PROLOGUE

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (depending on how far away from South London you live) there was a thoughtful, dark-haired little girl called Florence, who dreamed of being a princess. A princess with a difference, but a princess nonetheless. She could even do a mean Lady Diana impersonation on request, so you couldn’t say she hadn’t done her research.

Florence was slight, pale and shy – mostly – but she had a powerful voice with a life of its own. She sang every day to her school friends, whether they liked it or not. Sometimes they would tell her to shut up. She probably couldn’t hear them.

Florence was a dreamer, she scribbled poems and lyrics into library books as the inspiration struck, dyed her hair pre-Raphaelite red, read Grimms’ fairy tales, played in the woods and made up fantastical games, losing herself in her florid imagination, the same imagination that would produce the demons and terrors that would regularly wake her up at night. The only way to transcend them would be singing, and that would never change.

And she’d attain her dream – little did she know that her future held thrilling secrets and golden promises the like of which she could never have anticipated. Admittedly, the only way in England to become a real princess at the time of writing is to try to get hitched to Prince Harry, but Florence did something arguably rather better than that, becoming as she would a high priestess of the festival stage, a conquering queen of pop music, an undisputed style goddess. Yes, one day the little girl who warbled in the corridors of her school in front of a smattering of oft-unimpressed classmates (“It just came out of my mouth,” she later protests, “and there were good acoustics”) would share that voice with thousands of people in arenas, stadiums, fields. They would sing her words back to her, words that would articulate how they felt, and they would sway as one to her music, like a multicoloured and somewhat inebriated field of corn.

All she needed now to complete the picture was a handsome prince. Even a Buttons … But her new life, spent scattering sparkling sounds and wistful words hither and thither, demanded sacrifices she’d never contemplated. The loneliness of the hotel room far from home, Florence would later find, would be the most hollow kind of solitude, and she felt it intensely. But these intense feelings, the terrors and the creeping dread at the dead of night that had plagued her since childhood, would simply lead to more words that would touch the hearts of millions who could relate to her gloom (albeit for different reasons; if there were millions of hugely successful pop princesses it would probably take away the gloss) and would be uplifted and exhilarated in turn by the transcendence of her songs. The Kate Bush of the digital generation, the gloriously witchy Stevie Nicks of the 21st century, these descriptions of the heroine of this book would never appear in any of Grimms’ fairy tales. But they appear in her own fairy tale, which is just as curious and romantic, just as dark and, if you love Florence, which, if you’re reading this now, I’m hoping you do, every bit as engaging. (And don’t worry, I won’t actually continue writing it as a fairy tale; that could get irritating.)

So with a handful of glitter, a swirl of chiffon, a glass-shattering holler and several strange cocktails mixed with a silvery tear or two, let’s stage-dive into the story of Florence + The Machine and celebrate the fiery damsel who rocked the world.

CHAPTER ONE

Yes, Florence Leontine Mary Welch’s name isn’t ‘jazzy’ enough apparently, and the more traditional names ‘Sarah’ and ‘Beth’ are deemed infinitely more exciting. When Florence – known as Leontine to her sister Grace – said she ‘wanted something really jazzy’, there must have been at least a few people expecting her to continue this sentence with ‘like Crazylegs Gillespie’ or ‘Snakehips Muldoon’. Now those are jazzy names. But still, to each his or her own. And as always, life always seems more tempting on the other side of the fence. But it was on this side of the fence, the Welch side, that was, by most people’s standards, if not ‘jazzy’, then bohemian, curious, cultured, comfortably chaotic, enviably interesting.

Florence, named after a great-aunt rather than the Italian city, was born to high-flying parents: Evelyn, a New York academic and later professor of Renaissance Studies, a woman so bright that her younger daughter, Grace, would boast to schoolfriends that her mother had ‘read the dictionary back to front’, and Nick, a frustrated performer himself with a mighty record collection who brought ‘a rock ‘n’ roll element to the family mix’, having lived in a West End squat and hung out with Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band the 101ers. Nick, of course, is now better known as the advertising executive who’d, no doubt among other things, invented the ‘can you feel the bubbles melt?’ slogan for Aero chocolate, but the influence of his record collection (the Ramones, the Incredible String Band, Fleetwood Mac) on Florence during her childhood cannot be underestimated. He now manages an ‘alternative’ campsite near well-to-do Tunbridge Wells. Strummer would have been proud.

The hifalutin family connections don’t stop there: Florence’s uncle is the satirist Craig Brown, while her paternal grandfather was former Daily Telegraph deputy editor and Daily Mail parliamentary sketch-writer Colin Welch. Those are some smart, go-getting genes right there. Colin would also contribute some wild-card records to what would become Florence’s own record collection, not least the soundtrack to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It had, as you might imagine, something of an effect on Florence.

“I think one of my first crushes when I was about 10 was Richard O’Brien, in suspenders,” she said. “I don’t know what that says about me. My ideal man would be like a photo-fit of Buddy Holly, Jarvis Cocker, Richard O’Brien and David Bowie. That would be one weird-looking man.” Indeed it would. Especially if you incorporated the suspenders into that picture.

But The Rocky Horror Picture Show was also an early influence in a different way: from repeatedly warbling along to the tracks, Florence maintains she taught herself to sing. Not that hearing Florence belt out a few tunes around the house was a particularly rare thing before Rocky Horror came into her life. As a toddler she adored watching musicals and would sing all of the songs in the bathtub “with a red flannel on my head”! And why not?

But back to her parents, it’s clear that Evelyn was always the realist, “so clever it’s mental”, according to Florence, while Nick would be a perennial dreamer. As a result, Florence was left, as only she could put it, “dreaming in reality”. Between Nick and Evelyn, you had all the ingredients for a charismatic child who would be at home in front of an audience, not just because of Nick’s rock ‘n’ roll sensibilities but thanks to Evelyn, who, while not a performer, could cast a spell over a hall packed with students with her passionate, mesmerising lectures about art history.

“When she gets on stage to give a lecture she becomes this heightened version of herself. She can suddenly hold the whole room rapt,” Florence would muse. “I think that’s where it comes from. I aspire to something like that, but with music.” Watching her mother give lectures in later years would have a huge effect on Florence, and this and the subsequent ‘educational’ family trips to the gothic churches of Italy planted a love of Renaissance art, and the immortal themes within it – sex, death, love, violence – firmly in her heart. (Her favourite painting was of St Agatha: “this saint who had her breasts cut off and she’s holding them on a plate”.) So the passions of her mother would be passed down to Florence. She saw her father as glamorous and exciting, and always wanted to impress him, but, in Florence’s words, “It’s my mum who had the really rock ‘n’ roll life, and she’s really down to earth and academic.”

Evelyn left New York as a young woman, pre-children, finding England more of an appropriate fit. Saying that, she’d also been connected to Andy Warhol’s Factory clique and was a regular, alongside her clearly incredibly groovy father and brother, at the iconic seventies New York disco Studio 54, beloved by stars including Michael Jackson, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Cher, Salvador Dali and Debbie Harry to name but a few. Florence and her siblings would grow up listening to stories told by her godmother about how, when Evelyn and Nick were first married and staying in New York City with Evelyn’s family, they would be called by name to the front of the queue by none other than Warhol himself, who was, Florence has revealed “in love with my uncle, but in his weird, platonic, ‘I just wanna draw you’ way. The lifestyle was too much of a whirlwind for my mum and she left America.”

“My mum doesn’t really talk about it,” says Florence. “I don’t think she cares that much. She was always more interested in the Renaissance than she was about Studio 54.”

Born in Rotterdam, Holland, on August 28, 1986, baby Florence would arrive home for the first time – home being Camberwell, South London (the place that inspired the name ‘Camberwell carrot’ as a sobriquet for ‘enormous spliff’) – in the height of a sticky English summer. To put it into some kind of cultural context, her birth came just days after the 1986 Notting Hill Carnival, and not long after Chris De Burgh’s quivery-vocalled ‘Lady In Red’ stormed the UK charts, so one could argue that this fateful year which birthed both Florence and this soft-rock hit was simultaneously a good and bad year for British music.

Nick was keen to instil his musical tastes into his new daughter; even in her early months he attempted to get her to sleep by eschewing Brahms’ Lullaby and trying some of his records out on her instead: “Florence, always a difficult sleeper, was often encouraged to nod off by being wheeled around the sitting room in a pushchair to the accompaniment of loud music,” he chortled. “Her earliest subliminal influences include the Smiths, whom she found highly soporific, and Syd Barrett, less so.” Whatever works, Nick, whatever works.

Four years later, Florence’s sister, Grace, would arrive, and the pair became inseparable companions, as they still are. The two imaginative little girls both loved to indulge in flights of fancy, romantic nostalgia (inspired by what they were reading or which reruns were on daytime TV) and creativity, making dollhouses out of cereal boxes and pretending to be the characters in Little House On The Prairie, which involved an impromptu remodelling of their bedroom. However the novelty didn’t last long …

“We made our bunk beds into the house and the whole rest of our room into the prairie,” Florence reminisced. “There was a towel river and fields of corn made from books. It was really boring actually because the only game we could play was: go out, plough, come home, cook, fish in the towel river …”

When they weren’t playing ‘let’s pretend’ at home, Florence would be dabbling in magic and accessing her inner witch (all girls have got one), slicking on purple lipstick and dyeing her hair black (she’d already dyed it red when she was 10 – nothing to do with the pre-Raphaelites, rather because she was “obsessed with Rogue from the X Men”). Her witchy preoccupations led her to secretly make candlelit shrines in her bedroom and try to bewitch boys from afar. “I tried to cast spells to make the boy in the next class fall in love with me. I don’t think he did.”

Or, if she was dragged out on a shopping trip, she’d be doing her other favourite thing: dancing in supermarkets. It was an activity that Florence took to with great aplomb, although her sister needed a little more encouragement, to say the least.

“[The supermarket is] such a strange place because no one will look at you,” Florence said. “Everything has such order and everyone is so focused on what they’re doing that no one ever pays attention to you spinning and dancing around.”

Grace Welch: “I remember her dragging me and running down the aisles. My dad had to get them to call out, ‘Would Grace and Florence Welch please come to the front of the store?’ That’s one of my earliest memories of being really humiliated.”

London life seemed to suit the growing Welch family – brother JJ would arrive a few years later – and the Europhile matriarch of this colourful brood was in her element in London. However, Nick had been rather more thrilled by the glamour and glittering nightlife of New York. When they were first married, he was excited by the prospect of living in America and, according to Florence, when he discovered Evelyn’s enviable connections he thought, “OK, this is going to be fun …”

However, despite staying in the ramshackle and often distinctly unglittering London of Thatcher’s eighties, there would be plenty of opportunities to escape to the sandy haven of Long Island, where Evelyn’s parents lived, and enjoy a rather more family-friendly version of what New York City had to offer. … even if most of Florence’s early memories of being on Long Island were rather, well, grey … And there was a ghost house, naturally. This is a book about Florence; if there wasn’t a ghost house within the first few pages you’d surely be wondering what was going on …

“I remember these grey beaches with this spiky seaweed that hurt your feet and stretches of grey coast with this huge abandoned grey house in the distance,” Florence recalled. “It was a massive mansion, one of those big wooden ones. But it was a ghost house. We had a house on the beach miles down, but you could see, well, this big grey house with shutters. It was incredible. And that sensation of the pain from walking on spiky seaweed …”

Florence might well have had an American passport as well as a British one, but at her core she was as English as a cream tea: porcelain-skinned and green-eyed, softly spoken, elemental and emotional with an unquenchable spark of fire in her heart. Admittedly these words don’t always spring to mind when English people are being described these days – drunk, boorish and lairy tend to be more widespread – but if you were looking for the quintessential English rose, you only had to look at the young Florence, as in touch with nature as a folksong heroine, as fascinated by the curious romanticism of junk-shop Victoriana as she was the vivid melancholia of the pre-Raphaelites. And yes, when she got a little older, occasionally drunk too. And of course, always singing, whether drunk or not. Yes, the singing, believe it or not, could be a bone of contention. “It annoyed my family so much because it was constant,” Florence would later confess, and her father, Nick, cheerfully admits that many was the time he begged his daughter to “put a sock in it”. Well, don’t blame her. Apparently it’s all God’s fault …

Florence was never particularly religious, although she has always been fascinated by the high drama and “smoke and gold” of Catholicism (she was deeply disappointed when she was told by her father that she was actually C of E). Either way, the first music that truly inspired her at a young age would be the hymns that she sang at school, first at the historic, expensive Thomas’ London Day School in Battersea in South West London, and later at the exclusive Alleyn’s – school motto ‘God’s Gift’ – in leafy, middle-class Dulwich, a South London suburb. Posh? Relatively speaking, yes, although naturally Florence denies this hotly, insisting, “It’s not like I have tea with the Queen.”

Hard as it may be to imagine now, with her endlessly long limbs, slender physique and style-icon status, Florence has described herself as a “short, chubby” kid at school and not at all ‘cool’. What’s more, the logistical side of school life could often be tricky, particularly as Florence is dyspraxic, which meant coordination and organisation could be a challenge, leading to her feeling self-conscious and ‘different’ to everybody else: “My mum describes it as not thinking in the most linear way. I’m not very logical. I always go for the most extreme option. I take things and turn them into something that perhaps they aren’t.”

So she particularly looked forward to the daily escape that hymn-singing in assembly could bring. These spiritual songs, full of dark warnings or transcendent messages that would often be lost in the mixed-up din of school-age voices, sparked Florence’s curiosity, and the communal choral-singing experience would be one she would later repeat in her own music. From the first time she opened her hymn book to sing, flanked by her jostling school-mates, little Florence, who was normally so quiet, would throw her body and soul into it, losing herself in the music.

“Singing takes over your whole body and your brain,” she said. “It’s like coming back from a weird place every time you stop. I remember singing hymns at school and people in front of me turning around and looking at me funny; I must have been singing loudly.” We can only hope she wasn’t inspired to attempt one of her now trademark crowd surfs. Anyway, hymns. You were saying?

“It’s nice to mix the mundane and the magical, the irrelevant with the huge themes. Sex, love, death, marriage, guilt – mix that with seeing a huge sky or going for a walk or turning the page of a book. Living is dealing with the everyday and the notion that you’re going to die.”

Big themes indeed, and themes that would stay in her heart, informing her creative decisions and inspiring her art, music and lyrics in years to come. School plays would also give Florence an outlet for her raw, powerful young voice. During her early years at Thomas’ Day School she was in her element on stage in the Great Hall, which had been converted into a theatre. No damp Portakabins or giving your best Virgin Mary portrayal amid the PE apparatus here. What’s more these performances gave her something to channel her musical energies into, because by the age of seven she already had what she described as “musical Tourette’s” …

CHAPTER TWO

At least Florence was safe from criticism when she was giving her all onstage, either in the choir or in a play. Her paternal grandmother in particular would be rapt by her performances, dabbing away her tears as she watched her beloved first grandchild shine onstage. Not that it would be particularly unusual for a grandmother to be proud, of course, but Florence already had a voice that cut straight to the quick in an astonishing, preternatural way, and she loved to encourage her grandchild with frequent trips to musicals – and yearly pilgrimages to see Oliver! at Christmas time. “There was never any chance of going to see a different one,” laughs Florence. “It was always Oliver!.

“My English grandmother was very interested in me performing and singing. She would always make me sing at Christmasses. I actually sang at her funeral and at my other grandmother’s funeral.”

Florence’s father, Nick, was also stunned by his daughter’s school performances, and he can pinpoint the very moment he realised that what he was feeling was more than just paternal pride – he was discovering his little girl was seriously gifted. “It happened during a performance of Bugsy Malone. Florence was 10 or 11 and she was playing the part of Blousey Brown,” he remembered.

“Parents are usually interested only in their own offspring, but when Florence sang, the whole audience was engaged. I remember thinking: ‘Cripes, she’s got a voice – this is serious.’ It wasn’t just her perfect pitch, she had the essence of phrasing and timing which makes a good singer great.”

Her eye-opening musical triumph led Nick to persuade her to sing, in his words, a “rather obscure and difficult” Gilbert & Sullivan song at the memorial service for his father, Colin Welch, at the journalists’ church, St Bride’s, off London’s Fleet Street in 1997.

“The great and good of Fleet Street were there,” remembers Nick. “Florence sang brilliantly in front of scores of weeping crumblies.”

Florence had become the go-to singer for her grandparents’ funerals, which would occur painfully close together (her maternal grandmother, an art historian like Evelyn, would later take her own life when Florence was just 14). It’s little wonder, then, that Florence claims her fascination with death, doom and rebirth comes from these early, formative experiences of ageing, deterioration and demise, all experiences that were occurring as Florence, conversely, was blossoming into a young woman, growing, flourishing, very much alive, even if she did nearly drown herself several times. Don’t worry, she doesn’t have an Ophelia complex, even though she has referenced the pre-Raphaelite image of Hamlet’s tragically unhinged girlfriend in a subsequent music video. This, on the other hand, was merely because of her frequent attempts to breathe under water like a mermaid. Obviously. But, as she sadly discovered, no gills, no dice.

“I thought I could breathe underwater when I was a kid. Maybe it was a dream I had but I was convinced that it had happened once. So, every time I went to the local swimming pool, I would always nearly drown myself trying to make it happen again.

“I wanted to be a mermaid: when you’re in the water everything’s graceful. My local swimming pool was the Latchmere, that’s where I learned to swim, the pool that the Maccabees wrote about. I spent so much time at the bottom trying to breathe underwater. I was always going down to the ocean and making offerings to the sea, rocks and things.” Later, of course, she would get to be a mermaid in a safe environment, when Karl Lagerfeld invited her to sing at a sea-themed Chanel runway show in 2011. She would even have her very own giant clam shell to emerge from. But all that was to come, little did she know. All she was thinking about at this point was getting through school – or dodging it altogether.

Once Florence was installed at the visually imposing, wood-panelled Alleyn’s school (alongside fellow colleagues including Jack Peñate) her talents would continue to flourish, thanks to the focus the school gave to the arts, art and music in particular. It costs thousands of pounds per term to attend Alleyn’s, but while Florence was something of a dreamer during class, and often an absentee (she admitted she would bunk off and, hold on to your hats, sneak off to the library), it is fair to say she got her money’s worth when she was present and engaged: singing, painting and reading in the mostly supportive atmosphere that the school provided, even if she did sometimes get told off when she appeared to be less than riveted during lessons.

“I’m a bit scatty, unfocused – these are things that have been told to me, mainly at school: I’m undriven, don’t concentrate, I have a bad memory … but the one thing I always remember is songs. That’s why I love making music.” She was in the right place for that, even if she didn’t always turn up to make the most of it, preferring to climb over the walls and escape to the park or the surrounding fields to climb trees or, specifically, run to the charms of the mulberry tree in her local park, a place that felt magical and safe. “I had that weird sense of excitement about being hidden and out of reach,” she said. “I read a lot, and that probably has informed my lyrical style: Emily Dickinson, Raymond Carver. I read a lot of ghost stories growing up, a lot of Victorian horror. I got really obsessed with Jack The Ripper.”

Childhood, to Florence, was a “terrifying” place to be – probably at least in part because of her macabre reading material – but the external “terrors” and pressures would be exactly the factors that would entice her into other worlds. She would later reflect that, being such a “scared kid”, she now feels that, through her career, she’s enjoying a renaissance of her childhood, the freedom, the sense of imagination but without the fear or, at least, with different fears.

“I was quite absent, mentally as well as most of the time physically. I was imaginative, a bit of a dreamer,” she revealed. “I remember being completely involved in imaginary games that would last for days, weeks. It was always magic, sorcery, living in trees. Living in imaginary worlds. I don’t think I’ve lost that. It’s just now I’m doing it as a job.”

But when she was present at school, she could still throw herself into music – Alleyn’s certainly had that covered. “The music department had two floors of classrooms,” remembers Ellie Emptage, a former Alleyn’s student who attended the school at the same time as Florence. “It had big spaces for choirs and orchestras to rehearse and smaller one-on-one teaching rooms; you could use these on your lunch break to play around with the instruments.

“The main music teachers were Miss Connelly and Miss Gardner. Miss Connelly was very into the Beatles and in the first year you were made to audition for her choir, which was called Korale. Florence was in that. I remember she was given solos – one of the things I remember is her singing the opening part to ‘The Circle Of Life’ from The Lion King, and that she had a really big voice for her age.”

The high-ceilinged, messy and heavily turps-scented art department would also be a refuge to Florence, and was no doubt the part of the school that nurtured that side of her that longed to roll up her sleeves and craft miniature people and strange, romantic and flower-strewn installations that would later inform her stage designs.

“Mr Sutton was head of art,” recalls Ellie. “He would always have music on in there and wander around teaching with a cup of tea. It was always really relaxed. There was also a resource room with huge freezers where there were dead rabbits and fish you could paint.” Oh so Florence.

When not flooring everyone present with her pipes and her paintings, Florence’s obsessive love of retreating into imaginary worlds would, of course, lead her to the library. When Florence joined the school this once poky space was extended and re-opened by the then poet laureate Andrew Motion, much to the delight of the more bookish students present.

It was there that Florence would escape and dream, indulging in her love of gothic Victorian murder mysteries and poring over poetry, often making up her own. When the mood took her, she’d furtively scribble nascent lyrics and musings into the pages of some of the library books there when the librarian, the stern Mrs Knowles, wasn’t looking. One of the most memorable things about Mrs Knowles was that she wore huge glasses and spent much of her time blinking rapidly behind them, and evidently these glasses were powerful enough for her to spot Florence thoughtfully notating her books in the comfort of the library … “I got in real trouble for writing lyrics in school library books,” Florence later chuckled. “If anyone at my old school has a look there might be some books there with lyrics in!”

Even now, Florence’s lyrics are scribbled down on whatever paper happens to be at hand and, indeed, Florence’s first-ever song was written in a school book when she was just 13. On the cusp of adolescence, with the swirl of emotions and angst that that can bring, Florence only had one thing on her mind when it came to songwriting. Love or, more specifically, love gone wrong. “Flowers dying rather than blossoming …

“My first songs were about imaginary break-ups. I’d never even had a boyfriend and it was all very flowery and poetic,” she said. “Like: ‘And the tears from the trees/Fall like raindrops/On my pain” or ‘There’s a rose on the table/It’s the last thing you gave me/And it’s DEAD!’ I guess I’m still melodramatic, but now it’s about real experiences.”

However, when Florence did experience her first tentative kiss, it was on a trampoline, which perhaps didn’t fit with her doom-laden lyrical sensibilities … Never mind ‘Kiss With A Fist’, the title of her first proper song, this would have been more a case of ‘kiss with clashing teeth’ …

For any girl, approaching your teenage years is a turning point. You are leaving childish things behind. You are becoming more self-conscious, more aware and at the same time more confused. And most importantly, you suddenly see boys (smelly, rude, slugs, snails and all that) in a completely different light. Which means you want them to notice you. Which means you have to customise your boring old school uniform into something rather racier.

Alleyn’s, which recommends parents of students to purchase uniforms from the swanky Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square, insisted on dark navy knee-length skirts or trousers. Well, knee-length, schmee-length. Where there’s gaffer tape, there’s hope, as any self-respecting rock ‘n’ roll roadie knows. It probably wasn’t intended for use by schoolgirls trying to look cool, however.

“We found ways of adapting our uniforms,” said Florence. “I got in a lot of trouble from my stepfather for using his duct tape to tape up my school skirt. So the inside of my skirt was done up with electrical tape. Very short.” Bad Flo.

But there were other changes in Florence’s life at this sensitive age, and not just the usual, hormones-racing kind, but changes within the family that would shake their foundations. Evelyn and Nick were splitting up. What made this even more complicated, although ultimately quite handy, was that Evelyn’s new man was in fact their neighbour. This new romance saw Evelyn and Florence move into a house just four doors away, and not only did Florence gain a stepfather, she gained three step-siblings too – and she already had one stepbrother, Nick, one year her senior, on her father’s side. There was Maddie, five years younger than Florence, Sam, the oldest stepbrother (two years older), and John (one year older). So, Florence was suddenly demoted to ‘middle child’ status. “Talk to a shrink about that one,” she quipped ruefully in later years.

It was a recipe for trouble, even though she’d always known and liked her new clan growing up. Playing happy families was a different story, not least because each family would feel that “their traditions were being stomped on by the other”.

“I hated it. It was a nightmare. We didn’t really fit. We’d all known each other since we were little and we’d been friends but then when we sort of became siblings, it was very difficult.

“I enjoy that we have a big family now, and at Christmas there are six of us and we irritate the piss out of each other. It sort of backfired on my parents, because we ended up getting along so well that we became not ‘us versus each other’ but ‘us versus them’.”

At the time, Florence, who had just reached puberty, was “incredibly angry. Difficult, moody, no longer a child.” But she gives credit to her mother, Evelyn, who had the sense of perspective and the patience to hold out for her brood to come together into what Florence now describes as “an incredible unit”.

However, none of the kids seemed to share this foresight, and this strange, multifarious new domestic arrangement left Florence feeling in need of a more stable, even more puritanical, innocent lifestyle. She would later admit that she had already sensed the tension between her parents before the split, and her unsettled, apprehensive feelings left her longing to “live in a log cabin, read the Bible and drink fresh milk”. Again with the Little House On The Prairie fantasy. But that was not to be. Rather she would be living in a house in Camberwell crammed with teenagers, reading fashion magazines and penny dreadful-style horror stories, swooning over pictures of Jarvis Cocker and drinking cups of tea.

“When you’re growing up, everything’s very cut and dried, right and wrong,” Florence mused. “But as you get older, you make mistakes yourself and learn to be less morally prescriptive. I’m very non-judgmental when it comes to relationships now.”

All the same, the subsequent divorce of her beloved parents was hard to process, and during those difficult early years of adjusting to her new family, while her father was still just a few yards away, Florence would retreat to her bedroom and dance, read, and listen to the radio and her records. She’d already rifled through her father’s vinyl collection, kept safely in a treasure chest of a trunk which was imbued with the evocative smell of the records inside, and was so strong she could dance on top of it. (She wasn’t quite so taken with her mum’s favourite records: “My mum only listened to Tom Jones and the Monkees …”)

After all this training from Nick, it was only a matter of time until Florence started building up a collection of her own, albeit with donations from other family members. It was shaping up to be quite an array of oddities too: amid her dad’s Incredible String Band discs and her grandfather’s contributions of Harry Nilsson and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, she also proudly included her first-ever music purchase – a cassette of the Spice Girls. “I know the whole rap! ‘So here’s the story from A to Z …’ Posh and Ginger were my favourites!” Her tastes were catholic and she soon followed up this purchase with ‘My Name Is’ by Eminem.

“It was funny performing on the same stage as him at the VMAs,” she would reflect later. “I wanted to find it so he could sign it for me! I was also really obsessed with Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill; me and all my friends were obsessed with it at school.”

Florence also took solace in the cracked, emotional vocal style of the tragic sixties blues-rock singer Janis Joplin, who would later influence Florence’s own freewheeling stage persona. “She was so unrestrained, so free, and she wasn’t afraid to wail,” she said. “Her connection with the audience was really important. It seems to me the suffering and intensity of her performance go hand in hand.”

“I think that throughout history there has been something really intoxicating about female performers. I know from having watched and being really inspired by them. That strength and fragility in one package, which I think is wonderful, going all the way back to Ma Rainey and early blues singers.”

“Billie Holiday predates a lot of other artists in my life,” Florence continues. “When I was much younger – 11, 12 – I was listening to Billie Holiday records in my room on my own, with a wine glass full of orange juice, already pretending to be a sort of tortured mistress of blues, wafting around my bedroom.

“Her voice was just incredible. Her whole manner of perfoming was very restrained. So cool. Completely the antithesis of Janis Joplin, but had that same thing – the emotion she was able to create through singing.”

Another female artist Florence revered was Goldfrapp singer Alison Goldfrapp. She was tall, unearthly and glitzy, and she had a voice and talent that soared. Florence loved the strange sounds she created, and was moved to imitate her as best she could. Albeit with slightly different props to those that Alison Goldfrapp tended to use …

“I remember standing on a wheelie bin trying to imitate her dance moves holding a broom – yes, this is classy!” Florence laughed. “The broom seemed like a fun prop at the time … I was very young!”

Life could often be fraught chez Welch, “like the Brady Bunch but with a lot more swearing”, but music often came to the rescue, as Florence’s own music eventually would for other teenagers and young people who felt lost, confused or alone. But, music aside, Florence’s emerging love of fashion, and particularly vintage style, would also flourish thanks to her frequent visits to her old house where her father still lived, and where her stepmother now kept a huge and irresistible stash of antique clothes. Capes were always a big favourite with Florence, and continue to be so, as they are perfect for creating an interesting shape onstage. We’re not necessarily talking floor-length à la Rick Wakeman, more waist-length little numbers. Long and wide enough to make the wearer feel airborne anyway. “I like the idea of taking off like a bird. It’s this romantic idea that the music could literally lift me off the stage.”

So what were some of the looks she concocted as a child? Well, there was the gothic witch, of course. There was the preppy, thoughtful look: white socks, loafers, ponytail combined with “standing really still”. Then there was ‘Little Old Lady’: a combination of brogues and cardigans and ankle socks, a combo she still favours in her more casual moments to this day – brogues being a big favourite of Florence’s (at nigh on six feet tall, it’s not like she has to wear heels when off duty). Another ensemble was ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’, encompassing boys’ short trousers and blousy shirts.

“I was always straight into the fancy-dress box as a child – it’s kind of the same now, it’s that childlike element of wanting to play dress-up.” Her visually stunning Cecil Beaton scrapbook, crammed with stylish, often fantastical imagery, would also inspire and inform her unique sartorial streak, as would the female artists and TV shows that she loved.

Her new family set-up also meant that, in order not to be completely passed over, Florence would quickly have to shed her formerly shy disposition and learn to speak up and “command the room”. “That was part of where the style of singing came from, having to get people’s attention,” she said. “I learned how to control it and now what’s lucky is people are already listening and I don’t have to shout to get their attention.”

And there was yet another benefit that would help to shape the Florence we know now: she was also being exposed to even more music thanks to her two new older brothers. This would take her to places she’d never been before (at an unusually young age) and give her a fresh musical perspective, after having absorbed and memorised her father’s entire record collection … and her Spice Girls cassette, of course. She had an ulterior motive for her sudden interest in her new siblings’ favourite music, however …

“My older stepbrother was a skateboarder and I fancied all of his friends and wanted to impress them,” she laughed. “They got me really into No FX! The first gig I went to was the Voodoo Glow Skulls at the Astoria when I was 11. ‘Charlie Brown’ by the Voodoo Glow Skulls was a favourite song.”

Inspired, Florence started buying more discs with her own pocket money: ‘Dookie’ by Green Day; Nimrod, Silver Chair and No FX! records. She plunged herself into music, and was a prime target for the pioneers of the grunge revolution: Nirvana, Hole, Deftones … and she listened avidly to alternative indie radio station XFM in the car on the way home from school, a station that would later be a staunch supporter of her own music.

Little pre-teen Flo could also be seen rocking out at the metal festival Download and the Reading Festival – and Florence’s parents were far from disapproving of her new-found love of the kind of gigs that might not initially be seen as ‘little-girl friendly’. In fact, her father actively encouraged it, taking her along himself (her first festival with Nick being Womad, for any Florence-themed pub-quizzers out there).

Nick enjoyed watching her discover different bands for the first time, plus it meant he could keep an eye on her. So, while other kids might relish going to theme parks, laser quest or throwing themselves into paintballing sessions, Florence was “a little punk” who was more interested in seeing as many bands as possible on a festival bill. On her 13th birthday, a momentous day, she attended her first Reading Festival wearing pink fairy wings and a padded bra.

“[Dad] was very kind. He took me to Reading Festival about three times with my little sister, Grace, in tow, I think she was about nine, on his shoulders watching Limp Bizkit and people surfing past on plywood!” It would only be a matter of time before Florence would be doing her own surfing – no plywood required. She’d always regretted not getting stuck into the crowd surfing when she first went to punk gigs in her pre-teen years, but she would certainly be making up for it in a few years’ time.

What she did do was start her own punk band however, the Toxic Cockroaches, with her friend Mira. They were just a duo – Mira on drums and Florence on vocals and guitar, hindered only by the fact they had no guitar. And no songs.

Florence’s father, Nick, admits that he and Evelyn, who would have been separating at the time she formed her band, “probably did not pay enough attention”. Well, the band might have only lasted for “about a week” but amid the Florence fan community, the name ‘Toxic Cockroaches’ is legend.

“I remember writing the name on all of my school notebooks. We graffitied my friend’s garage because we were going to have our band’s rehearsals in there. I sprayed ‘Daniel Johns Is God’. Of Silverchair. He was God.”

The drums and vocals schtick would be one that, interestingly enough, Florence would take with her throughout her musical career, and it would later be the core of the Florence + The Machine sound. And this fledgling outfit, which never really progressed beyond being a concept, would encourage her further to escape school and embark on the life she really wanted to lead.

Florence had been witnessing how her voice could move people in powerful ways, and to hone this power, she asked her parents for singing lessons so that she could build her technique. This wasn’t about, as she says, “jumping up and saying ‘Look at me!’” This was serious, and even as a youngster, she knew she had a gift worth developing, thanks to the encouragement of her family.

“I was trying to sing like how a blues singer would, but my teacher said, ‘We’re going to do the arias’, so that’s where the gospel and the classical elements came together.”

Florence was taught to sing in French and Italian, and even tried out ‘operatics’, but at the end of each session her tutor would let her choose a song to sing. “I’d sing things like ‘I Will Always Love You’ and I was also singing Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, ‘Spooky’ by Dusty Springfield.”

The mix of styles, influences, sounds and even languages is, Florence maintains, what helped her shape her unique voice. But when it came to her performing style, well, that was wrought from something rather grittier, grimier, sparklier and boozier. By her mid-teens, Florence had dived into Camberwell’s underground art scene – and the parties, where Flo would sing, dance and drink, were something to behold. Clever as she was, Florence knew academia didn’t do it for her. But singing with a band at a squat party full of kindred spirits felt like home.

With her friend Sophie ‘Sadsack’ Hart-Walsh, a comrade who remains by her side to this day, Florence was moving on. (Hart-Walsh’s ‘Sadsack’ sobriquet, incidentally, is now tattooed on Florence’s wrist – a tattoo Flo has insisted to her mother is a transfer.)

“I had one best friend at school and we entered this world of art students and these amazing crazy parties and gigs. That’s what made me want to be in a band. By the end of school, I wasn’t really there.”

CHAPTER THREE

Florence’s parents were somewhat easygoing with their kids, and while some would be concerned about the lack of boundaries, the freedom they gave their children certainly ensured that they would live life to the full from an early age. However, this also meant that they had access to a lifestyle that might be the kind most parents would blanch at, but the “chaotic family life” that Florence would often refer to gave her a chance to “slip under the radar” and run wild.

By 14, Florence had already started drinking and partying, losing her inhibitions and consigning adolescent awkwardness to the four winds. Shy Florence had made way for crazy, elemental Florence, and while she experimented with alcohol early, and allegedly tried ecstasy when she was 16, she insists she “never progressed to anything hard” and would generally try to stay away from drugs. But she did once run through the comfortably bourgeois streets of Camberwell without any clothes on. Another later occasion saw her waking up, still drunk, on the roof of a pub wearing a Captain America costume that was spattered with paint. Life was never dull …