FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Florence + The Machine - Dance Fever
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ONE big reason…
PHOTO CREDIT: Lillie Eiger
as to why I am including such a recent album into Revisiting… is because Florence Welch was awarded at the recent Ivor Novello Awards for the song, King. It was written alongside Jack Antonoff. It rightly won for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. It was an honour for an amazing artist whose fifth studio album, Dance Fever, was released on 13th May, 2022. Despite it being critically acclaimed, I do not hear tracks from it much on the radio anymore. It is an album with some great deep cuts. Without a weak moment, this is one people should listen to. I am going to come to some reviews of the masterful Dance Fever to wrap up. Before then, there are a couple of interviews involving Welch in promotion of the wonderful Dance Fever. I think it is an astonishing work that was one of the very best from 2022. Hitting number one in the U.K. and seven in the U.S., this was a huge commercial success for the group. Led by the peerless Welch, I think that Dance Fever is one every music fan should explore. Before getting to an interview from British Vogue, there is one from The Guardian that I will reference. We get some background and backstory to this amazing artist:
“Dance Fever is Welch’s first album in four years. Like Ed Sheeran or Adele, she is a survivor of that tense period at the end of the 00s when the industry decided that no one was buying recorded music any more. Her rise was steep and surprising: at 23, her debut album, Lungs, launched her on an 18-leg world tour that culminated in support slots for U2. Big gigs, and a big voice, made her a household name but her artistic paraphernalia has always been part of the package: there was a book club with fans (it’s still running) and a couple of years back, a volume of Welch’s poetry.
Today, she sits in a small room in the garden of an art gallery in Camberwell, near where she grew up and attended art college for a while. Four or five large rings chime on her expressive hands: her hair is whirled into a high ponytail which she occasionally releases, with a flick of her fingers, to punctuate a joke or a moment of drama, before piling it back up again.
Welch’s parents divorced when she was 13, and when her mother, an esteemed history professor, married their next-door neighbour, she acquired two new siblings overnight and became even more protective of her own space (her little brother slept in the linen closet). But her stepfather’s late wife had left behind an Arts and Crafts chandelier and a huge gothic fireplace, both of which fed into an aesthetic that has never left her – 13 years after her debut album she still puts one in mind of John Singer Sargent’s Ellen Terry, or the Lady of Shalott in a vintage Laura Ashley dress.
In person, Welch does not have the imperious air she has on stage: she seems to arrive filterless, fizzing with a nervy but rather humorous energy. In the video for her latest song, Free, she plays herself, while Bill Nighy has a cameo as her “anxiety”. Interviews are hard work, she says – she likes to schedule a day off afterwards to lie down. Harder than being on stage for two hours? “I think so, yes, because that’s scripted and you’re in control.”
Being on stage was, of course, a moot point until recently – this summer, she will tour for the first time in three years. Everyone knows that musicians had a terrible time in the pandemic but Welch, with her unusual directness, is a useful person to ask about it. What did she really think her prospects were?
“My mum said: ‘You’ll find something else to do,’” she says. “It felt incredibly final. I don’t know if that’s because musicians and performers lean towards dramatic thinking, but the reality was no one could say, before there was a vaccine, if gigs would ever come back. Maybe in five years, seven years. I often think about everyone meandering back into the world now with so much unprocessed PTSD.”
Welch told her mother: “I don’t really want to exist in a world where I can’t do the thing I feel like I was put on this Earth to do. The thing that gives me meaning, that makes the jumble in my head – which is a sort of screaming nightmare a lot of the time – make sense.” In print, this sounds a bit overblown but in person, she sounds almost apologetic.
Lately, she has been musing on what she calls the “monster of performance” – how it comes round every two years and swallows you up for a world tour. When it slunk off during the pandemic she felt “bereft”. In March 2020, she was in New York, writing songs for Dance Fever, with Jack Antonoff, known for his work with Lorde and Lana Del Rey. Back in south London, in lockdown, she moved her boyfriend in to her flat and wrote “sad little poems” instead, which turned into songs such as My Love (“my arms emptied, the skies emptied, the buildings emptied”). Unable to dance on stage, she danced in her kitchen (“I’m actually really good at wombling around in socks”). Yet Dance Fever, which was eventually produced in the UK with Dave Bayley from indie band Glass Animals, is no disco record. It may be high in BPM, but much of what she’s put on top is dark, strident, mournful: she has called it “Nick Cave at the club”.
I am keen to move onto a couple of the many positive reviews that Dance Fever received last year. First, British Vogue chatted with Florence Welch last April. There is something insightful and revealing with each interview. There are particular sections of the interview that I will bring in, as they are particularly interesting. I think that Florence Welch is among the most inspiring artists of her generation:
“This wry, gently self-mocking sense of humour runs through Dance Fever, which sees Welch return to the euphoric, stadium-sized anthems that defined her early career. After the success of the band’s debut, Lungs, in 2009, each Florence and the Machine album (Dance Fever will be the fifth) has sold in the millions. They have played all the major festivals, been nominated for six Grammys, and Welch herself has performed with everyone from Drake to The Rolling Stones. “Lungs with more self-knowledge,” is how she describes the new album. “I’m kind of winking at my own creation,” she says. “A lot of it is questioning my commitment to loneliness; to my own sense as a tragic figure.” Cue cackle.
Take the opening line of the Kate Bush-esque “Choreomania” (named after the compulsive collective dancing mania that erupted across Europe in the late Middle Ages): “And I’m freaking out in the middle of the street / With the complete conviction of someone who has never actually had anything really bad happen to them.” Or that of the lo-fi electronica number, “Free”: “Sometimes I wonder if I should be medicated / If I would feel better just lightly sedated.”
“I feel like as a female artist you spend a lot of time screaming into the void for people to take you seriously, in a way that male artists just don’t have to do,” says Welch. She was “so tired of trying to prove myself to people who are never going to get it”. So she stopped. And “it set me free.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn de Wilde
The photographer and director Autumn de Wilde, responsible for the album’s artwork and Welch’s new music videos, was instrumental in creating Florence’s new liberated world. “She is an electric genius,” de Wilde says of Welch. “I started to feel like the record she was making was very honest, very raw and modern, but also rich with otherworldly fantasy. I wanted to create a visual escape-hatch into an ancient fairy tale.”
The pandemic was looming when Welch started working with producer Jack Antonoff in New York, having just finished a gruelling tour for her 2018 album High As Hope. “It’s almost like an addictive cycle,” she says of her need to constantly record. “You forget the pain so quickly.” Plus, she was 33 (her “resurrection year”, as she puts it) and felt she was at once “finally growing into herself as a performer” while also increasingly aware of that all-too-familiar “rumbling panic that your time to have a family might suddenly just–”, she clicks her fingers like a magician. “I had this drive underneath me and I was like if these songs want to get out, I have to get them out fast, because I do have other desires…”
It is the push and pull of these “other desires” – namely motherhood and the impact child-bearing can have on a career, a body, a mind – that “King”, the album’s opening track, explores so affectingly. You can already hear its refrain, “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king”, being bellowed by thousands of women on this summer’s festival circuit. “The whole crux of the song is that you’re torn between the two,” she says. “The thing I’ve always been sure of is my work, but I do start to feel this shifting of priorities, this sense of like,” she drops to a whisper– “maybe I want something different.”
I wonder what it is that makes her feel like she can’t have both – motherhood and a career. She pauses. “I think I’m afraid. It seems like the bravest thing in the world to have children. It’s the ultimate measure of faith and of letting go of control. I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings. I think I’ve had a stilted emotional immaturity just through having been in addiction and eating disorders for years.” She admits she has a “really complicated relationship” with her body. After years, she is finally comfortable in it, but the idea of the change it would undergo is one she finds terrifying”.
Alongside commercial success, there were huge and impassioned reviews for Dance Fever. Many consider it to be the best Florence + The Machine album so far - in a career that has not had a weak or even slightly good album in it. The consistency of the group is amazing! In fact, the debut single from the group, Kiss with a Fist, is fifteen on 9th June. This is what The Line of Best Fit wrote about Dance Fever in their review:
“Choreomania, as the condition was later termed, was recently put to screen in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film Midsommar, but Florence Welch’s long-standing fixation with the pagan and the bewitched has rarely felt horrific. Instead, all of her references to witchcraft and the occult have felt like pure theatrics – her music colourful and accessible, her wicker made for the Glastonbury main stage rather than their runes. Since her 2009 6x platinum debut Lungs, her presence has remained stubbornly consistent, an anomaly amongst her pop peers who often contorted their sound to the whim of each passing trend.
Indeed, her fifth LP sticks to the same, fruitful ground. There’s a moment on "Cassandra" where she sounds a little like '90s Nick Cave, which is new, and the final track sounds closer to breezy indie pop than she’s ever ventured before; but the album’s singles are still filled with howled choruses, driving drums and plucked harp. Despite this, Dance Fever feels like Welch’s biggest change of course in a decade. Firstly, it boasts some of her strongest singles ever, and, coming at the end of a four year break and a two year pandemic, it’s not the theatrical Welch who shows up here; this is a woman and a songwriter, no forest-sprite.
On the opening "King", Welch is standing in her kitchen arguing with her partner about her career and about motherhood. It’s filled with personal triumph al a "Shake It Out", but also pieces of startling self-doubt: “I was never as good as I always thought I was” she sings in the coda, “but I knew how to dress it up”. On the wonderful "Girls Against God" she makes a mockery of the grandeur which is her music’s defining sound: “Crying into cereal at midnight… I listen to music from 2006 and feel kind of sick / But oh God, you're gonna get it / You’ll be sorry that you messed with this”. Welch has been many things in her music, but funny wasn’t one of them until now.
On Dance Fever, there’s definitely the feeling of an artist whose decided that they have nothing left to hide. On "My Love", the album’s most-likely hit, she talks about losing her creative spark as lockdown began, and wonders where to put her feelings if not in song. The panic of this loss is palpable, and more horrific than any creature of the night. The moment of rediscovering her muse is a jubilant one, as is the closing stretch of the record, which boasts some of the most delicate instrumentation of a band whose career has been marked by bombast.
Closer "Morning Elvis" is the most self-lacerating song Welch has ever recorded; so raw that hearing it feels like pressing a thumb against a bruise. “I told the band to leave without me / I’ll get the next flight / I’ll see you all with Elvis if I don’t survive the night”. The song ends with the kind of explosive finale which made Welch a star, but after lyrics like these, the jubilation feels truly earned. Dance Fever may not be their pivot towards disco, but moments like these make it as thrilling as a night on the dance-floor”.
The final thing I want to bring in is from CLASH. They were enormously impressed by Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever. I am surprised that the album was not shortlisted for the Mercury Prize last year, as it was more than deserving. No matter. It definitely resonated with fans and critics alike:
“Proclaiming herself as king, Florence + The Machine’s fourth album is as majestic as it is authentic. Tip-toeing along the lines of grandiosity, the record (and Welch herself) possesses self awareness and is beautifully honest. Anxiety’s dance partner, a girl against god, a defector from love: Florence weaves together poetry, spoken word and angelic vocals effortlessly. Pounding drums are once again her partner in crime and push Dance Fever’s crescendos to a euphoric level.
Ironically, most of the tracks on ‘Dance Fever’ have a choral eeriness to them that would suit the acoustics of a cathedral. Florence is the devil caught in God’s pure gaze as it feels like she dictates straight from her poetical diary. A tone of wizened nostalgia is found on ‘Back in Town’. Thoughts of LA tie it to ‘How Big How Blue How Beautiful’. References to previous records are sprinkled throughout but a familiar clapping pattern and twinkling harp at the beginning of ‘Choreomania’ sends a ‘Dog Days’ shiver down your spine.
Defiance in the face of inner demons paired with the give and take relationship of music making reveal themselves as the main themes of the album. Welch has spoken about how the opportunity for relapse was incredibly present and real during lockdown as well as how wearying being away from the stage was. "Take me back drunken gods", she sings on ‘Cassandra’ as she searches for someone to sing to. Burdened with empty pages and a full heart, Welch captures the vast emptiness of a locked down world.
Jack Antonoff has left his fingerprint on ‘Dance Fever’ although not as clearly as on some of Welch’s contemporaries’ records such as ‘Solar Power’ and ‘Blue Banisters’. ‘Girls Against God’ has a familiar melodic lead guitar that bends to the producer’s will. Beyond that, Florence’s mystical touch injects the right amount of drama and empowers fragility and self-truth. Visceral soundbites of gasping, laughter and guttural throat noises are layered throughout and add to the harmonies and choir of Welch’s voice. Heard on ‘Daffodil’, they add depth to the already cinematic track that has the power of a war cry and the storytelling of a Dickensian villain.
The shorter tracks ‘Restraint’ and ‘Prayer Factory’ are not to be glossed over. They act as epilogues to their previous sister tracks and give them satisfying outros, tenderly teasing you in less than a minute. ‘Dream Girl Evil’ melds rapturous instrumentation with fervent drums. It throws the male gaze into the fire and delights in its burning. Religious metaphors have a small hold over Florence when it comes to desire as seen with ‘Ceremonials’ bonus track ‘Bedroom Hymns’.
In the face of love, bombs are thrown and Elvis asked for forgiveness at the end of ‘Dance Fever’. Balancing a dramatic soundtrack with heartfelt emotion, Florence + the Machine invite you into their fever dream. A dance party to release your demons to, they cast yet another lyrically beautiful and musically capitulating spell.
9/10”.
If you have not heard this album for a bit, go and take a listen to the magnificent Dance Fever. It is a masterpiece from Florence + The Machine - and I think that songs from it should be played on the radio more. With this consistency and brilliance, it will be exciting to see what the group…
COMES up with next.