USA TODAY International Edition
Florence Welch ready to tour again
After year off, she feels rejuvenated.
Yes, even rock stars need to eat their veggies.
Two weeks after Dave Grohl broke his leg falling offstage this summer, Florence + the Machine filled in for him at the U. K.’ s Glastonbury festival. Emailing beforehand, “I just said, ‘ If you’ve got a broken bone, you have to eat lots of broccoli because there’s iron in it,’ ” says frontwoman Florence Welch. “I was really nervous about Glastonbury and he said whenever he’s nervous, he watches Queen performing at Live Aid and that sorts him out. So that’s what I watched, too.”
Of course, Welch, 29, knows about nursing injuries. The British siren fractured her foot in a freewheeling stage dive at Coachella in April, but was up and
prancing across the Governors Ball stage in New York less than two months later, days after her How Big, How Blue, How Beauti
ful album release. As she revs up a three- week North American tour that kicks off Friday in Nashville, the pesky appendage is the least of her concerns.
“It feels fine now,” she says. “It gives me a little trouble, occasionally, but I almost don’t remember that it happened. Sometimes, I’m like, ‘ Wow, I broke a bone. That was a whole thing.’ ”
In fact, she’s glad it happened. Leading up to Beautiful’s launch in June, she performed a handful of gigs to intimate crowds in Los Angeles and New York. Sitting on a stool, she was backed by stripped- down arrangements which only underscored her powerful lilt.
“That was kind of amazing,” Welch says. “It gave me a chance to go back to how it was when I first started performing,” as a singer/ songwriter. “I didn’t realize how much I was using my physicality as almost another distraction and it was really interesting to have to be vulnerable in that way again.”
The injury became a metaphor of sorts for her new music — the product of a near- breakdown fueled by relationship problems, heavy drinking (“I used to drink before every performance. ... But I don’t anymore,” she told Billboard in May) and nearly four years of non- stop touring. Taking a year off from the road to record Beautiful, she channeled those frustrations into searing anthems such as Ship to Wreck and What Kind of Man, and now feels rejuvenated heading back out.
“Having that year where I really had to face myself, I found a new approach to ( touring), which is less extreme,” Welch says. “Having been so broken down by it, as it were, the album itself kind of got me back up again and I had to deal with a lot of things in my life. It’s a work in progress, but I’m managing to still do that while touring, which is really good.”
“It gave me a chance to go back to how it was when I first started.” Florence Welch on performing while seated after breaking her foot