Between a gin distillery and a condemned gas works, on a street of rickety Georgian terraces, you’ll find Florence Welch’s house. Hers is the one with the forgotten keys dangling from the front door. “Noooo!!!” she howls, flinging the door open to greet me and catching sight of them. “The plan was for you to come here to see how well I’m coping by myself.”
When Welch finally announced her intention to move out of her family’s south London home a few years ago, her mother insisted she stay within a five-minute cycle journey. The 28-year-old singer, fashion icon and notorious space cadet may have travelled the world and be worth an estimated £12m, but she couldn’t be trusted to survive on her own. “The general consensus was I’d have my stuff here and sleep at home, which I did for a bit last year when the boiler broke here and they found me sleeping under these fur coats.”
“Anyway, come in!” she presses on with the domestic-goddess charade. “I’m making pumpkin soup.”
Her house, which features in the music video for her latest song, Ship to Wreck, is extraordinary: narrow, wambly and crammed to bursting with curiosities. Books, birds’ nests, flowers, fabrics, records, trinkets, postcards and an old-fashioned ladies’ bike with a basket we have to pick our way over to get to the kitchen, which is carved out of wood like the interior of one of Peter Jackson’s hobbit houses. I spot a tree house in the garden.
“It’s like a hippie Disneyland,” she laughs. Yes, or that mad anthropology museum in Oxford, with the shrunken heads, I suggest.“It’s funny you say that. Sometimes it’s good to get out and go to other people’s houses, otherwise it’s as if I’m constantly curating my own museum. I’ll be having dinner on my own and I’ll get up to move a jar 2cm to the left. I’m obsessive like that.”
How did she manage then, when a 50-man film crew descended to rearrange the place for the music video? “At first I was like, ‘Oh my God, a postcard has been knocked down!’ I looked around, they’d taken down all the lights and there was rigging everywhere. Then I had to trash the house. We had a dinner-party scene and I had to completely lose it, Exorcist-style, and smash glasses and stuff. It was so traumatic.”
The song Ship to Wreck is about her belief that she’s always on the brink of destroying everything she holds dear: her career, her relationships, her sanity. It was brave, I say, to open up her private space so publicly. Didn’t she find it exposing? “It’s almost more exhausting putting up a wall,” she thinks.
Back in the kitchen, Welch makes me a cup of tea. “Can we interest you in some hemp milk with that?” she asks. She uses the majestic plural unintentionally, like some batty old woman living with a host of friends in her head. “I don’t know why I keep saying that,” she frowns. “Me and the ghosts? Or maybe the clothes, they have their own floor.” Later, she’ll take me on a tour of the house, where the entire first floor has been turned into a giant walk-in wardrobe; row upon overloaded row of the wafty and diaphanous, vintage and designer. She shows me one rail dedicated entirely to ornamental waistcoats, another to her collection of bespoke shirts with “Shakespearean cuffs”. Boots and shoes clutter the floor, hats and handbags are heaped on shelves. Across the landing, a second room is reserved for her coats.
We take another flight of haphazard stairs up to her bedroom. It’s serene in comparison — though the radio is blaring at full volume and the curtains are billowing against the wind from an open window. Even here, there’s no escaping her textiles dependency. “That cupboard’s got kimonos,” she whispers.
Downstairs she returns to the pumpkin soup. “I think I’m going to keep doing this while we’re talking. It’s good for me to be fiddling with things, otherwise I’ll get anxious.”
She moved into the house in 2012, straight after her band, Florence and the Machine, came off their last tour. It was the first break she’d had for years. She was a 20-year-old art student when she was discovered by her manager belting out Etta James songs in the toilet of a Soho club, but quickly assembled a band. She was Florence; her friend and keyboardist, Isabella Summers, was the Machine. The line-up soon expanded and the “Machine” now covers a revolving cast of band members and collaborators.
The band’s debut album, Lungs, won a Brit award in 2010 and made Florence a household name. Their second, Ceremonials, took them to America where Florence ran with the A-list crowd and became friendly with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Since then it has all been world tours, award ceremonies, guest spots, fashion shows, festivals and repeat.
“I got picked up at the age of 20 and then-” she makes a whooshing noise, which I’d describe as theatrical, were not everything she says so exaggerated that you stop noticing the am-dram after a while. “I’d been on tour for something like five years, then I came off tour and went on a bender to end all benders. It lasted, like, two weeks and ended with a Christmas party here at this house.”
Moving into the new house was supposed to signal the start of a recuperative year off. Instead, Welch seems to have had some sort of emotional breakdown. “I felt like there were pieces of me all over the place. My whole life had been touring and structure and living at home with my Mum, then I was in this little house on my own and I didn’t even know how to cook. I was spiralling, desperately trying to cling onto anything that was stable because I didn’t know how to live.
“Being on tour is so weird,” she continues, “because it’s chaos. You can go into a place, drop a bomb on everything, then you get to leave. But living here, if I wake up and I’ve trashed the house and it’s a Tuesday and there’s water everywhere… This is still my life. You don’t get to pick up and go anywhere, there’s no gig to revalidate you, you’re making a mess of your life and you have to stay in it.”
Much of the drama involved a boy. They had a “complicated on-off relationship” during her year off and have since split up. She won’t give me any details about who he is, but he dominates her new album.
She remembers the first song she wrote for it, while in Jamaica, staring at a phone that wouldn’t ring. “I was in the most beautiful place in the world, refusing to go outside, just a sea of tears and confusion. I was losing my mind waiting for someone” — the boyfriend — “to call me back. Someone asked me if that song was about waiting for a drug dealer. It wasn’t, but, I mean, kind of.”
As the relationship disintegrated, she self-medicated with drinking and extreme socialising. Back in London, she would turn up at the studio a wreck. “Poor Markus,” she says, referring to Markus Dravs, the album’s producer. “I’d never worked with him before. He’d been expecting this Boudicca, this warrior queen. What he got was a girl crying in leggings at 4 o’clock on the dot every day.” At one point things became so desperate, she sought relationship advice from Taylor Swift, pop’s queen of romantic oversharing. “I know it sounds a cliché, but she’s good to talk to about boys,” laughs Welch. “She knows her stuff.”
It happened after the Met Gala — the annual fashion fundraiser in New York — when Swift invited a host of starry types back to her apartment for an impromptu pizza party. “Lena Dunham was there, and Spike Jonze and Reese Witherspoon and Zooey Deschanel, eating pizza, talking about boys. I’d already asked loads of taxi drivers and everyone else I’d met [for advice], so I thought, why not Taylor Swift and Spike Jonze too?”
What did they tell her ? “I don’t want to go too much into it, but they were very helpful.”
Now, with some perspective, she recognises that the relationship wasn’t the only reason for her fragile emotional state. “I realise that it was so much to do with myself. You think a relationship’s going to save you, but it isn’t going to fix you, like being famous isn’t going to fix you. You have to make yourself happy, you can’t put that responsibility onto someone else.”
It’s hard to imagine her being depressed, I say. She always seems so excitable and up. “There’s a real down,” she tells me, “with everything there has to be an opposite. I can go way up there, but I get really sad.”Did she ever see a doctor about it all?
“I have a therapist, she’s known me for years. She helped my little sister as well. She’s so rational, it’s good for me, because I see everything in extremes. She’s like, ‘Maybe it’s about coming to a more moderate place?’”
So Welch stopped drinking. She’s been on the wagon for the last year, although she flinches when I use that phrase. “I wouldn’t put a stamp on it, no.” She worries that the label will make it more of a news story when she does, inevitably, start drinking again.
“It [drinking] wasn’t coming from a place of fun and joy. It was coming from a place of wanting to cover and hide. But, actually, if I did want to go back and enjoy drinking again, then that’s a choice.”
Has it been hard, giving up? “It hasn’t, just because I was so sad. And I’ve never been that interested in having a glass of wine, I’ll have a shot of tequila, it’s always been about the end result.”
After giving up booze, she says she spent the recording process living “like a monk”, cycling to and from the studio near Tower Bridge each day with a packed lunch. She even wore the same outfit: “leggings and this cagoule, which I stole from someone at a New Year’s Eve house party. I wore it for a year. It saved my life”. For once, she’s not exaggerating. Welch measures her happiness levels through her outfit choices. I’ve never met anyone so sartorially self-aware. “Clothes to me are a way of distracting myself and I had nothing left, I wanted to be identity-less.” She calls it her “Steve Jobs thing” (Jobs wore a uniform of black turtleneck jumpers every day). “I can always tell I’m getting better because I start coming back to myself.” Today she is padding about barefoot in skinny black jeans and a simple, beaded black top. I’d say she still has a few issues to work through yet.
The new album, out next month, is called How Big How Blue How Beautiful, after the skyline in LA, where she did some of the songwriting. It was going to be called “something angry and strong, then I thought, ‘No, I’m so glad everything happened.’ Even though it was a period of confusion and sadness, I had to learn so much about myself.”
Without hangovers eating into her days, she has started busying herself with wholesome new interests: home cooking, interpretive dance classes, transcendental meditation. Her favourite discovery has been a book club, started on social media by a group of young female fans. “I’ll recommend a book and they all get together on Twitter and Instagram to talk about it. Recently, they have read Lena Dunham’s biography and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Tartt is Welch’s “f****** hero”. She interviewed her via email for the club and posted it on her Facebook page.
She is still making the soup as she tells me all this. It’s taking an awfully long time — partly because she keeps getting distracted and rushing off to grab a book or her phone to show me something. But also because she seems to have some slightly odd rituals going on. She keeps stopping to touch everything: each part of the onion she has sliced; the petals of the flowers in a vase. “I’m obsessive, compulsive and all those fun things,” she tells me during the tour of her house.
Her parents divorced when she was young. Her father is a former advertising executive who now runs an organic campsite; her mother is a professor of Renaissance studies who recently received an MBE for services to education. When she was 13, her mother fell in love with a widower who lived four doors along and the two families merged under one roof. Welch went from being the oldest of three siblings to the middle child in a home of six teenagers. “Analyse that!” she hoots when I mention it. “You go from being the responsible one to being the attention-seeking one, which creates a conflict in you: ‘Look at me! Look at me! Why are you looking at me?’ I’m still trying to figure it out.”
She describes her family as “this big dysfunctional thing. We’re a close, chaotic unit. My [original] family is so batshit, that without the combined family we’d all be too involved in our own madness. If you get other people’s madness involved, it can balance itself out.” But, she adds, “It’s nice having so many brothers and sisters who are so different — it’s given me a good overview of people.”
Her younger sister, Grace, operated as her PA for a while, though it ended badly. “That was a terrible idea. Why did we ever do that?” she screams. “She had to cater to all the things she hates most about me: too much shopping, being materialistic, being drunk all the time. Imagine! She was so pissed off with me.”
Although fashion is her biggest extravagance (she claims to have a vintage-clothes dealer who saves her pieces in every city she visits), Welch has decided she wants her image for the new record to be more casual than her previous incarnations. “When I started out, I sort of looked like this,” she says, pointing to herself as she clears up pieces of vegetable peel with her other hand. “Then, as I got more famous, a reaction to that was the eyebrows went bleached, the hair got redder. I wanted to become this fantasy creature. It was good because it kind of protected me. But I’ve spent a year or two unravelling all that stuff.”
Of all the things she tells me about today — the drinking, the breakdown, the compulsive cagoule-wearing — what shocks me most is the revelation that she is not a natural redhead. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that!” She was a brunette when she started out, but spent all the money the band made from selling T-shirts on their first tour getting a pillar-box dye job while drunk in Paris one morning. “And that was that.”
After two hours in the making, the soup is finished. It’s now more anticipated than her new album. Welch tastes it and makes a face. “That’s quite weird. I don’t think I’ll let you try it. I’ll practise and figure it out. I’ll bring you a flask of soup next time.”
When we meet again a couple of months later, she has made porridge, not soup. Unfortunately, I don’t get to try it either. The night before we are due to meet, she sends word that she would prefer we rendezvous at a cafe around the corner rather than at her house. Then she goes to bed and forgets about the change of plan. The next morning I sit and wait for her in the cafe, while she sits and waits for the porridge to go cold at home. Eventually, she realises what’s happened and comes to find me. She is boiling over with stories about her latest adventures. There’s the one about how she locked herself out, smashed her phone and flooded her house all in the one day. Another about going to LA and driving out into the desert after a party, then waking at 4pm the next day in a dodgy casino on the Nevada border. “I was like, ‘I’m not even drunk, what am I doing in a Nevada casino?’ ”
She has returned from a month in the Mexican jungle, filming videos among the cenotes. “Cenotes are underground lakes that come up from Mexico’s rainforest. Ancient Mayans thought they were portals to the underworld.” They were the album’s perfect visual metaphor: “This idea of descending into hell, then coming back out of it.” Some of the videos she made there have already been released online. One, for her song What Kind of Man, is very intense, showing Welch surviving a car accident, fighting off predatory men with a dance routine, and getting naked. “Yeah,” she giggles. “It needed to be as real as possible. During the time [of writing the song] I felt so exposed and vulnerable; it was about re-appropriating that feeling. It made me feel f****** strong. I can’t tell you how empowering it was, being this angry, naked woman.”
She claims not to have been on any massive benders since we last met. “Not even small ones. I don’t really do small.” She thinks if the wheels do come off, it will probably be at Glastonbury, where she is performing next month. That’s assuming she’s mobile by then. Two weeks after our interview, she’ll play at Coachella in California and break her foot as she leaps off the stage, meaning her subsequent performances “will have to be somewhat stripped back”.
The bigger news — although she is trying to play it cool — is that she has started seeing someone. He’s a fashion photographer who she met in her local park. She was out for a run, he was walking his dog… “Yeah, I’ve been dating,” she giggles. “Just to see if I can have a nice time. Everything was so intense for so long. I’m trying to figure out how to keep things light and not to do the intense thing.”
Has the man who inspired the album been in touch since songs about him have started to appear on the radio? Have they spoken about them? “In a way, yeah. He’s a wonderful person. I thought it was a break-up album, but it’s not. It’s about so many other things. I now see how much of it was about me, the relationship I was having with myself. I’m so protective of that time, so protective of him.” I realise she has started crying.
Does she think they will ever try and make it work again? She looks away and laughs, frustrated by her tears. “I can’t think about that now. I’m going to focus on the work because that’s what’s making me happy at the moment. I felt stuck for such a long time, but I feel more free every day, so whatever I’m doing, I’m going to keep on doing it.”
Oh, and what about the soup? Turns out it just needed coconut milk.
Florence + the Machine’s new album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, is out on June 1