When Welch is 13, her parents divorce her mother later marries immunologist and lung specialist Peter Openshaw. Welch is educated at Thomas’s prep school, Battersea, and Alleyn’s school, south-east London she later starts studying at Camberwell College of Arts before dropping out. But her stepfather’s late wife had left behind an Arts and Crafts chandelier and a huge gothic fireplace, both of which fed into an aesthetic that has never left her – 13 years after her debut album she still puts one in mind of John Singer Sargent’s Ellen Terry, or the Lady of Shalott in a vintage Laura Ashley dress.įlorence Leontine Mary Welch is born in Camberwell, south London, on 28 August to advertising executive Nick Russell Welch and Evelyn Welch, professor of Renaissance studies. Welch’s parents divorced when she was 13, and when her mother, an esteemed history professor, married their next-door neighbour, she acquired two new siblings overnight and became even more protective of her own space (her little brother slept in the linen closet). Four or five large rings chime on her expressive hands: her hair is whirled into a high ponytail which she occasionally releases, with a flick of her fingers, to punctuate a joke or a moment of drama, before piling it back up again. Today, she sits in a small room in the garden of an art gallery in Camberwell, near where she grew up and attended art college for a while. I’m very good at being loved from a distance – I think that says so much about being famous Big gigs, and a big voice, made her a household name but her artistic paraphernalia has always been part of the package: there was a book club with fans (it’s still running) and a couple of years back, a volume of Welch’s poetry. Her rise was steep and surprising: at 23, her debut album, Lungs, launched her on an 18-leg world tour that culminated in support slots for U2. Like Ed Sheeran or Adele, she is a survivor of that tense period at the end of the 00s when the industry decided that no one was buying recorded music any more.
Some girls at school were being mean to me and I just remember sitting at home thinking” – she affects a melodramatic voice – “‘If they would just see this room, they would understand and they would love me!’”ĭance Fever is Welch’s first album in four years. Her first bedroom had been decoupaged right up to the ceiling – an attempt to externalise the contents of her head: “I would have been 10.
As a child – in fact, not only as a child, but until she was 26 years old, had two No 1 albums and had performed with the Rolling Stones – Welch slept on a mattress on the floor of her mother’s living room, with books stacked around her head and three of her late grandmother’s paintings forming a makeshift headboard, which would regularly fall on her. Sleep has always been a sensitive issue (her manager used to have to wake her very carefully on tour), so she went out and ripped the entire unit off the wall. T he other night, in an unusually high spring wind, Florence Welch’s electronic doorbell malfunctioned, repeatedly ringing through the small hours as though pressed by the finger of some ghostly hand.
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