Issue

No.

24

7 2012 Summer

Festival Guide and what ones suite

you

Florence and the machine is an English indie-pop band

with Florence Welch as the

lead singer that had a raise to fame in 2009 after the release

of their first album ‘Lungs’

which got high reviews from many different people. It

went straight to number two

in the UK album charts and after six months there finally

moved to the top spot, and in

October 2010 the album had been in the charts for sixty

-five consecutive weeks becoming one of the best-

selling albums of 2009-2010.

Florence, born on August 28,1986, grew up in London

where she went to school and

was toilets at a club and sang Etta James' 1962 song

"Something's Got a Hold on

Me". Mairead Nash is said to be

one of the most influential

promoters on the London music scene and has her label

named luv luv luv, she

o r i g i n a l l y d i s c o v e r ed Florence and the machine.

The huge record label Island

Records, which was first founded in

1959, by Chris

Blackwell and G r a e m e

Goodall in

Jamaica, now s i g n s

Florence. The company has

been based in

the UK for many years and has a long

list of successful artists

signed to it such as Nicki Minaj, Jessie J and Tom

Florence perform-ing, (bottom left) Florence on the red carpet

1

Florence + the Machine

Jones. Florence also has released her second album

Ceremonials, which went to

number one in the album charts.

Florence is said to write her

best songs when she’s diagnosed with dyslexia but

still managed to do well

academically, she also got occasionally in trouble for

impromptu singing.

In 2007, Welch did her first officially recording with a

band named Ashok, who

released an album called Plans on the Filthy Lucre/

A b o u t

R e c o r d s label. This

album also

had the e a r l i e s t

version of

her later hit "Kiss

with a F i s t " ,

which at this point was titled

"Happy Slap". She signed a contract for Ashok with a

manager, but feeling that she

was "in the wrong band" she quit, which cancelled the

contract. Florence and the

Machine is managed by Mairead Nash (one half of the

DJ duo Queens of Noize),

who decided to manage the singer when an inebriated

Welch followed Nash into

the drunk or has a hangover, because that’s when the

freedom, the feral music

comes, creating itself wildly from the fragments gathered

in her notebooks and in her head. “You’re lucid,” she

explains, but you’re not really

there. You’re floating through your own thoughts, and you

can pick out what you need. I

like those weird connections in the universe. I feel that

life’s like a consistent acid

trip, those times when things keep coming back.”

2

The BEAT Magazine