Florence + The Machine

Let’s talk about magic. Because music, at its best, is a kind of magic that lifts you up and takes you somewhere else. “I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tallbuilding, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe,” says Florence Welch. “It’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you’re either going toexplode with it, or you’re just going to disappear.”

Florence writes her best songs when she’s drunk or has a hangover, because that’s when the freedom, the feral music comes, creating itself wildlyfrom 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.”

Florence herself is a mass of contradictions: she’s toughyet she’s terrified, a bundle of nerves and passion, of darkness and pure joy. “I feel things quite intensely, which is why the music has to be so intense. I’m either really sad or really happy, I’mtired or completely manic. That’s when I’m at my most creative, but it’s also dangerous for me. I feel I could write some good songs, or break some hearts. Or tables. Or glasses.”

As a performershe can seem fearless, but she’s also far too quick to pass judgement on herself. This is the woman, after all who got into Camberwell art college by making a huge floral sign telling herself ‘You are atwat.’ She says she’s a geek, who loses all control when in love. She’s also something increasingly rare and precious in a time of karaoke pop: an artist who has found her own, authentic voice.Her soaring, epic vocals, quirky melodies and self-contained musical world have already won her the 2009 Critics Choice Award at the Brits. Some compare her to Kate Bush. You’ll also find touches of...