Big nights and big feelings left ‘a trail of absolute destruction’ in Florence Welch’s wake. As she prepares for the biggest night of her life headlining the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury, she opens up about karaoke, learning to cope and why she’s scared of her own voice

Florence Welch has woken up in some exciting places. Ask her about the time she drank so many dirty martinis with Kanye West and Lykke Li that she woke up in bed at the Bowery Hotel in New York to discover she had chipped her tooth and set the room on fire. Or the time, after playing the Hollywood Bowl, that she had seven extra beds sent up to her hotel room at the Chateau Marmont at 4am for her friends to sleep in.

On the other hand, there was the recent night at the campsite her dad runs in Sussex, when he hadn’t got a tent for her so she had to sleep in Shamanic Sid’s caravan (“he’s a really practical groundsman, but he’s also a shaman”). She walked into the woods, found a man brandishing a broadsword, was told to go away, then found out her dad didn’t have any food either. “So he said: ‘Oh, we’ll just go round the site and see what people are cooking.’ And we ended up asking strangers for some of their sausages.” It’s certainly one way to keep your famous child grounded.

At 28, Welch is now preparing for what might be the biggest night of her life – headlining Friday night at Glastonbury. After Dave Grohl broke his leg during a concert in Gothenburg and the Foo Fighters pulled out, Florence + the Machine were bumped up to the top slot. The night looks set to be half glamour, half Shamanic Sid. When we speak a few days before the festival, Welch is ruminating on the strange series of events that have got her here. Her foot, which, in an echo of Grohl’s accident, she recently broke on stage, has only just healed, and the songs she will play from her new album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, are about falling and crashing in a more spiritual sense.

Florence + the Machine: How Big How Blue How Beautiful review – same drama, new hits Read more

“It’s the broken hearts and broken limbs that led to Glastonbury,” she says. “It’s a strange and quite cracked way to get there. Literally. If I’d had six months knowing that I was going to do this [headline slot], I think I would have slowly descended into madness. But Glastonbury is such a powerful place that I feel we should get everyone in the crowd to use their healing powers – utilise the ley lines – to help Dave’s leg. Maybe I should hold a ceremony in the healing fields for him.”

But let’s rewind a couple of weeks, to when Grohl had fully functioning limbs and Florence was less daunted and very cheerful, sitting at her kitchen table in south London, making some herbal tea while I asked her about her new album, which is named for the Los Angeles skyline. On the song What Kind of Man, she sings: “I was on a heavy trip, trying to cross a canyon with a broken limb.” Those lines described her life: she kept splitting up with her boyfriend and life was continually crashing down around her. After spending years on the merry-go-round, careering too fast, she got off it and finally moved out of her mum’s house – only to find that sitting in your own kitchen can send you even crazier than the glittering parties. She had become famous young. She hadn’t learned to cook. She hadn’t learned to cope.

“I think living on my own for the first time showed me that I was actually quite sensitive, and was prone to highs and lows, and maybe needed to figure out a way of managing that a bit more, because when you’re left to your own devices and you find you can’t actually leave the house … some of it was desperate. I had been looking for other people to look after me, and that creates this really exhausting cycle for everyone involved. It’s very tiring. I think I can see that now,” she says, laughing at the embarrassing realisation that she might have been a bit of a nightmare.

I point out that it would be a shame to regret the whole thing though - surely the party years were fun? “Oh, it was fucking fab. I had a great time. I think I just funned myself out. I’m glad, I needed to – but there were moments where I wish I hadn’t ended up on the news, singing a batshit karaoke version of Get Lucky in a tiki bar and then crowdsurfing on to nobody. My manager rang me saying: ‘Er, have you done any cover versions recently? Because there’s this footage …’ I thought I’d got away with that one. So that was when I wrote Ship To Wreck, which is a song about self-destruction.”

She had a period where she thought she might be a depressive, but she now thinks she is actually porous – she soaks up other people’s emotions and then feels them even more vividly than they do. So she can be very upbeat, like she is today, “but I’ve had relationships in the past where, say, if someone’s sad, I’ve gone round to look after them, I’ve laid in bed with them and,” she mimes spooning somebody, “then in the morning, I’d wake up and I’d be like, full. Absolutely full to the brim, and weeping hysterically.” She says her dad sometimes drives his red sports car into her garden and stays on the sofa for the weekend, but their temperaments are too similar, and they mope around the house saying to each other: “Are you sad? I think I’m sad.” Fortunately, her mum also comes round a lot, too (her parents divorced years ago) and the other day she said to Florence: “You know, you’re just a normal person really, who does all this other stuff, too” – a statement that seems to have brought her huge relief.

All the other stuff, though, is what we are here to talk about. When I first saw Welch sing, eight years ago, at a daytime event for unsigned artists in a north London pub, her voice was the biggest thing in the room, electrifying, singing these stark, dark songs, Kiss with a Fist and My Boy Builds Coffins. Then she got discovered, signed a record deal, and the songs began to grow, like gardens that grow over themselves. Her first two albums, Lungs and Ceremonials, were dramatic, harp-laden affairs that achieved the rare feat of breaking America – Ceremonials reached No 6 in the US and Florence + the Machine received two Grammy nominations in its wake. The girl raised in a bohemian house full of kids in south London, by an art historian mother, was now a global star, invited on American chatshows, to talk about collaborating with Kanye, to hang out with Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

But the simple connection to her original electricity had been lost. It seems that producer Markus Dravs thought so, too, which became clear to Welch after she brought him in to work with Paul Epworth on the new album. She wrote certain songs, including St Jude and Ship to Wreck, quite simply and immediately. “And then this huge trumpet-heavy Which Witch one, where I thought Markus would say: ‘Yeah, that’s it!’ because it was big. But actually he was a lot more interested in the quieter, vulnerable ones. I just thought they were too simple. I was like: ‘Where’s all the STUFF?’ I’m like: ‘Me and Isa [Isabella Summers, the Machine of the group name, and the only other permanent member] have spent weeks on this big one, there are imaginary covens, all these vocals on top of the other, I’ve sung a hundred takes and put in a weird football chant at the end – and now you just want this one that took five minutes? Where’s the big finish? Can I at least have more reverb?’”

Did she feel a song that came too easily, too simply, was somehow unearned? She nods. “Exactly.” She and Dravs had a lot of arguments about reverb, “which I love, because I’m pretty much scared of the sound of my own voice, as it is, because I think it’s so exposing. Live, I kind of know what I’m doing, but hearing it on record, it’s like hearing your own voice on tape, I’m just like: ‘Argh.’ So I love effects, and I love loads of layers on my vocals, because you can’t quite hear what’s going on, and that is my safe space. But Markus said: ‘This is your safe space. These big songs, that’s what you feel comfortable doing. We’re going to try to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Big voice … Welch. Photograph: Michael Loccisano

She won half of the reverb wars, so there are still a lot of big songs on the album. She was inspired by Vali Myers, a bohemian artist who made paintings based on Aboriginal dream songs. “They would take her 10 years to make and she had a tattoo of a moustache. She became the spirit animal for this record, because she would go to the dream world and bring back ideas for her paintings, and she lived in a cave in Portofino with foxes and she was an amazing lady, really incredible. And then, me and Isa were in LA and thinking about this kind of idea of a witch trial in LA, a Hollywood love story that goes wrong, and someone dies. It was kind of about things that were happening in my real life, but again, escapism. I started singing trumpet lines – I would sing them, and then we would try to make them work on a Midi keyboard, which is impossible. And huge big clapping, stamping, feral feet. That was kind of an armour against what I was feeling: it was like: ‘Fuck you, look at this big song I’ve made!’”

The album took her through a lot of feelings that had been unresolved until she put them to music. “The problem is that I’m not very good at saying how I feel, in person. When you’re a performer, you want to make people feel good. And when you do that on such a grand scale … when your feelings are difficult, smaller and more domestic, you’re just like: ‘I have no idea how that is said. Do you want me to sing it?’ I can go and sing it to loads of strangers, but this kind of … the intensity of actual day-to-day intimacy …”

She shows me a piece of art she made when she studied at Camberwell School of Art for a bit. It is a tiny glass jar with some paper bees hanging inside it and a sign saying: “I’m so sorry for everything and I’m going to stay in here with the bees until you forgive me.”

So what was she so guilty about?

Performing with Dizzee Rascal at The Brit Awards 2010. Photograph: Dave M Benett

“Well, I was always getting drunk and snogging people! Which actually, thinking about it, wasn’t that bad. But it created a very – I was just like: ‘Arghh! What am I doing? Why am I doing this again?’ I would wake up somewhere really random and have to cancel cards, cancel phones. There was always a lost handbag. A trail of absolute destruction.” She had singing lessons with a teacher who said: if you want to be a singer, don’t shout, don’t talk loudly, don’t smoke, don’t drink, or go to loud places. “And I was like: ‘I want to do all of that stuff, RIGHT NOW.’ I would start smoking on the way back from singing lessons.

“It was weird, because singing for a while was something that I felt was like secret, my secret thing. When I was little, at school, I just felt quite mundane. But I remember singing in the school hallways when everyone else was in class, because of the echoes, and the resonance was so wonderful, and I can remember that feeling of: ‘Whoa, what is this? This is something.’”

She shows me round her house, which is so beautifully decorated and full of art and treasures that I am surprised to find out she only rents it. She is trying to buy a house somewhere else, a bigger one, as she would like to have children. The video for Ship to Wreck was shot here, and she found it odd to have all these people in her elaborately curated home. “I’ve done videos where I have to take my top off, that’s fine, nudity doesn’t bother me at all – but having people around my possessions. I’m like: ‘DON’T MESS UP MY STUFF,’” she laughs.

And then she remembers something else from childhood, which for me, sums her up entirely, and explains why her songs get so large, and her life so performative.

“We were on a family holiday to Turkey, I’d gone off for a walk on my own, and I remember first seeing these ancient ruins, and being so completely sensorily overwhelmed by how beautiful they were. Just trying to suck it into my body and my brain somehow. I was trying to feast on it. I really wanted all of it, and I was frustrated that my eyes weren’t – I didn’t know how to get it. I was like: ‘I WANT.’ And I think that’s a feeling that I have about the world sometimes. I’m just like: ‘I want to suck it into myself somehow.’ Those quite big feelings can create something almost uncomfortable and so they have to come out in a really big way.”

Which is another way of saying that the reverb wars are not over for a long time yet. I do wonder what will happen when she comes full circle to the 19-year-old girl singing in a bar on a Sunday afternoon.

Florence + the Machine headline Glastonbury Friday 26 June. Their performance will be shown on BBC2. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is out now on Island.