really sort of resurrected the record really it was sort of
very lost like i couldn't get i didn't i'd started the record with jack and i couldn't
get back to him for a year and a half there was no travel there was no like leaving and the record
we nearly scrapped it because i just say i don't know how to
yeah i don't know where this is going and sort of meeting dave really did like resurrect the project
florence welsh welcome back to absolute radio how you doing good yeah thank you thanks for having
me thanks so much for coming in we're just sort of um talking off air about how we last i think
we did this really well we sat next to each other on some bench a few years ago but now it's lovely
to have you back in the studio i'm fed up of zoom interviews we did a lot of those in lockdown it's
so nice to be able to be back and face to face how are you doing you're right yeah i'm i'm good the
album is out and that's a relief yeah totally um so yeah just kind of like coming down from that a
bit i think absolutely dance fever so number one congratulations on that as well a fairy tale in
14 songs i think he described it as well with each song being sort of chapter as it were i absolutely
love this trip when i first heard my love i instantly felt like i was actually in the festival
field it's transportative like the the sound and the production so we'll work our way through
through the albums it were but this started off quite early on just before the pandemic is that
right it's weirdly almost a chronological album so king three quarry mania back in town all written
free ironically was written march 2020 wow okay so free and back in town which is back in town is the
last song that i wrote when i got to new york and it's kind of a love song to new york or the sort
of amazing sort of manic loneliness that new york creates and the space it allows for fantasy and
i had packed my bags to go make dance fever and spend a month in new york so it was this kind of
as back in town like my my fantasy always tricks me into thinking i'm going off to have a kind of
romantic adventure and it's always an empty room you know like it's and that's kind of what a lot
of songwriting and touring is is tricking yourself into the creativity is the biggest connection in
your life away from like family and home and then you get there and you're like oh god it's
a hotel room alone again you know so i was already questioning my relationship to songwriting into
performance and then wrote back in town and had to get out of town yeah straight ahead so the gears
really shifted then and changed and then suddenly you were back home do you think in retrospect
that was a blessing weirdly to suddenly sort of ricochet back to london i think when i released
the album it was a funny thing because i had to contend with the period of time that was made
and there was a kind of grief response because it was irreconcilably changed by the period of
time i was in the way of making one record that was very much based in live music and the love
of live music and then i was making a record in a world where there was no live music and
it it completely changed everything maybe it was a blessing it's hard to see it that way yeah yeah
um i think we're still in that phase where it hasn't to really understand that what level it's
affected us the last two years i don't think women are going to know for a really long time
because in lots of ways it's still ongoing and i feel like actually what it has done
to our psyches and to ourselves and i don't think i'll be able to look back on this album
and fully understand it for a long time yeah it's a big journey for everybody wasn't it
with that in mind and you were saying sort of you know the love of live music
did you have any sort of moments in the unknown sort of days of covid where you just thought
i may never get on stage how did that make you feel i'm over dramatic at the best of times but
there were moments there you know it was it was it was as if it was also people were like
because you were asking i was asking people like i was asking like doctors i was like is it
because we just didn't know how long mass gatherings were going to be an absolute no and
in the scale of like greater good you have really sort of accepted accepted that but as it started
to drag on it was more of a question of like maybe this will never come back or if it comes back it's
gonna be back in like eight years or ten years like there was a kind of futurelessness to it of
something that i had devoted my entire life to my entire life to getting people but yeah there were
moments where i was just on the floor just being like the thing that i have known my whole life and
my job my job yeah could never come back i think my mom was like oh you could you do other things
i've got no other skills moms have always got something it'll be fine you'll do something else
good stuff to me it's not been like ever been a thing that i do it's been who i am and it's
what's given me kind of meaning in my life but i think that that was also really interesting
to me because it forced me to contend with that meaning it has given me a lot of meaning in my
life it's also caused me a lot of pain because i'm perennially like unsatisfied because that's the
creative nature to make something and be like i didn't get it perfect this time and agony and that
just what keeps you making more is because that sense of like it's in king it's like i said it at
the beginning of the record i was never satisfied it never let me go as i released the record i had
exactly the same feeling of just agony of like i didn't quite get it right i'll do better next time
how i know this about myself and it doesn't fix it and it's the grief of letting something go and
they really do rip records off you like they're never finished yeah um and especially with the
one in the time that it was made it was like contending with the period of time and the record
it was really hard to let it go um the cycle of it was strange though because i think for like
like about a year in when it was also like the variance just kept coming um it it really did
seem very bleak in terms of like music and that coming back and i was i don't know if i can even
live in a world without live music like it seemed such a and actually then because it went on for so
long yeah about two years in i was like well maybe we're taking a question maybe it's okay you know
it was just as i'd accepted that maybe i wouldn't go back to touring and maybe i would just kind of
stay at home and maybe do the family thing or maybe like settle things came back so it feels
like the whole record is this cycle of be careful what you wish for you know right yeah um so yeah i
went through a lot of it was like all the grief i was like denial anger and then i did come to
some kind of acceptance that maybe performance was gone and then they were like right it's back we're
putting the album out you're going back on tour oh my god we're back we're back you mentioned that
briefly but in in a few of the printed interviews i've read about this this album you have discussed
family life and and your relationship with being a songwriter and performer and that kind of push
and pull of womanhood as well have you left this project with any answers on that or any kind of
oh my god no no i wish that's again it's the self-knowledge avails us nothing
i think i have kind of come to terms with the fact that success itself and achievement
is probably not the core of really what will make for a happy life i kind of know
that instinctively but you kind of have to learn it through and i think that is kind of
the lesson like whether that means that's like because i want to have a family or whatever i'm
not sure but i think what people have also said to me is that that won't fix it either
yeah yeah exactly it's like everything external that you try and like fill the void or the pain
or kind of like it won't work so i think more and more i can do it with like oh music will fix it
that will make everything better and then i get to that and i get to that place of achievement
and like oh it didn't so i think it's so easy to then be like what's because i don't have a
family and if i have children and i settle down then i will be content and happy and to be honest
from when i for people i've spoken to they're like no it won't like if it's if it's within
you if the rest if that kind of restlessness or sort of spiritual restlessness is within you
nothing that you can try and grab onto is going to make it better so i think that is the realization
that like whatever i choose to do like the work is going to be mine like internally to come to a
place of contentment yeah totally i was reading i was watching actually a video with van gaalis
the other day and he was saying he took music making very very seriously and he was always like
and there was a line that struck me but she said you've always just got to be ready you've got to
be so nice and ready because when it arrives you've got to be ready do you feel that with
your music making what that it just suddenly almost like channeling no it does it really
does especially with um songs like they kind of take you on a ride and you just have to let them
there is a sort of powerlessness to it and especially with songs like king that one
kind of just arrived end to end fully formed and especially with this record the songs really had
a lot of their own ideas of what they wanted to be and it i wanted to make a lot a record that
was a lot more of a smooth ride and the songs just refused to so a lot of the songs that i've
recorded in lockdown like my love and heaven is here and daffodils i tried to then re-record out
of lockdown with jack again and re-record it so that everything in the album had the same sonics
because at this moment you have a kind of like much more analog sound and then there's
the cynthia sound when you're heading into the lockdown and things are getting really weird
but when we tried to do that it was as if that moment in time and those songs have been created
at that moment they just demanded to be what they were and when we tried to smooth them out
and i guess that was emblematic of that period of being like there's no smoothing this out
like this is the wrong chaos yeah so when we tried to um because i'm very committed to the album
itself as a story and i was sonically being really worried that it would be jarring but i had to kind
of give in to the songs and they sort of refused to be tamed in a way i loved um some of the
i wrote down here notes it probably makes no sense but like industrial frills it felt like in places
i love some of the synth patterns and just some of the the such a nice way to put it oh good
and some of like the tracks fusing into each other and that whatever is
so the way that i i was trying to make sense of such a chaotic period of time so
and i at the end of it realized that it was a kind of be careful what you wish for fairy tale and so
it's almost like the story of it sonically is you're kind of in this analog
world and then it goes into kind of nick cavian hellscape that shoots you out into a nightclub
it's a good night the climax of the sort of movie in my head of this album is suddenly
just in this kind of ecstatic nightclub of my love um and then you get dropped out into restraint and
you're kind of left in the wreckage of the bomb so with all those transitions and interestingly like
the transitions at the start are kind of heavenly and like angelic voices and as you go towards the
end of the record they become like ragged breaths so i think you can hear the kind of
descent into this different world throughout yeah i totally loved it it was absolutely brilliant
it reminded me a bit of moments of i wrote my dissertation on dancer in the dark bjork's film
oh wow and moments of that sort of industrial kind of bass line sometimes just creeping in
well it needed it and you know when we tried to re-record it it just took it all out and it made
it a nice record and i wasn't like there was so much about this record that isn't about being nice
and isn't about being smooth the darkness that since can provide and the heaviness and that
kind of almost claustrophobia of it was really important i was sat yesterday with my mates
we had a glass of wine i was telling them all about choreomania because i was talking about it
on the radio and they were like wow that's so tricky what and you probably know much more about
it than i but it's it was a was it between 13th and 17th centuries yeah it's like the middle ages
really and i just feel like i've been speaking about it i feel so conscious that i'm not
historian and i get so worried that there are historians out there being like she's selling it
if you are a historian just like please call in and give it like give the real facts but basically
there was this kind of phenomenon of it was like a dancing plague or it could have been psychological
or it could have been like hallucinogenic grain so that no one really knows but there were these
outbreaks of this sort of dancing fever um called choreomania where people would literally just
dance themselves to death in the streets and i think what was interesting to me is like the idea
that it was stress was really interesting the idea that because you know the middle ages it
was like successive famines and plagues and wars and this idea that you could be so psychologically
stretched that the only thing you could do was just get go out onto the street and dance until
you dropped and i really felt that so deeply i understood it i was like that makes sense to me
to do that exactly that sort of relationship with movement and expressing yourself as a yeah it's
absolutely nuts when you start reading about it and then you sort of click to the next ice
cream like oh my god this is crazy but um it made me think you know sort of i i've always
been quite a reserved person i think from my family being quite reserved in terms of you know
sort of my mum dancing that she's going to watch this no offense mum but you know it's
very kind of like site step to you know and there's there's no freedom there in terms of
yeah create it but i i always really wished i had that and so when you see people have that
i think it must just be a wonderful thing did you you studied um technical dance not so long ago a
few years ago is that right i did i think it was a big part of um dancing or kind of collective
joy such a big part of my life and you know when i kind of stopped drinking
dancing was really like what i missed and so i started training in technical dance and it really
helped a lot because it's also like going on big benders is a way to expel energy really so you
have this huge build up of creative energy and racing thoughts you don't know what to do with
them so you like trigger a bender and it will reset everything um in a very dysfunctional way
and this just felt like a more functional way of expelling a lot of creative energy and so
yeah it's like eight years or something and it really helped me find a new way of expressing
myself and of using the body yeah so i think it was one of the things that i sort of missed
the most it is sort of the unself-consciousness of dancing as well and there's nothing i like to see
people dance brings me so much joy because it is a kind of it's coming together in collective joy
and freedom seeing groups of people dance yeah it totally is i've lost any kind of fear i had now
because i've got kids now and so i don't want them to have it so i just go for it now i'm probably
like the embarrassing mum did you have a moment when you were sat recording a video with bill
nye who's playing your anxiety thinking this is a busy you know i never imagined that i would be sat
here i know i was like life is amazing um i mean and the best thing about it was that when we were
performing together he was being my anxiety 24 hours so he was on the phone being like well let's
like go through her childhood i think and let's think about something from there oh oh i was and
oh he would say to me do you want to go through that like thing that you said that you think might
have come off weird that person five months ago should we run that a couple of times i was like
yeah yeah run that run that so he was really kind of very committed fully to the role of my anxiety
but just so nice to spend time with and just such an incredibly elegant performer it was amazing to
watch him in action like what an incredible thing to witness yeah i loved it and with all the um the
visuals and the aesthetic of the record as well i noticed when you performed at the billboard
music awards you had the moon on stage as well is this kind of quite symbolic in terms of well the
record it was interesting because it was like everything in the world that sort of
everything that i'd known had gone and i was at home and it was sort of a futureless but the moon
it was like that was still there and the seasons changing was still there and so there was a sort
of consistency in a communication with nature became really important in terms of as bad as
things got the moon was always beautiful and i kind of have always had that with the sky
itself of like no matter where i was at in my life or as bad as things got the sky was always
beautiful to me and this sense of that there was something bigger than my feelings and bigger
than what i was going through and i think a lot of my work is trying to get outside
of myself and outside of my thoughts so looking to something bigger and yeah then yourself is sort of
so yeah there's a lot about the moon on this record because i felt like it was kind of that
sort of what i was talking about being sort of like losing it in my garden and just being like
crying at the moon looking oh is it the mighty boosh the one where the moon talks oh yeah
the red shoes because which is also a sort of fairy tale about a woman who kind of can't stop
dancing with these cursed shoes and so it brought it back again to the cory mania of the record
full circle love it and find it how is it working with a dave bailey because i mean
they've had a phenomenal couple of years haven't they glass animals yeah it was
funny because he was like glass animals were having their kind of biggest hit and he was
stuck in his kitchen so when we met we were sort of that we were like only hanging out with each
other really it was like in the studio at home in lockdown yeah and that's kind of well that those
are that's where we made my love and all of those and i think at that point we both needed catharsis
so much that this sort of dance it was funny it was nice to take dave bailey over the dark side
because like firstly we made my love which is quite sort of euphoric and then i just dragged
him over to daffodils which was really dark and then i just everything that he would do i'd be
like scarier darker because he's naturally quite like buoyant and everything you know it's bright
and breezy euphoric and lovely and i was like make it scarier that was really fun to do to go on that
journey yeah oh brilliant and they had they were it wasn't the most globally streamed track i think
they had a week where they were just like kings but just the nicest person and really sort of
resurrected the record really it was sort of very lost like i couldn't get i didn't i'd started the
record with jack and i couldn't get back to him for a year and a half there was no travel there
was no like leaving and the record we nearly scrapped it because i just i don't know how to
yeah i don't know where this is going and sort of meeting dave really did like resurrect the project
well it sounds completely fully formed to a consumer to listen like me i absolutely
i was so worried that because it was such a i was like this is just chaos i like it it's good
it must be so nice to be back on the stage i'm sure that you'll just have these moments of just
soaking it all up when you're on this next run i think it's really going to sink in if we get to
the tour right now i think there's still been so many kind of stops and starts and every show feels
like it might not happen still i'm really looking forward to getting the tour and being able to now
people seem to really embrace this record which i'm so grateful for i'm looking forward to getting
to play some of the album tracks a lot and really create the world visually on stage um
yeah to really kind of make the horrific fairy tale of it all very real i feel very excited about
yeah i can't wait to see it thank you so much your time florence thanks a lot thank you for having me