“I love rap music so much”, beams Isabella Summers aka Isa Machine—the super producer that puts the ‘Machine’ into Florence + The Machine. When you hear the epic, throw-yourself-off-a-cliff, harp-infused sound of Florence + The Machine, hip-hop is probably not something that comes to mind but it’s hip hop that was Isa’s first love.

Born on Halloween in 1980, Isa is an OG Hackney girl who grew up with a proper cockney accent on Victoria Park Road. Despite the fact that her dad is a born and bred East Londoner, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to bring up his offspring in his native Hackney. When Isa was 10 years old the Summers upped sticks and moved to the seaside town of Aldeburgh.

“When I was 13 the two guys in the house next door to me were rude boys and older than me and I was terrified of them and therefore completely in awe of them,” says Isa. They gave their scrappy neighbour a cassette tape with Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle album on one side and 6 Feet Deep by Gravediggaz on the flip. Isa listened to that tape over and over and learnt every single word.

“When I was 15 my best mate Dale had decks and was into turntablism. There was nothing to do after school in the countryside, in the bleak east of England. It was a tiny seaside town, we moved from London to nothing by the epic sea. I hung out with loads of boys who smoked loads of weed and listened to hard American rap. They’d never let me touch the decks. Then when I was 18 I bought a pair of decks myself and thought if they can do it, I can do it.”

Eventually Isa moved back to the big smoke to study fine art at Central Saint Martins, where she made and soundtracked horror films for the next three years and that’s about when life got crazy. She moved into an infamous squat in Peckham, South London, known as the Co Op squat and would DJ at hip hop nights in Brixton and Stockwell. Isa immersed herself in the male dominated scene, turning up to gigs, 5ft tall with her bag of Mobb Deep records terrified and having to properly psyche herself up to go in and DJ.

Isa scored a part-time job at Xfm working on the station’s All City hip-hop radio show with Dan Greenpeace, who took her under his wing. Greenpeace was tapped into the hip-hop world and people like The Game, Guru and Gang Starr would regularly come through the studio. Isa got herself an MPC (music production controller) and a little studio in a former plastics factory in Crystal Palace and started making music with people like Skinnyman and Kashmere The Iguana Man. Collaborators began stacking up but then something unexpected happened—Isabella Summers met Florence Welch.