When Florence Welch’s talents propelled her to early stardom, her mother made a speech at her 27th birthday, pleading for her friends to keep her out of the 27 club, the list of artists who died at that age, largely due to a self-destructive lifestyle. (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, to name a few.)
Florence got sober a few months later, and states it is the best thing she ever did. “I was one of those drinkers where it was all or nothing. If I enjoy my drinking, I can’t control it and if I control my drinking, I don’t enjoy it.” 1
Having spent my own years of drinking and drugging, her music captures and understands my feelings on addiction unlike any other. And now, with 30 years of sobriety, there are very few sober highs more powerful than hearing Florence + the Machine music, particularly when performed live.
I vividly remember the first time I saw her perform, 2010, MTV Music Awards. As if commanded to do so, I was brought to my feet and stood next to the TV in admiration, and I’ve been mesmerized ever since. Lyrics and music that embrace both darkness and beauty. Cosmic, spiritual, full of passion, raw emotion, introspective with stunning vulnerability. Her poetic lyrics are filled with evocative imagery, inspired by mythology and folk horror—that folk horror never more present than her most recent album, Everybody Scream.
No feeling is small in the F+TM world. Everything is huge and sweeping and drastic and visceral and harrowing and epic, as she says in King, “my halls echo with grand self-mythology.” Tragic figures of mythology, quite often, but also songs of beautiful triumph, embracing the full spectrum of your being. In Everybody Scream, she’s integrated a witch spirit full of feminine power and rage and terror, baring her soul, and asking us in Kraken, as she turns into a ravenous creature of the deep: “Do you see me now?”
Yes, I do see you, and maybe more meaningful, I feel seen by you, for no other artist has captured my own emotions and trauma and hope around the subject of addiction.
From her first hit song, a tendency for unbridled yearnings was clear, the beat of Dog Days Are Over slows down to a crawl with Florence declaring: “I never wanted anything from you—except all that you had, and what was left after that too” before it picks back up again into the big booming beat. Such are the big feelings and primal cravings in the F+TM world. Demons and Gods and death and so often self-destruction (usually depicted as a drowning). Would anybody be shocked if such an artist fell into addiction?
The intensity and tendency for excess is in so much of her music. In the song Moderation, she sings: “Want me to love you in moderation? Do I look moderate to you? Want me to love you in moderation? Well, who do you think you're talking to?”
And in Hunger: “I thought that love was in the drugs, but the more I took, the more it took away, and I could never get enough.”
And in Delilah, a song of deep emotional turmoil and betrayal: “Now the sun is up and I'm going blind, another drink just to pass the time—I can never say no.”
Florence talks about her behavior in her early twenties as coming from a place of “self-loathing,” saying “I was able to push boundaries and take chances because I wasn’t very fussed about whether I came back alive. Oblivion was usually the goal.” 1
The self-loathing is clear in the melancholy Back in Town: “I’ve never really been alive before, I always stayed in my head. It was always easier, hungover and half dead…. because it’s always the same. I came for the pleasure, but I stayed (yes I stayed) for the pain.”
That line, I came for the pleasure, but I stayed for the pain, particularly the way she delivers it, resonates with me, and I suspect every addict. Is that not what we do? Come for the pleasure, but we stay (yes we stay) for the pain. Drinking and drugging is hardly pleasurable as it evolves, but the pain is something we reveal in, because there is something real in that suffering, perfectly avoidant, and the cycle of craving, then seeking, then peak anticipation, and that momentary relief, ahhhhhhh…. And the pain, consistent and expected, always follows.
The short, haunting song, Restraint, has only one line of lyrics: “I never learned restraint. Am I quiet enough for you yet?” Restraint seems as if it was written specifically for performing on the stage. (I caught a video of this live during the Dance Fever tour: see below). Watch how at first Florence punches outward to the drum beat, as if lashing out at others, but ends with her punching inward, as if stabbing herself. Because isn’t that what happens in addiction? First we hurt others, then ourselves.
So when Florence sings, “I never knew my killer would be coming from within” in King, there’s this inference she means her drinking (mixed in with eating disorder traits and ever-present anxiety.) But this line killer coming from within tragically foreshadows the miscarriage that required emergency care or it would have ended her life. Not only does she reference mythology in her music, her life course has become myth incarnate. No need to apologize for self-mythologizing, it’s as if the Gods have ordained she will live as a mythic figure. The 27 club can't have her, neither can death by addiction.
(Worth clarifying, when I describe her addiction, ‘addiction’ is my word, since I can't be certain she would label it the same, but clearly it’s a self-destructive relationship with drinking and drugging that had to stop.)
But looking back on those days, is it all regret, or does a longing and hunger still exist? “I tend to look back on that time with a mix of nostalgia and terror,” Florence explains. “There’s a part of me that is in awe of that girl, her total disregard for self-preservation, how she could run at the world headfirst, eyes closed, with no care for the consequences. But I also want to hold her in my arms, say, ‘It’s OK, you’re OK, you can come down now. You’ve been screaming at the top of that tree for a bit too long.’” 1
She sings of this nostalgia in her song South London Forever, driving past the places she used to drink, “Young and drunk and stumbling …. High on E (ecstasy) and holding hands with someone that I just met” and at the time, she thought, “it doesn’t get better than this.”
Those moments of drinking and drugging leave a permanent psychological and spiritual imprint for those in their addiction. These peak experiences are, in some ways, something humans were just not meant to feel, but we found a way through some kind of chemical alchemy. Trying to cheat nature into euphoria and giving us at least the illusion of being God-like. But at some point it becomes too much, and at the last moment we beg for rescue. Please, someone “grab me by my ankles I’ve been flying for too long.” (Sky Full of Song)
The song Mermaids perhaps captures this self-destruction best. It tells the story of mythical creatures with razor blade teeth who delight in drunken revelry during their one night upon the shore. In Mermaids, Florence again reminisces: “I remember falling through these streets, somewhat out of place, if not for the drunkenness. It makes my chest hurt to think of it, not of regret but of missing that—Cheerful Oblivion”
I see you, and I feel seen, for this is exactly how I feel about the city I did the most damage to my own spirit, Ann Arbor. Every street corner I have another story of getting kicked out of that bar, or stumbling down this street, or a friend who lived in the house over there that is now dead from their addiction, which I would have been too had I not gotten out. But a part of me can't help but romanticize the thrills of it all. That cheerful oblivion.
When others ask me, even after 30 years of sobriety, if I still crave to drink, I have to decide if I should be honest, for the truth shocks them. Though it nearly killed me, with a liver swollen up like a watermelon, bleeding internally, persistent despair and hopelessness, the cravings are still there (though nowhere near what they once were). I’ve found that ‘not drinking’ now comes as naturally as someone with a nut allergy who looks at a peanut butter jar and knows it will kill them, and turning away is reflexive.
Yet still, I feel the craving in my gut the way you might feel being hungry for food. To me, it’s just evidence of the monstrous beast always living inside me, and so, when Florence sings “your threats and promises, they don’t scare me, after all there is nobody more monstrous than me.” I feel that, the fan base feels that. That’s me, I’m her, we’re her, if only we could all express it the same, but we don’t need to, she’s doing that for us.
The devastation of substance use is present in the song Morning Elvis, where Florence sings about laying on the bathroom floor of a hotel room, the trip to Graceland diverted because she’s too strung out.
“Bathroom tiles were cool against my head, I pressed my forehead to the floor, and prayed for a trapdoor, I've been here many times before..." Recalling broken promises to stop drinking: “after every tour, I swear I'll quit, it's over boys, now this is it. But the call, it always comes And it sounds like children, Begging to be born."
Children begging to be born? My God, yes, the cravings, living inside, and like children, begging to be born. I'm grateful I've learned not to set those monsters free.
There is something so beautiful that Morning Elvis was the closing track of the album Dance Fever, with lyrics crying out: “If I make it to the stage, I’m going to show you what it means to be spared" and then the first words of the next album, “She gets on the stage, and they call her by her first name” Like an answered prayer, a spell cast, please, if you save me from this, I promise I’ll change, was answered. “I guess I got my wish, anything, anything, anything but this."
But miracles are often inconvenient, because then the terror of now what? How the fuck do I live stone cold sober? This line in Mermaids that resonates with me, as it does to many:
“Oh you know I'm still afraid—I'm still crazy and I'm still scared.”
As with every lyric written on this page, the emotion is felt in the hearing it sung, not in the reading. I’m still afraid. I’m still crazy and I’m still scared. Yes. I’m with you. But also with the defiant stance: if I make it to the stage I’m going to show you what it means to be spared.
Because I am going to make it to the stage.
Two in Chicago, one in Detroit. Three F+TM shows in a row. Two of them I will be stage-side, close enough to smell the Witch Coven’s brew. I am not going to hear Mermaids or Morning Elvis, but I will bear witness to a human siren, me tied up to the mast in recovery so I don’t crash on the shores. I’m going to Howl. Going to watch her unfurl to her full size, burst through the ceiling, so glad I came And the anticipation for being at these performances is not unlike the cravings I used to have to get high, only this one is not destructive. And what a gift it is, to let the chorus console me, because the way you stay sober is not to stop getting high, but find natural ways of release.
Because we need that release. Being sober means reality all day, every day, without an artificial relief valve. Florence explains this the same when she shares: “When you’re sober it is unfiltered reality all day every day. You don’t get a brain break.” 1
I feel that. And the thing is, one of the greatest highs of my sober life (or all my life, really) is listening to Florence perform. So I’m going to imagine she’s looking straight into my eyes, as if singing for me only: “I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too. So I stayed in the darkness with you.”
Is there anything more freeing than that? To be in your darkness, but not alone. To exist in the face of suffering and death and somehow still keep singing?
Sources:
Did I mention my tattoo?
Did I mention my two novels, inspired by the work of F+TM?
The Hobgoblin of Little Minds , inspired by HOWL
And TO THOSE WILLING TO DROWN, inspired by the numerous water and drowning songs in the F+TM catalog (What the Water Gave Me, Never Let Me Go, Ship to Wreck...) The novel includes Never Let Me Go lyrics a preface, with permission from the F+TM camp.
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