The story of Florence and the Machine

A south London childhood

Florence Leontine Mary Welch was born on the twenty eighth of August 1986 in Camberwell, south London. Her father Nick worked in advertising, and her mother Evelyn, who grew up in the United States, became a leading professor of Renaissance studies. It was a family full of words. Her grandfather Colin Welch had been deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, and the satirist Craig Brown is her uncle by marriage. At the age of ten, Florence sang a Gilbert and Sullivan song from The Mikado at her grandfather's memorial service. She also sang at family weddings and funerals, encouraged above all by her Scottish grandmother Cybil, who pushed her to sing and perform.[1] [2]

Home life changed sharply when Florence was a young teenager. Her parents divorced, and her mother went on to marry the man next door, the immunologist and lung specialist Peter Openshaw. The two households merged, and Florence went from being the eldest child to a middle one, with new step siblings she remembers fighting with constantly at first. Around the same time came a real tragedy. When Florence was fourteen, her maternal grandmother, who had bipolar disorder, took her own life by jumping from her New York apartment. Florence has said that loss still echoes through her family, and years later she would write about it directly in her songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence was an anxious, imaginative child. She believed ghosts and werewolves were real, read Edgar Allan Poe, and was drawn to the goriest stories in Greek myth and Renaissance painting. With two school friends she started a witches' coven, writing spell books and trying to cast spells on classmates. She was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia, and she struggled with maths, but she was fearless in the school choir. So fearless, in fact, that she was regularly told off for singing too loudly during her favourite hymns. She went to Alleyn's School in south east London, and music and books became her escape from feeling different.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As a teenager she lurched from the Spice Girls to grunge, then to Lauryn Hill, the Wu Tang Clan and garage rock. She dreamed of Broadway and begged her parents for musical tickets. At seventeen, she later revealed, she developed an eating disorder, the start of years of struggle with food and later alcohol. After school she worked behind the bar of a pub and studied illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, before dropping out to chase music, singing at open mic nights and in basement squats in the small hours. She has joked that these were not really shows, just a microphone, a lot of shouting and bubble wrap on the floor.[1] [2] [3]

Florence Robot and Isa Machine

The most important meeting of Florence's life was with Isabella Summers, a producer six years older who made hip hop in a small studio in a former plastics factory at Crystal Palace. Summers was tired of working only with men and wanted to write pop music with a woman. She invited Florence over, and the two began making demos, sitting back to back in the tiny room with a cheap keyboard and half a drum kit. They called themselves Florence Robot and Isa Machine. On the way to her first gig, Florence needed a name and tried Florence Robot Is A Machine, then decided it was far too long. It became Florence and the Machine.[1] [2] [3]

There were false starts first. Florence had flirted with being a country singer and recorded folk songs, and in 2007 she wrote with Johnny Borrell of Razorlight, but nothing stuck. She also fronted a band called Ashok, which released an album called Plans. It contained an early version of a song called Happy Slap, which would later become Kiss with a Fist. Florence has said she wriggled out of her contract with that band. What finally worked was the chaos of Summers's studio. Both women had recently been hurt by boyfriends, and they would lock the door, turn up Madonna and try to write a hit from scratch in half an hour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band's big break came in a nightclub toilet. Drunk one night in the mid two thousands, Florence cornered Mairead Nash, one half of the DJ duo Queens of Noize, and sang Etta James's Something's Got a Hold on Me to her right there. Florence soon had her first booking, and Nash later became her manager. Nash's partner in Queens of Noize, Tabitha Denholm, became the band's art director and filmed many of their early videos. Florence has summed up the journey as going from the toilets to the Brits. The line up grew around her, with Rob Ackroyd on guitar, Chris Hayden on drums and a harpist called Tom Monger.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 2008 the band's management sent them to South by Southwest in Texas. In the crowd were members of MGMT, who offered them a slot on their European tour, for just thirty euros a night. Florence and MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden swapped stage clothes, and one sleepless night in Paris they went looking for a hair salon. He wanted a mullet. She came out with the flame red hair and heavy fringe that became her trademark. In June 2008 the independent label Moshi Moshi put out Kiss with a Fist, her debut single, which reached number fifty one in the UK. That August she played the Reading festival, and the crowd grew as she sang.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Lungs and the breakthrough

The buzz built fast. In November 2008 Florence signed to Island Records, and in December the BBC named Florence and the Machine on the longlist for its Sound of 2009 poll, where she finished third. The single Dog Days Are Over came out that same month. Weeks later she was named winner of the Brit Awards Critics' Choice prize for 2009, before she had even released an album. She later admitted that when she heard the news, she had a panic attack in a branch of Caffe Nero, because she felt she had done nothing to deserve it. The music press was not always kind, and some writers sneered at her posh accent and art school image.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The debut album Lungs came out in early July 2009. It was largely a break up record, written after the end of a relationship with a young man named Stuart who worked in a bookshop. Florence called it a scrapbook of guilt, fear, love, death and nightmares. The production was shared between Paul Epworth, James Ford, Steve Mackey, Eg White and Charlie Hugall, with Isabella Summers producing too. It entered the UK chart at number two, held off only by a Michael Jackson compilation, and sat at number two for five straight weeks. It was also shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. The Observer called it the sound of someone who has found their voice.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came the slow burn. The band's cover of You Got the Love, the club classic by the Source and Candi Staton, started life as a B side but became so popular that Island released it as a single. It reached number five in January 2010. On the seventeenth of January 2010, after twenty eight weeks in the top forty, Lungs finally reached number one in the UK. A month later it won Best British Album at the Brit Awards, where Florence performed a mash up with Dizzee Rascal that reached number two as a single. Lungs went on to sell more than three million copies worldwide, and more than one point eight million in the UK alone.[1] [2] [3]

Life on the road was wild and sometimes dangerous. In October 2009, during a European tour, the trailer carrying the band's gear caught fire, and they had to finish the tour on rented instruments. Florence said you could hear the harp strings pinging in the flames. She threw herself around on stage, crowd surfing and once climbing about thirty feet up the scaffolding at Reading festival, a stunt her mother, Florence recalled, had to watch from behind the sofa. In 2010 the band played its first headline festival slot at Latitude, booked before they had become famous. By now Florence was drinking heavily, which she later said was a way of coping with shyness and sudden fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Conquering America

America took a little longer. The band played its first official New York show at the Bowery Ballroom in October 2009 and performed Kiss with a Fist on David Letterman's show. The real turning point was the MTV Video Music Awards on the twelfth of September 2010. Florence was so nervous in the weeks before that she lost sleep and cried, and in rehearsal she struggled to stand on a rotating platform. On the night, her performance of Dog Days Are Over was a triumph. The next week Lungs jumped from number forty four to number fourteen on the Billboard 200, and the single leapt to number twenty one on the Hot 100.[1] [2] [3]

Dog Days Are Over was everywhere. It had been inspired by a giant text artwork by the artist Ugo Rondinone that Florence cycled past every day on Waterloo Bridge. It was used in the trailer for the Julia Roberts film Eat Pray Love, covered on Glee, and years later played at the finale of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume Three. By 2016 it had sold more than three million downloads in the US alone. In November 2010 the band played it on Saturday Night Live, and in early 2011 they were nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist. At that ceremony Florence was one of the female singers who opened the show with a tribute to Aretha Franklin.[1] [2] [3]

Florence was now in demand. For the Twilight film Eclipse she wrote Heavy in Your Arms with Paul Epworth. The soundtrack team gave her only one rule, that the song should have nothing about vampires or werewolves in it. At the Oscars in February 2011 she stepped in for a pregnant Dido to sing If I Rise with A. R. Rahman. In Australia in July 2010, the band drew such a crowd at Splendour in the Grass that the natural amphitheatre had to be closed by security. An estimated twenty eight thousand of the festival's thirty three thousand fans had crammed in to see them.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 2011 the band opened for U2 on the North American leg of the 360 tour. Florence compared it to gladiatorial combat in an open air arena, and she said she got through the whole run sober because she needed every bit of her energy. It was a rare break. Off tour, she told Rolling Stone in late 2011 about a night that ended with her lying in an empty bathtub in a stranger's bedroom after, by her own count, seventeen vodka martinis. Despite the fame, she was still living at her mother's house in south London.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ceremonials

For the second album, Island offered Florence a trip to Los Angeles to write with some of the biggest pop producers in the world. She said yes, then looked at the diary and changed her mind, afraid of losing everything that made Lungs special. Instead she chose one producer, Paul Epworth, who had just co written Rolling in the Deep with Adele. She wanted Lungs, but darker, heavier and more complete. The band spent five weeks in April 2011 at Abbey Road's Studio Three. About forty songs were recorded and cut to twelve. One of the best, No Light, No Light, had been written with Isabella Summers overnight on the tour bus in Amsterdam.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence nearly called the album Violence. She settled on Ceremonials, after a nineteen seventies art film she had seen, because she liked the idea of performance as a kind of ritual to get outside yourself. The record is soaked in images of water and drowning, and in songs that tie love to death. Florence later said the whole album was about someone under so much pressure that they wanted to be at the bottom of the ocean. It was also a record made during a reunion. She and Stuart, the man behind the heartbreak of Lungs, had got back together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ceremonials came out at the end of October 2011 and went straight to number one in the UK, selling more than ninety thousand copies in its first week. In America it reached number six, their first top ten there. Q magazine named it the album of the year. Not every video landed well. The clip for No Light, No Light drew accusations of racism because a voodoo figure in it appeared to be in blackface. Welch denied that reading. The same video fed an online rumour that she belonged to the Illuminati, which she dismissed as ridiculous. By late 2011 she and Stuart had split for good, after four years together.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Then came the dance floor. In July 2012 the Scottish producer Calvin Harris remixed the Ceremonials track Spectrum into a club version called Spectrum, Say My Name. It gave Florence and the Machine their first UK number one single. Harris then chased Florence to sing on his own song Sweet Nothing, which she co wrote with him and Kid Harpoon. That also went to number one in the UK in October 2012 and gave her a first American top ten hit, peaking at number ten. On stage, Florence waved the rainbow flag during Spectrum, and the song became a staple of her support for LGBTQ rights.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty ninth of November 2012, the Rolling Stones invited Florence to sing Gimme Shelter with them at the O2 Arena in London. She admitted later that she had assumed a rock band would just wing it, and did not know the exact words. Mick Jagger noticed in rehearsal and corrected her, and she ran off to the toilets to learn them. Her lesson from Jagger, she said, was to learn your lines. The Ceremonials tour finally ended in December 2012, after two years on the road. The album earned Grammy nominations for Best Pop Vocal Album and, for Shake It Out, Best Pop Duo or Group Performance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Breakdown and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

In August 2012 Florence announced she was taking a year off. It did not go to plan. Without the structure of touring she later described having a kind of nervous breakdown. She was going out constantly, drinking extra dirty martinis and waking up in strange houses in other people's clothes. After one party at her house she ended up at a pub, sang Daft Punk's Get Lucky with the house band and crowd surfed onto nobody. A video reached MTV News, and her manager asked what was going on. A few weeks later she wrote Ship to Wreck about that urge to destroy everything. In 2014 she stopped drinking altogether, and she has been sober ever since.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For the third album she chose the producer Markus Dravs, because he had made Björk's Homogenic, a record she loved. Dravs pushed her to write about real life instead of fantasy and metaphor, and famously banned her from writing any more songs about water. She wanted brass, live instruments and a warmer sound after the cathedral scale of Ceremonials. She called the new songs an attempt to learn how to live in the world instead of escaping it. The album, called How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, was announced in February 2015 with the single What Kind of Man, and a string of connected videos directed by Vincent Haycock.[1] [2] [3]

In April 2015, during a show at Coachella in California, Florence leapt off the stage into the crowd once too often and broke her foot. She apologised to fans, said the shows would be stripped back for a while, and joked that the album was all about making something from what was broken. She did not cancel a single show. The album came out at the start of June 2015 and went to number one in the UK. In America it became their first number one on the Billboard 200, with about one hundred and thirty seven thousand units in its first week, easily their biggest sales week yet. It went to number one in eight countries.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then fate stepped in. In June 2015 Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters broke his leg falling off a stage in Sweden, and the band pulled out of their Friday night headline slot at Glastonbury. Organiser Emily Eavis said there was only one person they wanted to call. On the twenty sixth of June 2015, barely recovered from her own broken foot, Florence headlined the Pyramid Stage barefoot. She told the crowd her first Glastonbury had been an eleven o'clock Sunday morning slot in a tea tent, with no tent to sleep in. She dedicated a cover of Times Like These to Grohl, and closed with You Got the Love and Dog Days Are Over.[1] [2] [3]

Florence became the first British woman to headline Glastonbury this century. Since then only Adele and Dua Lipa have joined her. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful picked up five Grammy nominations and a place on the Mercury Prize shortlist, though the band was touring New Zealand on the night Benjamin Clementine won. In 2016 Florence and the director Vincent Haycock stitched the album's videos into a short film called The Odyssey, and the band recorded a classical version of Stand by Me as the theme for the video game Final Fantasy XV. That year Florence also recorded a duet with Lady Gaga, Hey Girl, which appeared on Gaga's album Joanne.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

High as Hope

The fourth album brought change inside the band. On the twenty eighth of February 2018 drummer Chris Hayden announced on Instagram that he had left after more than a decade. Florence, meanwhile, took more control than ever. She spent six months on demos, some of them recorded at 123 Studios in Peckham, and for the first time she was credited as a producer, alongside the American producer Emile Haynie. She had come to feel that in her early years she had deferred too much to older male producers. High as Hope was stripped back and personal. She had almost called it The End of Love, but chose a phrase from a poem she wrote while wandering New York.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The single Hunger was the most personal thing she had released. It began as a poem, and in its opening line she revealed for the first time that she had starved herself at seventeen. The song also touched on drink and drugs. Florence said she was terrified to share it, and her younger sister was baffled that she had kept the eating disorder secret for years, only to put it in a pop song. Later she said she had stopped weighing herself, and that letting go of that obsession felt like a bigger achievement than headlining Glastonbury. Hunger became the band's fifth number one on the Billboard Adult Alternative chart.[1] [2] [3]

Elsewhere on the album, Grace was an apology to her sister for the chaos of her drinking years, and Patricia was a love letter to her idol Patti Smith, whom she called her north star. The End of Love returned to her grandmother's suicide, a subject she had first touched on in Ceremonials. High as Hope came out on the twenty ninth of June 2018 and reached number two in both the UK and the US, blocked in both countries by Drake's Scorpion. Days later she published Useless Magic, a book of her lyrics, poems and drawings. The High as Hope tour ended in September 2019 with a concert at the Acropolis in Athens.[1] [2] [3]

These were busy years away from the band too. She appeared in the Terrence Malick film Song to Song, alongside Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. In 2017 she received the International Achievement award at the Ivor Novello Awards and dedicated it to her dad, who had driven the band around Europe on their first tour. In 2019 she recorded Jenny of Oldstones for the final season of Game of Thrones, years after turning down the show's request to sing The Rains of Castamere. On the High as Hope tour she asked American fans to donate to the American Civil Liberties Union instead of buying merchandise, to support women's rights.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dance Fever and a brush with death

In March 2020 Florence was in New York writing with Jack Antonoff when the pandemic hit. Back home in south London under lockdown, she moved her boyfriend into her flat, and wrote sad little poems instead of songs. Some became songs anyway. She grew fascinated by choreomania, a medieval phenomenon first recorded in 1374, in which crowds of people danced uncontrollably, sometimes to exhaustion and even death. It gave her the title Dance Fever. Antonoff produced eight of its tracks, and Dave Bayley of Glass Animals also worked on the record in London. She described the sound as Nick Cave at the club, and she named Iggy Pop as its biggest musical influence.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The videos were shot in Kyiv in November 2021 by the director Autumn de Wilde. A few months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Florence posted that two of the dancers, Maryne and Anastasiia, were sheltering from the war, and dedicated the video for Free to the Ukrainian people. In Free, the actor Bill Nighy plays her anxiety. The lead single King, released in February 2022 after fans received medieval style tarot cards in the post, wrestled with a choice between her career and having a family. Dance Fever came out on the thirteenth of May 2022, became their fourth UK number one, and earned the best reviews of her career.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

One familiar face was missing. Isabella Summers, the original Machine, did not play on Dance Fever or its tour. By then she had become a sought after film and television composer, with an Emmy nomination for the series Little Fires Everywhere. In 2022 she told the Guardian she had not left the band, but had never given an official line, and had not even formally told Florence. It was unspoken, she said, because their bond was sisterly. The band had other changes too. Keyboard player Hazel Mills left in 2022, and drummer Loren Humphrey briefly stepped away. The Dance Fever tour ran from September 2022 to March 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 2023, during a summer of festival shows, Florence suffered a miscarriage. It was so early that she had not told anyone she was pregnant. A week later, feeling unwell and bleeding heavily, she still headlined a festival in Cornwall in a storm. Back in London her doctor insisted on a scan. It showed the pregnancy had been ectopic, and her fallopian tube had ruptured, filling her abdomen with blood. She needed emergency surgery within the hour, and the tube was removed. She cancelled shows in Zurich and Paris and told fans only that surgery had saved her life. Ten days later she was back on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Everybody Scream

In 2024 Taylor Swift texted. The two had known each other for years, and together they wrote Florida!!!, a stormy duet for Swift's album The Tortured Poets Department, produced by Swift and Jack Antonoff. It reached the top ten in America. Florence joined Swift on stage at her final London show in August 2024 and again in Miami that October, and said stepping onto that stadium stage felt pretty cool. That September, Florence and the Machine celebrated fifteen years of Lungs at the BBC Proms, playing the whole album with Jules Buckley's orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. The concert was released as the live album Symphony of Lungs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence also turned to theatre. With the producer Thomas Bartlett she wrote the music for Gatsby, An American Myth, a musical based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a book she said had haunted her for much of her life. It premiered at the American Repertory Theater in June 2024. Then came a new album. In July 2025 she posted photos of herself in the studio with Mark Bowen, guitarist of the band Idles, with hints about witchcraft, folk horror and madness, and a whiteboard that read Swans versus Adele. In August a video showed her digging a hole in a field and screaming into it. The sixth album, Everybody Scream, was announced for Halloween.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Only after the announcement did Florence tell the full story of her ectopic pregnancy, in a Guardian interview in September 2025. The album grew out of that trauma. She researched the history of witchcraft at the Warburg Institute library in London, and noted that some of the first people tried as witches were midwives. Mark Bowen and Aaron Dessner of the National did most of the production, with Mitski co writing the title track. In the song One of the Greats, written as a long poem and recorded in one take, she takes aim at the double standards faced by women in music. Florence called it her most personal record yet.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Everybody Scream came out on the thirty first of October 2025. It became the band's fifth number one album in the UK and reached number four on the Billboard 200 in America. Critics were warm, with the Guardian calling Florence perhaps the most consistently successful British alt rock artist of her era. The Everybody Scream tour began in February 2026 and moved on to North American arenas that spring. Having nearly lost her life, Florence partnered with Planned Parenthood, which set up tables at shows to offer reproductive health information. She said access to that kind of care could be the difference between life and death.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026, Florence and the Machine have released six studio albums, five of which reached number one in the UK. Rolling Stone placed Florence at number one hundred and twenty eight on its list of the two hundred greatest singers of all time. Her influence can be heard in younger artists like Ethel Cain, Chappell Roan and the Last Dinner Party, and Beyoncé once said the band influenced her album Four. Through it all, the harp of Tom Monger has stayed at the heart of the band's sound. Florence still says the stage is the one place where the noise in her head goes quiet.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Florence and the Machine

Florence Welch and Isabella Summers. Summers is the original Machine. A hip hop producer with a studio in Crystal Palace, she invited Florence to write pop songs with her, and together they made Dog Days Are Over, Cosmic Love and much of Lungs. She co wrote and produced across the first three albums and played keyboards on tour for fourteen years. Since 2022 she has mostly worked as a film composer, but insists she never left, describing the bond as sisterly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence Welch and Mairead Nash. Nash was one half of the London DJ duo Queens of Noize and is credited with naming Pete Doherty's band Babyshambles. After Florence sang to her in a nightclub toilet, Nash booked her for a gig and became her manager, steering her from tiny London venues to Glastonbury headliner. Florence has said that on tour her manager had to wake her very carefully, because sleep was always fragile.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence Welch and Paul Epworth. Epworth co wrote and produced Rabbit Heart and Cosmic Love on Lungs, then became the sole producer of Ceremonials, which they recorded at Abbey Road. Florence likened him to a shaman. He came up with the organ chords that started Shake It Out, and he coached her to relax her voice instead of forcing it. Around the same time he co wrote Rolling in the Deep with Adele.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence Welch and Stuart Hammond. Florence met Stuart, then working in a bookshop, around 2005. Their break up in 2008 fuelled much of Lungs, and the Observer called him the villain of the album. They got back together after it came out, which made hearing her own songs about him on the radio awkward, then split for good in 2011. He later became a literary editor, and the two reportedly remain friends.[1] [2] [3]

Florence Welch and Markus Dravs. Florence picked Dravs to produce How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful because he had made Björk's Homogenic. He pushed her to write about her real life rather than fantasy, and he banned songs about water, which she slyly got around with Ship to Wreck. He also co wrote Queen of Peace and Various Storms and Saints. The result was her first American number one album.[1] [2] [3]

Florence Welch and Calvin Harris. The Scottish producer turned Spectrum into a club track in 2012, giving the band its first UK number one single. He then spent months chasing Florence around her schedule to sing on his own record. The result, Sweet Nothing, co written with her and Kid Harpoon, went to number one in Britain, reached the American top ten and was nominated for a Grammy.[1] [2] [3]

Florence Welch and Taylor Swift. The two had known each other for years when Swift texted her about a song idea. They wrote Florida!!! together for The Tortured Poets Department in 2024, and Florence drew her verse from a short story about a woman riding out a storm in a bathtub. She joined Swift on the Eras Tour in London and Miami, and called it pretty cool.[1] [2]

Florence Welch and Evelyn Welch. Florence's mother is a respected Renaissance scholar who became vice chancellor of Bristol University. She worried music would hurt her daughter and once said remembering every outfit was a waste of a brain. Yet Florence says watching her lecture showed her where her own stage persona came from. Evelyn kept a box of press cuttings from 2009 and 2010, then stopped, perhaps expecting fame to pass.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence Welch and Jack Antonoff. Florence was writing with Antonoff in New York in March 2020 when the pandemic shut everything down. He went on to co write and produce eight tracks on Dance Fever, including King and Free. Their paths crossed again on Florida!!!, which Antonoff produced with Taylor Swift in 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Florence Welch and Mark Bowen. The Idles guitarist co wrote and co produced Everybody Scream in 2025, bringing a rougher edge to the band's sound. Photos of the two working together were the first hint of the album. He co wrote the title track and even appears in its video as one of the possessed men, while his grinding guitar opens One of the Greats.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence Welch and Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones invited Florence to sing Gimme Shelter at the O2 in November 2012. Jagger caught her not knowing the exact words in rehearsal and corrected her, and she hid in the toilets with the lyric sheet. She joined him again in 2018 at London Stadium for Wild Horses, having learned her lesson.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Florence and the Machine

• As a teenager, Florence pinned ten personal commandments to Isabella Summers's studio wall, including be a country singer and always carry seeds. The list also included climb anything, wander about a lot and appreciate your feet. She explained that always carry seeds just reflected her obsession with snacking on nuts.[1]
• Florence's famous red hair came from a sleepless night in Paris with MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden, who wanted a mullet. She was naturally brown haired. On MGMT's 2008 European tour the pair hunted for a Paris salon, and she came out red with a thick fringe. She later tried to dye it back and says it simply would not go.[1]
• MGMT paid Florence and the Machine just thirty euros a night to open their 2008 European tour. They had spotted her at South by Southwest in Texas. Florence said it was just enough for her and three bandmates to split for drinks, and that she and Andrew VanWyngarden swapped stage outfits.[1]
• The band's manager, Mairead Nash, is credited with naming Pete Doherty's band Babyshambles. Nash was one half of the DJ duo Queens of Noize, well connected on the London scene, before she became Florence's manager after hearing her sing in a nightclub toilet.[1] [2]
• Harpist Tom Monger joined after Isabella Summers stopped him in the street to ask about his coffin shaped case. It turned out to hold his harp. Summers asked him to play on the demos that became Dog Days Are Over and Between Two Lungs, and he has stayed in the band ever since.[1]
• The prosthetic lungs on the Lungs album cover were built by Orlando Weeks, singer of the Maccabees. Weeks was then an art student. He said he wanted them to look Victorian and industrial, a bit like a punchbag, worn over a nineteen twenties style chain dress.[1]
• Kiss with a Fist began life as a song called Happy Slap, recorded with an earlier band called Ashok. Ashok released it on their only album, Plans, in 2007. Florence later reworked it as her own debut single, and it became the shortest track on Lungs.[1] [2]
• Dog Days Are Over was inspired by a giant rainbow text artwork Florence cycled past every day on Waterloo Bridge. The piece was by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. For the song's first video, shot in Sydenham Woods, Florence persuaded her dad to dress up as a clown.[1]
• In 2009 a fire in the band's equipment trailer destroyed their gear, and Florence recorded the sound of the harp strings snapping. It happened in October 2009 on a European tour, and they finished on rented instruments. She said the pinging strings made a strange sound she wanted to use in a song.[1]
• Lungs spent twenty eight weeks in the UK top forty before it finally reached number one. It debuted at number two behind a Michael Jackson compilation in July 2009 and only reached the top on the seventeenth of January 2010.[1]
• When Florence heard she had won the Brits Critics' Choice award, she had a panic attack in a Caffe Nero. She had released only a couple of singles and told a journalist she felt she had done nothing to deserve it.[1]
• The man who mixed Rabbit Heart nearly had a nervous breakdown, Florence said, because of how many times she overdubbed her voice. She wanted to sound like a massed choir made of one singer. She wrote the song after her label asked for something more upbeat.[1] [2]
• Cosmic Love was written in about ten minutes while Florence lay hungover on the floor of Isabella Summers's studio. She said it was the most hungover she had ever been while writing. The title started as a joke and stuck.[1]
• Cosmic Love hit number three in Ireland almost a year before its physical release, thanks to an advert for Dublin's O2 venue. It remains the band's highest charting single there apart from Spectrum and Shake It Out. In the UK it only reached number fifty one.[1] [2]
• The Twilight team gave Florence one rule for her Eclipse song: nothing about vampires or werewolves. She wrote Heavy in Your Arms with Paul Epworth for the 2010 soundtrack. It was her first song written for a film.[1]
• Karl Lagerfeld had Florence sing from inside a giant clam shell at a Chanel show in Paris in 2011. It was during Paris Fashion Week, the same season Gucci dressed her for her summer tour.[1] [2]
• In 2011 both David Cameron and Ed Miliband walked onto their party conference stages to Florence's music. The Observer noted it as proof of how far Lungs had reached, winning fans from the fashion world to the leaders of rival political parties.[1]
• Florence wanted to call her second album Violence. She wanted it to sound like the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. She chose Ceremonials instead, after a nineteen seventies art film.[1]
• Tom Beard's photograph for the Ceremonials cover is in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The gallery announced the acquisition in November 2019. Beard is a longtime friend who shot much of the band's early imagery with Tabitha Denholm.[1] [2]
• Shake It Out was written in about half an hour, as what Florence called a hangover cure. Paul Epworth was playing organ chords that sounded hopeful and sad at once, and she wrote about shaking off regrets. It earned an Ivor Novello nomination for co writer Kid Harpoon.[1] [2]
• Game of Thrones asked Florence to sing The Rains of Castamere in 2012, and she said no. Seven years later she did sing for the show, recording Jenny of Oldstones for the end credits of a final season episode in 2019.[1]
• Producer Markus Dravs banned Florence from writing any more songs about water. She wrote Ship to Wreck anyway, joking that it was not too explicit. Dravs wanted her to write about real life instead of fantasy.[1] [2]
• At the 2011 Oscars, Florence stepped in at short notice for a pregnant Dido. She sang If I Rise, from the film 127 Hours, with the composer A. R. Rahman.[1] [2]
• Florence's first Glastonbury was an eleven o'clock Sunday morning slot in a tea tent. She told the crowd she had no tent to sleep in that year. By 2015 she was headlining the Pyramid Stage.[1]
• Until she was twenty six, Florence slept on a mattress on the floor of her mother's living room. Books were stacked around her head, and three of her late grandmother's paintings formed a headboard that often fell on her. By then she had two number one albums.[1]
• At the 2017 Ivor Novello Awards, Florence dedicated her award to her dad for driving the band around Europe on their first tour. She received the International Achievement award at the ceremony at Grosvenor House in London.[1]
• In the video for Free, Bill Nighy plays Florence's anxiety. The video was shot in Kyiv, and Florence dedicated it to the people of Ukraine after the Russian invasion. She said Free was the last song she wrote before the first lockdown.[1] [2]
• Before Dance Fever, fans received medieval style tarot cards in the post with the word King on them. The envelopes read Chapter 1, and billboards with the same image appeared in London days before the single King came out in February 2022.[1] [2]
• Choreomania, the dancing plague behind Dance Fever, was first recorded in 1374. Groups of people danced uncontrollably, sometimes until they collapsed. Florence has compared it to a scene in the folk horror film Midsommar, which she watched during lockdown.[1] [2]
• Florence researched Everybody Scream at the Warburg Institute, a London library for medieval and Renaissance studies. Her references ranged from the mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe to Rosemary's Baby and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.[1]
• A whiteboard in the studio for Everybody Scream read Swans versus Adele. Florence posted it in July 2025 alongside words like witchcraft, folk horror and insanity. Pitchfork suggested it explains the album's more primal songs.[1] [2] [3]
• Isabella Summers once tried to buy an Ed Ruscha lithograph with a handbag full of cash. The Gagosian gallery politely suggested another payment method, and the story led to her composing music for their Cy Twombly exhibition.[1]
• In 2010 so many fans rushed to see Florence at Splendour in the Grass that security closed the amphitheatre. An estimated twenty eight thousand of the festival's thirty three thousand fans crammed in to watch. It reopened once safety concerns eased.[1]
• Florence's stepfather, Peter Openshaw, is an immunologist and lung specialist. Her mother married him after her parents' divorce. He had been the family's next door neighbour in south London.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.