devices, I realized I was f—ing everything up. I was in and out of a relationship, in and out of drinking too much. It was like constantly picking yourself up and then dropping yourself, picking yourself up and dropping yourself. And that was exhausting.”
Florence & The Machine’s ethereal last album, Ceremonials, referenced mythology and Virginia Woolf. With this record, Welch was finally ready to tackle her personal life. She says Swift made her more comfortable putting her own experiences into song: “Taylor said that you must sing about what’s happening in your life.” (Says Swift: “She’s the most fun person to dance with at a party, but then five minutes later you find yourself sitting on the stairs with her having an in-depth conversation about love and heartbreak.”) “It’s definitely not about trying to be vindictive,” says Welch. “It’s about being honest. This could’ve been a breakup record,” she adds, presumably referring to her longtime off-and-on relationship with well-connected British event producer James Nesbitt, which was closely followed by the U.K. tabloids. “But it was much more about trying to understand myself.”
You can hear Welch honing in on this pain in the crackling recent single “What Kind of Man.” Its video shows her naked and dripping on a bathroom floor, crawling out of a crashed car and being tossed around a dingy hotel room by a surly group of men. “For that video, we were thinking about ideas of purgatory and Dante’s Inferno,” she says. “Because I was in this purgatory with this man. That push and pull thing where you are just stuck and you’re like, ‘Why do we keep doing this to each other?’ ” Welch shakes her fists, causing her jewelry to clatter. “It’s an aggressive song, but I can see my own part in the whole process. I was just as crazy as he was. People think the men in the video represent my ex-boyfriends, but they really represent a lot of different forces that weren’t working for me.”
As Welch gathers her things up to head to the SNL rehearsal — she says she really wants to stand for the performance; ultimately she sat on a stool, seemingly fighting the urge to leap up — she reflects again on her bum appendage as a metaphor: for her new rawness, her need to connect to an even wider audience on a yet more intimate level. “I don’t know why the foot break happened,” she says. “But it forced me in a way to slow down and have the same person who wrote this record to show up and sing those songs”.
I am going to end with two positive reviews for How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. I want to bring in a review from Billboard. A remarkable album that I think is up there with the very best from Florence + The Machine, I wonder how they will mark its tenth anniversary. Whether Welch will say anything about it. I remember hearing it in 2015 and loving it. It still holds such power. Every song on it leaves an impression:
“Between 2011’s Ceremonials and her new album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, however, she took a yearlong break to sort out some personal issues — the bad habits and relationship damage that are so often inflicted by years of perpetual touring. The hiatus helped her reassess her music as well. In her recent Billboard cover interview, Welch credits Taylor Swift — nobody’s idea of an art-rocker — with counseling her that she needed to draw more directly on her life for her songs. The payoff is immediately audible on How Big. It’s not a radical reformation of Welch’s style; she hasn’t stripped all the ornamentation from her cathedral of sound and become a folky confessional songwriter. But she is resorting less to abstract, lofty imagery and speaking with a more frank immediacy. There’s a confrontational edge to these songs, a dash of Chrissie Hynde pugilism to balance all that Stevie Nicks necromancy. The first lines of “Ship to Wreck,” already one of the more memorable singles of 2015, open on a scene of a body in peril — “Don’t touch the sleeping pills, they mess with my head” — and work their way through one of those painful morning-after reconstructions: “Oh, my love, remind me, what was it I did? Did I drink too much, am I losing touch, did I build a ship to wreck?” On that song and the following, equally urgent “What Kind of Man,” Welch and producer Markus Dravs (a rigorous taskmaster whom many artists, such as Coldplay and Arcade Fire, have called on when feeling at risk of a rut) have given her sound a more lean, streamlined propulsion, providing her with plenty of dynamic space to fill, as few other vocalists of her generation can do so well.
Fans of Welch’s most expansively raving anthems won’t go wanting here, however. Songs including “Queen of Peace” and “Third Eye” offer all the sky-high layered harmonies, rolling and echoing drums, and orchestral exclamation points one could desire, with horn arrangements by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp. But the intensity is relieved by sparse, restrained songs like the organ-led meditation “St. Jude” or “Long & Lost,” which, with its hovering guitar and strings and clunks of electronic percussion, evokes the dreamy swells of mid-1990s Kate Bush B-sides, or maybe even Cocteau Twins. The only letdown is closer “Mother,” on which Paul Epworth takes over production and comes up with a spiky jam that’s alternately meandering and overly melodramatic.
No matter the mood and tempo, though, the Florence & The Machine heard on How Big How Blue How Beautiful is a newly self-aware one. It shows a different kind of mastery by allowing for a different kind of vulnerability, an especially delicate balancing act for a young woman in pop music. “It’s hard to see it when you’re in it,” Welch sings on “Caught.” Perhaps, but by making that extra stretch for perspective, an artist can create songs that help listeners work out their own tangles and take measure of their own traps. In other words, the songs that people return to”.
I will finish off with a review from The Independent. They discussed an album where Florence Welch was confronting her demons in, and I agree, a frank manner. One of her most personal and moving albums. I am not sure if there is an anniversary reissue of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful but I hope it is marked in some fashion. A tremendous listen from one of our best acts:
“Before recording How Big How Blue How Beautiful, Florence Welch opted for a sabbatical year off – during which, she claims, she experienced “a bit of a nervous breakdown”.
The results of that stressful period are evident throughout the album: compared to the fanciful fantasy preoccupations of previous releases – especially the death and water fixations of Ceremonials – this is Welch facing up to reality, confronting her emotional demons in a frank manner.
In this she’s helped by heavyweight new producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay), whose skill in rendering big, bombastic arrangements with clarity is well matched with the Machine’s grandiose sound.
Dravs apparently forbade her to write any more songs about water – yet the opening track “Ship to Wreck” breaks that rule with panache, Welch wielding various maritime metaphors for insomniac confusion as she admits she “can’t help but pull the earth around me to make my bed”, a vivid notion whose darkness is echoed in the image of “trying to cross a canyon with a broken limb” in the single “What Kind of Man”.
It’s the first of a string of songs dealing directly or tangentially with a difficult relationship. Here, and in “Queen of Peace”, an ethereal, furtive introduction billows into a huge arrangement of crunching rock band beat further inflated by horns.
The emotional turmoil is better served by the more introspective balladry of “Various Storms and Saints” and “Long and Lost”, where heartbreak is more subtly suggested through ambient background textures, wisps of synthesiser, strings and vibrato guitar. The vaunting, anthemic approach, meanwhile, is much better suited to the assertive messages of “Third Eye” and “Delilah”, whose revival-meeting feel is strongly reminiscent of Arcade Fire. But perhaps the most touching performance here is the lost-cause elegy “St Jude”, where she finally reaches the realisation “Maybe I have always been more comfortable in chaos?”.
On 29th May, we mark ten years of Florence + The Machine’s How Big, How Blue,. How Beautiful. A record that was a commercial and critical success, the group took to the Pyramid Stage shortly after its release and stormed it. Ten years on and I still have very warm memories of this album. It is an absolute gem…
YOU all should hear.