PRIMAL FUN
Florence and the Machine will close out ACL Fest
Best bets of ACL Fest’s 2nd weekend; plus, the complexity of Florence Welch
In a dimly lit video from the 2008 South by Southwest Music Festival, Florence Welch, a 21-year-old art school dropout from London, stands alone on stage. She fidgets, clearly nervous, while the soundman cues a sparse CD backing track she recorded for the debut performance of a new song. “It’s still a work in progress so you’re pretty lucky, but also, could be pretty unlucky,” she says, with rambling charm.
In 2015, Welch, now 29, is an international superstar. When her band, Florence and the Machine, closes out the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Sunday night, she’ll front an 11-piece ensemble. Guitar, bass, keys, piano, a three-piece horn section, two backup singers and a harpist will all weave harmonies into the ornate tapestries of her majes- tic baroque rock. Rolling Stone magazine crowned the band “Best of the Fest” at Lollapalooza earlier this year. Her music has evolved into something magnificent, but even in those early clips of a stripped-down set, captured a year before Florence and the Machine would release their debut album “Lungs,” Welch is captivating.
On the old video, the backing track starts with a steady, solitary drum, soon joined by a plodding piano chord. “I did this all myself, that’s why it sounds really bad,” Welch says.
She beats intermittently on a snare drum on stage in answer to the monotonous drone on the recording. Then she closes her eyes and starts to sing. A high warble gives way to her sweeping dark alto as she eases into the chorus of “Between Two Lungs.” Her vocal power builds as backing harmonies from the CD swirl around her. She stretches into the bridge. “And my running feet could fly, each breath screaming: ‘We are all too young to die.’”
The backing track shifts to a faster string of graceful staccato piano chords. Welch jumps up and down in response, turning her body in a circle. She opens her eyes and with furious intensity spins the song through a cascading stream of breathless crescendos. She’s magnetic.
She’s also a bit unhinged. Another vid- eo clip from the same gig shows her closing the set with a high octane rendition of the dysfunctional love song “Kiss With A Fist,” a song that would become her band’s first single. As guitarist Robert Ackroyd strums vigorously, Welch jumps off the stage at Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant, a converted warehouse that once hosted the “Real World Austin” and now houses Vince Young’s Steakhouse. A shaky camera traces her dashing through the crowd to leap into a fountain near the
club’s door. She makes it back to the front in time to grab her mic and belt out the final chorus. Then, unsure how to exit, she dives under the 2-foot risers that hold up the stage.
From her home in London, Welch laughs about the memory. “Someone was yelling like, ‘There’s rabies in the pool!’ And then they were yelling at me like, ‘Don’t go underneath the stage, that’s where all the electricity is!’ And so basically, it was like everywhere was like a death trap,” she says.
Like many young bands, Welch’s first SXSW involved a lot of running around “pretty drunk and excited.” She caught some great shows — Bon Iver was amazing. She went to the Black Cat downtown and randomly selected her first tattoo, a heart draped with a banner carried by a blue bird that reads “sad sack.” It was all very typical, except her experience was also the stuff SXSW dreams are made of. That delirious set on a makeshift stage at a Mexican restaurant would launch her career. Welch and Ackroyd were followed by electro-psych rockers MGMT, one of the year’s big breakout acts.
“From that gig they gave us their support slot across Europe and England, which, actually ... that really kind of broke us,” Welch says.
“Lungs” was released in 2009, followed by “Ceremonials” in 2011. Both are collections of emotional orchestral rock, songs that pulse with stormy energy, a backbeat of ocean waves crashing on rocky cliffs, even as they reach forward with soaring aspirations. “Bleak magic” her father calls it, a term Welch thinks is apt.
Thematically, Welch also tends to go big. She draws imagery from biblical archetypes, ancient Greek legends and Celtic mysticism in songs that unwind as epic tales. Her music is deeply cathartic. Perhaps more than any artist of her generation she harnesses what Joseph Campbell would call “The Power of Myth.” This is no accident. “I literally read this yesterday,” she says, retrieving a book by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. She reads a passage that covers Jung’s belief that myth linked man to the world of the ancestors, to nature. The loss of that connection, Jung wrote, left man divided against himself.
“I think almost that music now allows people to still live in that world of myth ... the unexplained,” she says. “We can’t really explain why we have these big primal urges and feelings and why we sense things ... music taps into that kind of otherworldly thing that we perhaps are rejecting these days but is still somehow within us.”
When she performs live, she invites ceremonial participation from her fans. Lately, she’s been encouraging crowds to shed their clothes, in the least lascivious way possible.
“I just think it’s kind of beautiful to see everyone feeling so in the moment ... feeling free because it’s such freedom to me performing, and it’s about this sense of abandon.” Watching her fans swept up, unashamed to release themselves fully, is exhilarating, she says.
“I can sense that out there people are looking for kind of a real experience,” she says. She considers the act of disrobing symbolic. You don’t have to get naked, but removing a hat, a jacket, as a symbol of something you need to let go of can be a powerful gesture. At recent shows Welch has stripped down to her bra to connect with her audience. As “a girl in the public eye” she finds it liberating.
“It’s all about not feeling judged either,” she says. “So it’s that moment of like, ‘(Expletive) it, this is me. This is who I am.’”
The last year or so of Welch’s life has been all about getting to the heart of who she is. After touring nonstop through her 20s, she took 2014 off to write and record. Suddenly she found herself face to face with personal demons, an unhealthy relationship that needed to end and an excessive drinking habit she picked up on the road.
“I would have these periods of clarity and calm, and then I would trip myself up,” she says. “It would be like a threeday bender, or like a massive argument, or I would have to break up with someone again and then we would get back together.”
She adopted a healthy lifestyle, riding her bike to the studio, staying sober while recording. As the fog cleared, her perspective changed. “I saw how much of it had been about the relationship with myself and my own self-destructive nature and how drawn I am to chaos,” she says.
Frank self-examination is pervasive on “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” her new album released in late May. The album is loaded with vulnerable material, songs she wrote because she desperately needed them. “They were my talismans. They were my spells. They were my poems that I needed to just repeat to myself to keep me safe and to keep me sane, and I would hold onto these songs because they were getting me through,” she says.
The material was so raw that she struggled with the idea of playing it live. “But then that magical thing happens when you give it away, and you play it to other people, that you realize kind of the universal nature of experience,” she says.
Florence and the Machine made their ACL Fest debut in 2012. Armies of young women with flowing dresses, braided hair and flower crowns crowded the field to catch their early evening set. It was a powerful moment, representative of how Welch has tapped into an energy that resonates with her generation. As the sun dipped down, bathing Zilker Park in golden light, the women danced ecstatically to triumphant songs like “Shake It Out” and “Dog Days Are Over.”
Over the past few years, the female youth demographic at ACL Fest has emerged as a visible force. Twenty-somethings have crowded to the front of stages for acts like Lorde, Lana del Rey and Jhene Aiko. ACL Fest organizers have clearly taken note. Festival closing honors have traditionally been bestowed on legacy acts like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Lionel Richie. This year will mark the first time a female-fronted act has been booked into the vaunted time slot.
“It’s wonderful to see these beautiful, young, kind of quite dainty looking women really passionately going for it in the crowd, because I think it just shows ... women are complex characters,” Welch says. “I’m happy to represent that.”