Florence Welch is nervous. “I get very anxious in interviews,” she says, her pale cheeks flushed, her dark eyes shining. “I’ve always felt overwhelmed by my emotions. Even sitting here now I want to cry and I don’t know why.”

We are sitting side by side on a yellow striped sofa in the front room of the Florence and the Machine singer’s south London home, a small Georgian cottage fitted out in racing greens and walnut browns, patterned rugs and antique fittings. Gilt framed artworks crowd the walls, vintage bric-a-brac covers every surface, and countless books are densely packed on to shelves or stacked in perilous ziggurats around the floor.

Volumes by American writers like Lorrie Moore, John Berryman and Patti Smith rub spines with the poetry of TS Eliot and a handsome edition of Mary Beard’s history of Pompeii. Welch catches me admiring this distinctly esoteric library and laughs. “I hid the self-help books before you got here,” she says.