Florence Welch: ‘I am an extremes person. There is a part of me that’s drawn to really chaotic things’

Florence Welch’s Stockwell home perfectly channels the psychedelic, crazy-old-lady vibe of Granny Takes a Trip, the legendary boutique at the unfashionable end of King’s Road that closed its doors in 1974. Nothing about the pretty, unassuming entrance of the Georgian terraced house — ten minutes from her childhood home in Camberwell, and the street where her mother still lives — prepares you for the enchanting chaos within.

The first floor is filled with coats of every texture and hue, ball dresses (including the sparkling green Givenchy ‘dinosaur’ creation she wore to the 2013 Grammys), kimonos, feathery and furry stoles, walls devoted to shoes with huge platforms, and racks of beaded, embroidered handbags. In her bedroom on the top floor there are more kimonos and shawls, and lacy bras and knickers are strewn on every available surface. She confesses that she has only just discovered the joys of sexy lingerie.

The topsy-turvy angled walls and sloping floors give the sensation of being on the deck of a tilting ship, and the corridors are lined with art piled up on the floor. There are cabinets of curios, including a small bird’s nest, as well as empty birdcages, classical pictures from her art historian mother Evelyn’s family jostling against erotica and a framed poster of Pina Bausch. The kitchen, dominated by a large wooden table, has an old stand-up lamp at one end, with a shade made of tightly packed tawny and cream bird feathers, a collection of vinyl albums at the other.

Doors lead out into a garden, with a tree hut and a tumble of flowers. It’s overlooked by an abandoned gas works, which is what made Florence want to rent the place (she hasn’t yet found the perfect house to buy). Her study has a desk that resembles an outsider artist’s installation, barely emerging from layer upon layer of drawings, photographs and postcards from all eras meticulously, almost fetishistically, arranged; and a parlour in which a pair of low-slung slipper chairs sit by the fireplace, upholstered by an interior designer friend of her father, Nick, with a startling stripe of mismatched fabric down their centre.

The first time we met, a couple of years ago, Florence was dressed in an amazing long tube dress emblazoned with photographs of leaves, like an autumnal wood come to life. Today, at home, she is unadorned — barely any make-up, in jeans and a check shirt. She seems much more relaxed. A couple of times she breaks into song — once to demonstrate Etta James’ ‘Something’s Got a Hold on Me’, her voice swooping sweetly, which she belted out to hook her manager Mairead Nash in the ladies loo at a gig. Another time, we sing Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ — ‘So coh — oh-oh-ld, let me into your window…’ together. Yes, she did get to see the singer to whom she is often compared and describes the performance as ‘very out there. Very performance art and amazing.’

I had been warned that she was feeling tired, and her foot — broken after jumping off the stage in the US — was still painful. Florence and the Machine had been promoting their new album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful — their third — in small club shows and this was one of the first big gigs on the main stage of Coachella. ‘I was jumping on and off the stage a lot because the crowd are so far away when you are on the main stage,’ she explains. ‘You want to get to the people because it’s all about connecting and it was the last song, “Dog Days [Are Over]”, and I wanted to encourage everybody to be free and [I was] telling everyone to take their clothes off and everyone was; and Rob, my guitarist, said, “Well, you haven’t been taking anything off,” and so I did…’ (She mimes taking her top off.)

‘I still had a bra on but then I thought, “Shit, everyone at this end still has their clothes on, I’ve got to get down to these people, too,” and I jumped off the stage, quite quickly, barefoot — and I landed really heavily and I knew I’d done something but I just kept running and then I fell on my knees. It was quite dramatic: I literally just couldn’t walk any more. I managed to crawl back on stage and my security had to come and find me because I’d just curled up behind one of the speakers.

‘I’d broken my third metatarsal — which is apparently the same bone that David Beckham broke just before the World Cup in 2002.’

When we speak, she is still wearing a surgical shoe — which on her looks oddly on-trend; outdoors she is obliged to wear a big, ungainly aircast boot. At first, she was concerned that she would have to stay at home and not do shows: ‘I was pretty upset and worried about letting people down because there were all these gigs lined up… but then we just stripped it all back and did it acoustically and, actually, it’s been kind of amazing. Like talking to the audience and being so much more intimate; and this album has been so much about taking off the layers, and being honest and open and allowing myself to be vulnerable and more raw, I guess…so it’s now even more so.’

Her favourite track, she says, is ‘How Big, How Blue’, which she wrote in Los Angeles at the end of the band’s tour, with its lovely lines such as ‘Every skyline was like a kiss upon the lips’, and big, hopeful, heraldic sound. She’s very proud of the song, which ‘opened up the whole record for me, in a way. It was the beginning and the end of it.

ES magazine