She’s got the love

A look at the life of Florence + the Machine frontwoman and SE5 local Florence Welch

BY LUKE G WILLIAMS

As a consistent evangelist for the joys of Camberwell, few can match the voluble enthusiasm and advocacy of singer-songwriter Florence Welch, the charismatic frontwoman of pop giants Florence + the Machine.

Born in King’s College Hospital on 28 August 1986, Florence Leontine Mary Welch is the daughter of advertising executive Nick Russell Welch and Harvard-educated New York art historian Evelyn.

Welch was – to use her own description – a “highly imaginative and fearful child” who admitted that she later “learned ways to manage that terror – drink, drugs, controlling food”.

The youthful Florence’s love of singing and performing was encouraged from an early age by both her parents, as well as by her paternal grandmother Cybil Welch, who later served as the inspiration for several tracks on Florence + the Machine’s smash-hit debut album Lungs, which was released in 2009.

Growing up, Welch developed a fascination with the gothic and the macabre and what she termed “the beautiful and the sinister”; she drew crosses on her bed to protect herself from the werewolves and vampires she was convinced were real and would spend weeks at a time focused on imaginative play as “a witch, or a fairy warrior, living in trees”.

Welch’s parents divorced when she was 13 and her mother subsequently remarried professor Peter Openshaw, a renowned immunologist who was also the family’s next-door neighbour. As Welch adjusted to being part of a new step-family, she immersed herself in the music of Hole, Green Day, Nirvana, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and the Velvet Underground among others, attending as many gigs as she could and developing a penchant for crowd-surfing “or doing handstands up against the wall”.

Despite being diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia, Welch excelled academically at Alleyn’s school in Dulwich, achieving a string of As in her GCSEs and A-levels, before going on to study illustration at Camberwell College of Arts while also working at local pub the Old Dispensary, where this writer remembers well her sunny disposition, as well as her competence at pouring a pint.

“I was just bumming around Camberwell working at a bar and thought that I should start doing something with life,” she later commented of those days.

Music remained Welch’s passion and her voice and style were evolving fast – early bands she fronted included the intriguingly named Toxic Cockroaches and Ashok and she soon decided to drop out of art school to pursue a musical career, intending to return 12 months later if things didn’t work out. “I wanted to see where the music would go… then it started going somewhere so [I] never went back,” she later reflected.

In December 2006, Welch cornered well-connected indie music maestro Mairead Nash at a party. Nash subsequently became her manager and not long after Florence + the Machine were born, evolving from a previous band called Florence Machine/Isa Machine, which Welch had formed with her good friend Isabella Summers.

Keyboardist Summers remained a part of the new band, while there were further additions to the line-up in the form of Rob Ackroyd on guitar, Tom Monger on the harp, Chris Hayden

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on drums and percussion and Mark Saunders on bass.

Florence + the Machine’s debut album Lungs was a worldwide smash, staying in the top 40 of the UK album charts for 65 consecutive weeks and snaffling a Brit award for best British album. It also made the top 10 in the United States, and would go on to sell more than three million copies worldwide.

The sound that Florence + the Machine produced was eclectic and highly original – defying categorisation at every turn and fusing elements of rock, soul, pop, folk and baroque among other genres. Welch’s vision was as unique as it was arresting; she described Lungs as “a wave of sound that would envelop, something that was soaring, slightly church-like and then doom-like”.

As a frontwoman, Welch’s eccentric charisma inevitably saw her compared to other musical icons of the past, although truth be told, she was – and remains – a new, vital and overwhelmingly original artistic voice.

Leading American music website AllMusic stated of Welch and Lungs: “With an arsenal of weaponry that included the daring musicality of Kate Bush, the fearless delivery of Sinéad O’Connor, and the dark, unhinged vulnerability of Fiona Apple, the London native crafted a debut that not only lived up to the machine-gun spray of buzz that heralded her arrival, but easily surpassed it.”

Meanwhile, in the estimation of the ever-entertaining Rolling Stone magazine, the experience of listening to Welch sing was akin to “being chased through a moonless night by a sexy moor witch”.

Subsequent albums Ceremonials (2011), How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015), High as Hope (2018) and Dance Fever (2022), proved that Florence + the Machine were no flash in the pan, while also solidifying

Welch’s status as a post-millennial musical icon.

In 2015, after Dave Grohl broke his leg, forcing Foo Fighters to pull out of headlining the Glastonbury Festival, Florence + the Machine stepped in and – as a tribute to Grohl – Welch included a cover of his iconic song Times Like These as part of her Glastonbury set, a gesture whose kindness reduced the former Nirvana drummer to tears. It was the sort of human touch for which Welch is loved and adored by her many fans.

For Camberwellians and die-hard south Londoners, Welch’s devotion to her local area is also part of her unique charm. Florence + the Machine’s fourth album – 2018’s High as Hope – was an unashamed love letter to Camberwell and south London, peppered as it was with references to both. Camberwell was directly referenced in the song Grace, which Welch wrote in tribute to her younger sister, and sang: “I don’t think it would be too long before I was drunk in Camberwell again”.

Meanwhile, in the track South London Forever, Welch referenced an iconic Camberwell pub in the immortal lyric “young and drunk and stumbling in the street, outside the Joiners Arms like foals unsteady on their feet”. It’s not the only time that Welch has referenced her beloved Joiners Arms – in a July 2018 interview with the Evening Standard she nominated the legendary boozer as her favourite pub, declaring: “The Joiners Arms in Camberwell was where the art students always used to put on club nights. That’s where I got a lot of my first experiences of music. It’s also where I first fell in love.”

The same month, as part of the pre-launch publicity blitz for High as Hope, Florence + the Machine played a memorable gig at the Joiners for an intimate audience of around 100. The event was only announced earlier the same day, with fans admitted on a first-come, first-served basis to the limited capacity venue and the proceeds from ticket sales being donated to local charity South London Cares.

With potent incense burning around the pub and buckets of flowers decorating the stage, the sense that Welch was revelling in being “at home” in Camberwell was palpable.

In between songs she entertained the crowd with anecdotes about growing up in the local area.

Concluding the gig with a rapturously received rendition of South London Forever and her iconic hit Dog Days Are Over, Welch told the crowd proudly: “After 10 years I’ve finally made it – I got to play the Joiners Arms!”

See what I mean? Camberwell through and through!