DANCE MACABRE
Florence+The Machine are back with an album drawn from unsettling inspirations. MARION McMULLEN chats to singer Florence Welch about folk horror, pandemic angst, and a mysterious Renaissance phenomenon
FLORENCE + The Machine singer Florence Welch says inspiration for their latest album came from ghoulish stories from history of thousands of people dancing wildly to the point of exhaustion, collapse and even death.
The Renaissance phenomenon known as choreomania and the imagery of it all strongly resonated with the 36-year-old, who had been touring non-stop for more than a decade.
“A friend of mine told me about this sort of plague that had happened in the
15th and 16th centuries in Europe, where people were just dancing themselves to death,” she says. “There’s a specific one in Strasbourg where it mainly affected women, 400 women just danced themselves to death.
“I just felt it so deeply. It’s quite unexplained, it could have been from grain that had gone off and so had a hallucinogen in it. I’ve spoken to a virologist about it and it could have been because viruses come and go all the time, as we know now, but it could have been a choreographic virus that had just died, came and spread and then died out.
“But the thing that I related to most is that it was caused by collective stress, that actually it’s a psychological phenomenon, that’s possible as well. It was such a hard time to live and before choreomania, people had been through so many other plagues, wars, and complete civil unrest.
“I related so much to the idea that you just got so stressed, all you could do was dance in the middle of the street, I feel that to my core.
“I also think the thing I related to the most was inability to stop moving, I related that to my inability to stop touring. Sometimes it does feel like a death drive of like, no, it’s not enough, keep going, keep going.
“Before the pandemic hit, I was thinking that I would make a whole concept record about this plague. And then the pandemic hit, and I went, that is way too much. Just a little bit is enough.”
Florence arrived in New York in March 2020 to begin recording Dance Fever with producer Jack Antonoff when Covid-19 forced a retreat to London.
“We had one week,” remembers Florence. “I got to New York at the end of February. It was around that time when I was asking ‘is it okay to go?’ and people were still like ‘it’s fine, go’. We got one week where we were free... then I had to go home. It was crazy.”
Holed up at home, the songs began to transform, with nods to dance, folk, 1970s Iggy Pop, longing-for-the-road folk tracks a la Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris and more.
Lyrically, Florence drew from a wide set of influences. She took inspiration from the tragic heroines of pre-Raphaelite art, the gothic fiction of Carmen Maria Machado and Julia Armfield and folk horror films such as The Wicker Man, The Witch and Midsommar.
Florence says that period after her return to London was a difficult one, adding “Basically I got home and my whole family was sick,” she says. “It was just really scary because nobody knew [what Covid’s impact would be]. I came home and my sister, my niece who was three at the time, my brother, and basically everyone who lived with my sister had Covid.
“As soon as I landed, I would have gone to see them, but my sister was like ‘I don’t think you should come around’. We were just so scared that we didn’t know, my niece was so young, we were just terrified.
“The thing that scared my brain was when we didn’t know how far it could travel. I was standing like a street away delivering them some groceries and my niece tried to run to me and my sister had to stop her.
“I think that was one of the hardest moments for me in the whole pandemic – this little girl running to me and her mum stopping her. It kind of broke me that bit.”
Florence says audiences might now recognise a Miss Havisham look from Dickens novel Great Expectations to the stage sets and designs on the forthoming Florence+The Machine tour.
“Yeah, one of our references is Miss Havisham’s feasts,” she says, “the candles covered in spider webs and, lace was a very big reference for us.
“This idea of ruggedness and beauty that has been bedraggled and broken, I think this idea of everything that [the world] has been through, you can’t help but be a different creature on the other side, something slightly more cracked.
“I don’t know if I can afford to get more cracked but it happened, we wanted to represent that somehow.”
A friend of mine told me about this sort of plague that had happened in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, where people were just dancing themselves to death