Florence + The Punk Women
I never thought that my two musical worlds would collide but, in summer 2019, they did
It was Saturday 13th July 2019: British Summer Time day.
I gave the small pile of luggage by the door a once over: Sun block? Check, gig bag and overnight bag? Check, hat? Check. The train to Euston was due to leave at 8:04am. It would be a two hour train journey followed by the tube to Victoria, a ten minute walk to the hotel (where I could leave my bag to check in later) and a half hour walk from my hotel to Hyde Park.
When I attended British Summer Time festival in 2016 I’d paid extra for Priority Entry, meaning my entry gate was not far from Hyde Park Corner. This time I’d been too poor to pay the extra and, as such, faced a long walk through the park to General Entry, near the Lancaster Gate entrance, which I remembered wasn’t far from the neighbourhood where The Raincoats Gina Birch lived.
The day was hotting up and I could feel the glare of the sun on me as I walked through the park. It was starting to feel humid. I thought about 2016's British Summer Time festival, about interviewing Gina in 2009, and my memories of the Florence + The Machine High As Hope tour so far. Of seeing the band play to an exuberant crowd in Birmingham, then in Manchester a week later with my friend David, who had never seen Florence live before. Remembering the look of shocked delight on his face when she left the stage during ‘Delilah’ and began to run through the crowd. A Florence + The Machine gig really is unlike any other; a shared emotional exchange that runs deep on both sides, led by a warm and instinctive front woman who takes the audience along with her.
‘Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)’, the third single from Florence + The Machine’s Lungs album, was released in late June 2009. The huge, complex nature of the song thrilled and enthralled me on my first listen, and I felt excited about music in a way that I hadn’t done for years.
I had heard the debut Florence + The Machine single, ‘Kiss With A Fist’, when it was released in Autumn 2008, but while it was an alarmingly violent slice of punky rockabilly, it hadn’t felt like a particularly remarkable record. ‘Dog Days Are Over’, the band’s second single, was much more representative of the whole Florence + The Machine sound: That all encompassing, emotionally overwhelming sonic wave, layered and carefully crafted. It should have been the song for me, but it wasn’t because I missed its release entirely. As a music journalist this was unforgivable, but as a human being it was perfectly understandable: At the time of its release, I was basically going through the motions of life.
Three years into a freelance music journalist career, I was discovering that not only was it going to be harder than I thought to make a career as a writer but that the path to success was paved by badly paid assignments, late payments and editors broken promises. Even my day job working at the local university library wasn’t going well: I’d suffered a permanent physical injury to my shoulder and we were in the middle of a particularly prolonged and torturous staff restructure.
In times of crisis I tend to turn to music or books, but in late 2008 and early 2009 I’d been finding it hard to locate the right kind of medicine in either art form. I spent most of early 2009 listening to The Best of Simon and Garfunkel, which was not a natural choice for a girl who’d grown up listening to 1970s punk and 1990s Riot Grrrl. It was definitely an indication of my wider mental state at the time, and I’m pretty sure that the spiral of anxiety I was enduring also explains how I came to become obsessed with Laura Nyro’s Eli & The Thirteenth Confession. Until my pre-order of ‘Rabbit Heart’ arrived on 21st June, I was listening to nothing else.
I now know that anxiety manifests itself differently for different people but that a common theme is a need to find something you can have control over. The need stems from a perceived lack of control in everyday life coupled with a craving for some kind of stability: You need something — however small — that you can control in a world in which you feel powerless. For some people this manifests itself in a desire to control the people around them, or sometimes they will rigidly control the food they eat. For me, it manifested itself through how I listened to music. Not so much what I listened to as how I listened to it: Over the years I have developed what I can only describe as ritualistic listening habits.
It started in high school at the height of my punk and Riot Grrrl period when, for months on end, I would get up when my alarm went off before school, switch it off, switch on my record player and put on side A of either Siouxsie and the Banshees A Kiss In The Dreamhouse or Patti Smith’s Horses. I would then go back to bed, only getting up again once side A had finished. I’d then get dressed to side B.
I would alternate them every few weeks: Siouxsie, then Patti, then back to Siouxsie again. I usually arrived home from school feeling furious, depressed, or both so my after school listening tended to comprise of Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland and Hole most days.
The Laura Nyro CD was part of a new ritual, one that came to include ‘Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)’. I had worried that I’d over-remembered the song and that it wouldn’t be as good as I remembered, but I was proved wrong at the first listen: It was so much better. Thematically, the song can be read as an account of someone about to set foot into the music business at the corporate level. Someone shy who knows they are liable to get hurt but who feels compelled to enter the belly of the beast. But it’s also a song about strength and bravery.
If ‘Rabbit Heart’ had made me feel exhilarated and ready to fall in love with music again, Lungs, the bands debut album, was a sonic avalanche: It was absolutely overwhelming. “I have been waiting for this band all my life” I thought as I lay on my bed with my eyes closed.
What struck me from the start was both the hugeness of the sound but also the hugeness of the emotion being conveyed: This was the sound of a young woman exorcising all her anger, pain and sadness in one go, not holding back, just pouring it out in an absolute torrent.
The 2000’s had felt like a very arch, post modern kind of decade in indie music. It had all seemed a bit too achingly cool and bloodless. Lungs was the diametric opposite of that. The album’s artwork matched the strange intensity of the music. This was no arch millennial post-punk girl, this was a bloodied pre Raphaelite heroine staggering through the thorns of life, battering away at life’s demons.
I wanted to find out more about Florence Welch, but there was also a part of me that didn’t want to, that wanted to preserve the mystique. Had I disliked her as a person I don’t think I could have taken it.
By this time I was emerging from my period of anxiety and despair and felt ready to re-boot my journalism career. I was looking for a cause and I found it with the publication of Zoe Howe’s book Typical Girls? The Story Of The Slits.
Through personal research, I discovered that a small group of women in the UK, most of whom had been involved with the 1970s punk scene, were starting to write about their own and their contemporaries experiences of the punk world. Helen Reddington’s academic book, The Lost Women of Rock Music, had been published in 2007, the same year as Lavinia Greenlaw’s memoir The Importance of Music To Girls. Zillah Minx’s film She’s A Punk Rocker had also come out that year. In 2009 there was the Zoe Howe book plus news that The Raincoats Gina Birch was working on a film.
What was really interesting to me was this sense that women were looking at the established cultural histories of punk, of which there were a colossal amount by 2009, and were seeing that they were not represented by them. They were furious about this lack of representation and, rather than simply staying furious, had chosen to challenge the status quo by creating their own accounts. The big question, for me, was why they were doing it now, over thirty years after punk’s high point.
I began my research by reading the Zoe Howe book and interviewing writer and former member of The Catholic Girls, Lucy O’Brien. We had an illuminating and very inspiring phone conversation that served as the opening of a kind of Pandora’s Box, research wise. I realised that, despite a long standing personal interest in the scene, there was so much about punk that I didn’t know and needed to find out about.
That October I spent a week in London interviewing Gina Birch, Helen Reddington and journalist and artist Caroline Coon. I also visited a number of archives and conducted secondary research. When I wasn’t doing that I was enthusing excitedly to my editor, Jess McCabe, about a story I was beginning to realise was much, much bigger than I had anticipated.
The work itself was written over Christmas 2009, and was finished just before New Years Eve. I can remember feeling a sense of exhilaration, both as I was writing it and as I was typing it up, but somewhere along the line alarm bells began to ring increasingly loudly.
I hadn’t actually counted how many words I’d written and when I finally did my heart plummeted: It was just over 43,000 words. A wave of tiredness washed over me and I suddenly felt utterly exhausted. This piece had been all consuming, all absorbing for me since September, and I was worried that it had been for nothing: I couldn’t submit 43,000 words to Jess at The F-Word, could I? Well, there was one way to find out…
I sent a text. Then, even though it was only early afternoon, I went to bed.
It was getting dark when I got up again. Jess had texted me back. “Eep!” she began, and then “I suppose it’ll have to be a serial then!”
I’m very sure that no other editor would have taken it that way.
Throughout 2010 we serialised the punk women essay on The F-Word and I can honestly say that I’ve never received so many responses to a piece of work that I’ve written. All of the responses were positive, and one of my favourites came from a friend of Jess: “I felt really sad when they all gave up making music in the eighties” she said. She had become invested in the women’s stories, she was rooting for them.
Other women got in touch, often with their own stories, and I was very excited to hear from legendary fanzine writer Lucy Whitman, neé Lucy Toothpaste, who had enjoyed my essays but was now asking “Why didn’t you interview me?”
Amidst all this positive feedback in 2010, an idea began to form: What if I carried on with my research? What if I turned the essays into a book? The Slits frontwoman, Ari Up, had died in 2010 as we were serialising the the essay, and X Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene died less than a year later, in 2011. In both cases, there was a sense that these women had not been given due credit in their lifetimes, that their creativity and talent had not been sufficiently celebrated while they were alive.
In addition to interviewing Lucy Whitman and film maker and musician Zillah Minx, I found myself being invited to talk in a variety of venues (generally libraries, aptly) about women and subculture and women and fanzines. Between 2010 and 2013 I also changed library jobs twice and purchased the second Florence + The Machine album, Ceremonials, which was released on Halloween 2011.
Because I had become so absorbed by my punk women research I feel as though I kept my Florence + The Machine fandom at arms length: I really loved Lungs and Ceremonials, I’d tentatively read up on Florence Welch, but I never saw the band live during this period and I didn’t dive fully into the fan hinterland around the band until later. There are various reasons for this, including my profound loathing of smartphones at gigs, but when I look back I suspect that I was also slightly afraid that I’d lose my head completely if I dived too far into that world.
The first time I saw the band live was on the UK leg of the 2015 How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful tour at Manchester Arena. There had been a lengthy gap between Ceremonials and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful and, while I certainly hadn’t forgotten about Florence in the interim, she had faded a little from my day to day radar.
Florence Welch took a year off around about 2014 and in 2015 the suggestion was that she’d been having a bad time emotionally, mentally and romantically. We now know that she also spent the time quietly getting sober away from the public eye while, very slowly and painfully, writing and recording How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.
While Lungs and Ceremonials can be regarded as a pair of albums that book end each other, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful saw Florence turn away from dark baroque. By comparison, the bands third album was almost quiet, fairly stripped back in sound, more straightforward. Sure, it was still complex, but the drums were quieter, the vocals weren’t layered, it wasn’t so sonically overwhelming and there was space to breathe.
While songs like ‘Queen of Peace’ and ‘Delilah’ felt huge, ferocious, angry and complex, songs like ‘Long And Lost’ and ‘Various Storms & Saints’ were quieter, more contemplative, and sadder. If Lungs was the sound of a young woman’s rage, pain and fears and Ceremonials was it’s darker, sleeker sibling, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was 28 year old Florence’s heartbreak album.
The Florence + The Machine show at Manchester Arena came along at an interesting time for me. I was feeling burned out and exhausted by my library job, and I wasn’t feeling massively energised by the punk women project either. It was starting to feel like a weight around my neck. I was looking for something to fill my life and, as such, I was finally ready to dive headlong into the luminous hinterland of Florence + The Machine fandom.
Between September 2015 and February 2016, I don’t think I listened to anything other than the three Florence + The Machine albums. The How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful tour seemed to be serving as a process of exorcism for Florence Welch and this sense of pain as a process, a journey of self discovery, was underlined by The Odyssey, the long-form film made to accompany the album’s release. It took its narrative structure and themes from Dante’s Inferno and made use of contemporary dance as well as music to tell its story. Caravaggio had also been a touchstone, whereas Ceremonials owed more to Klimt and Lungs to Rossetti. Had I not already decided that there was more to Florence Welch than a jaw dropping voice and a kind of idiosyncratic pre Raphaelite beauty, The Odyssey would have confirmed it for me. The film is not an easy watch, but there’s an honesty to it that shines through. It has a clear narrative arc and you experience a real sense of catharsis at the conclusion.
Perhaps because I had dived headlong into the arms of the Florence + The Machine Army, 2016 was the year in which I felt the most tested when it came to balancing the needs of my punk research world with my Florence + The Machine fan world. London’s 40 Years Of Punk celebrations happened that year and, as an amateur punk scholar, I felt duty bound to attend. Even if the season of events had been signed off by Boris Johnson in his role as Mayor of London and seemed to be being done more in the interests of tourism than of cultural history.
For logistical and financial reasons I couldn’t attend the full calendar of events but I did make a point of attending the two events devoted to punk’s women question. A Sunday afternoon panel discussion in Stoke Newington with Liz Naylor, Helen McCookerybook (neé Reddington), Gina Birch, Pauline Murray and Shanne Hasler was followed by a screening of Helen and Gina’s work in progress of their film, Stories From The She-Punks, at the British Library’s conference centre in June 2016.
The audience at the British Library was full of magnificently dressed punk women, some of whom had been interviewed for the film. There were also fans; women of the punk generation who had come to see a film about their idols, and younger women who had come to hear about their forebears.
The introduction and explanation messers McCookerybook and Birch gave their film was endearingly self depreciating and defensive; they genuinely didn’t know what the audience were going to make of this very bare bones documentary. Their aim was to tell a story that had been hidden from history, to make a film in which the UK’s female punk musicians talked matter of factly about how they had got into music and about their musical careers and creative processes. For many of the interviewees, the film represented the very first time they had spoken on camera about their punk past.
The applause the film received, and the outpouring of personal experiences from the crowd during the Q&A, suggested that Birch and McCookerybook had tapped a need. The event ended with a sing along performance of the X Ray Spex song ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours!’ and an enthusiastic pogo pit formed in front of the stage.
Afterwards, there were drinks and conversations to be had but I found it difficult to relax: I’d only been able to get three hours off work and, as such, I had to be back at Euston at 9:40pm to get the train home.
I arrived back in Manchester at about half 11pm and walked through the largely deserted train station to the escalator, past the drunks squabbling by the taxi rank, and onto the bus. I arrived home about midnight, went straight to bed, and got up again at 7am, ready to do battle with the library book sorter and a phone that would not stop ringing all day.
Then, in the chaos and despair following the EU Referendum result, I went to see Florence + The Machine headline British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park on the 2nd July.
I can’t think of a single band who would relish being in a festival backstage area while a pro EU protest takes place next door in Green Park, but that was exactly what happened that day. I knew from her Twitter feed that Florence had backed Remain (as had I) and I later found out that Helen McCookerybook had been on the protest march from Green Park.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, Florence Welch had already begun writing 2018’s High As Hope album when the band played Hyde Park. ‘June’, the opening track on that album, was written in June 2016 as the band neared the end of their lengthy US tour and prepared to return to London. The song is the sound of two people clinging to each other for dear life against the hurricane of real life events in the outside world. Its central lyrical refrain, ‘Hold on to each other’, would become a rallying cry for fans in 2018 and 2019.
It was after the 2016 Hyde Park show that I found out about the Florence + The Machine book club, Between Two Books. It was set up in 2012 by Irish teenager Leah Moloney, who had been following Welch on Twitter. Inspired by her literary themed postings about book shops and the books she was reading, Leah tweeted that it would be a good thing for Florence to have her own book club in which she recommended reads to her fans. Rather than disappearing into the social media ether, Welch picked up on Moloney’s tweet and replied to her, saying she thought it was a good idea.
The book club grew slowly and organically, with titles picked initially by Florence Welch but later by Between Two Books themselves, by authors the book club had read together, and by friends and acquaintances from within the Florence universe. By July 2019, we had read 43 books together.
Florence + The Machine fans have always been a breed apart. They are a female dominated fanbase and the age range at shows tends to be anything from mid teens to 60+. There’s a strong LGBTQ+ contingent, and while the audience is very white, it’s becoming less so.
Among the Flow’s you will see a lot of long flowing dresses, flowers, face glitter and long red hair. Outside of the live arena, there are strong fan networks, or Florence + The Machine armies, around the world. Many fans travel from country to country to see the band live as well as to meet other fans. There are significant fanbases in Europe, the UK, US, Australia and South America. As well as Between Two Books, there are fans who create art or poetry inspired by Florence Welch, including films, embroidery and paintings.
An early indication that my Florence + The Machine fan world would one day collide with my punk scholar world was the discovery that Florence Welch is a massive Patti Smith fan. I feel as though I have always known this but it’s fair to say that I really began to appreciate the depth of her attachment to Smith when I began to explore the Between Two Books reading list and Florence’s Twitter feed.
The link became explicit in 2018 with the release of the High As Hope album and the song ‘Patricia’, a salute to Smith, who Welch describes as her “North star”. It felt good to me to hear a younger woman saluting a musician who I had grown up listening to, if not idolising. Florence Welch is roughly seven and a half years younger than me and, even as a teenager in the 1990s, I didn’t know anyone my own age who liked Patti Smith.
When I came to interview women about punk, many of my interviewees mentioned Patti Smith as a key touchstone for them. The Horses album, the very album that had helped to get me through the day as a depressed fifteen year old, had been a key moment for many of them, not just musically but aesthetically: Smith’s androgynous image, as expressed on the album’s sleeve via a portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, had shown them there was another way to be a woman.
Welch’s own Mapplethorpe is Tom Beard, the photographer she has known since she was seventeen. He has taken all of her album sleeve images and can be regarded as an integral part of the Florence + The Machine team. While Smith appeared on the cover of Horses with short hair, wearing a man’s shirt and braces with a jacket slung casually over her shoulder, Welch appears on the High As Hope cover in a pale pink dress, her long red hair hanging over one shoulder and her arms folded in a way that appears defensive. One hand holds a single flower and it’s possible to make out a number of tattoos on her hands. While Smith is depicted calmly facing the camera, an expression of cool nonchalance and slight challenge on her face, Welch’s expression is a combination of defensiveness and defiance and, as with many of her photos, she appears haunted. The photo has the composition of a pre Raphaelite painting for the modern age, a defiantly feminine image with an edge.
As part of the High As Hope tour, the band returned to Hyde Park to play British Summer Time festival in July 2019 at the head of a bill that was 70% female. Welch put her stamp on the festival in other ways too, most notably by including Between Two Books in the bill. The book club had held a couple of IRL book discussions prior to this, but this was the first time there had been one in London, Florence’s home town. Not only that but the book we would be discussing was Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls and Greenlaw would be joining the discussion. If I hadn’t already bought a ticket to see Florence + The Machine, I’d have bought one to see Lavinia Greenlaw, a woman I had thought about interviewing for my punk women book more than once.
While The Importance of Music to Girls is not a book about women and punk, it is the story of a young woman’s journey through life via her experience of music, and like many of her contemporaries, Lavinia was saved by punk.
One of the undoubted perks of meeting and interviewing so many punk women is that I get to hear them talk about what punk meant to them as young women. There may be similarities but every story is different.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s story was equally as interesting and inspiring as any I’d heard, only I didn’t hear it over a kitchen table, in a bar or cafe, over a dictaphone. I heard it at British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park while crammed up against a barrier. Which didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the moment one bit.
Lavinia was talking to Leah and Kate, the two early twenty somethings who run Between Two Books, and they had evidently read the book closely and thoroughly enjoyed it. I found it really interesting, and touching, to watch this dynamic between women who were separated by two generations. It was a dynamic that shifted again with the arrival of Florence Welch, who appeared partway through the discussion, armed with a notebook of questions and a keen interest in the book. She came across as enthusiastic but slightly shy, with a self depreciating humour that I was very taken by. I felt calmly riveted but also really weirded out by the undeniable knowledge that my punk scholar world was solidly colliding with my Florence + The Machine fan world.
Back at home I reviewed the progress I’d made on the punk women book since I’d left my library job in 2018 to go full time freelance. I didn’t feel as though I had a lot to show for it. A literary agent had been cautiously interested in the book back in late 2016, and she had suggested ways in which I could re-structure what was becoming an increasingly unwieldy narrative. When I’d made the changes and submitted a new proposal in 2018, she was no longer interested, so I was effectively starting again.
After British Summer Time I suddenly knew how I could move forwards with the book and immediately set to work. This is how I came to spend the hottest day of 2019 in my flat with all my windows open, writing furiously at my desk. It felt highly appropriate that this sudden urge to re-visit my most recent draft of the book had been, in part, inspired by Florence Welch. In a funny kind of way, that’s how it’s always been these past ten years. During another period of anxiety in 2017, I’d even made a full playlist of songs I’d been listening to while working on it, and Florence + The Machine was by far and away the most prominent artist on the list.
It would be fair to say that my own personal punk origin story begins with me watching Siouxsie and the Banshees performing ‘Kiss Them For Me’ on Top Of The Pops when I was twelve, and that my interest in how punk was written about stems from reading Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming when I was fifteen. But it would also be fair to say that the current bit of the journey begins, and may even end with, Florence + The Machine, a band who emerged from the late 2000’s South London punk scene, and that that is how it should be.
