Florence and the Machine - Make the Apple festival their own!

September 28th 2015

London, Camden Roundhouse (Apple Festival), UK

*****

Florence in flow gave us something worth waiting for. She was big, sort of silver and gold, and beautiful.

Florence and the Machine ***** James Bay had been lined to up to be the support for Florence's iTunes festival (Now the Apple festival) performance at the Roundhouse. It seemed too good to be true to have such a big name support lined up considering the festival this year has felt smaller and flatter then in previous years. At just under an hour before doors we were told he had pulled out, but Florence and the Machine would still play at the same time.

Florence fans would have to wait patiently for three hours until the show. Ok there was no one but winners in the queue, and as the gig was FREE there was really no complaining. I assumed that like me all the folks waiting had obsessively listened to Florence and the Machine's performance at the iTunes festival back in 2009, and were excited to hear her live, but even so it was a long wait for a Monday night gig.

There were a few people who had come to see James Bay, and weren’t such big Florence fans, but they decided to stay anyway and make a night of it. The Roundhouse is one of London’s best venues, but it quickly got hot. The floor started to feel very hard and painful to my feet, during the time that there was nothing filling the space before Florence and the Machine hit the stage. Florence and the Machine was well worth enduring the suffering of the wait, she bounded onto stage to an Ambient hum with an energy that stirred the audience back to life.

This instantly released the build up of frustration and boredom wit her energy which is hard to define... but at the same time carries the charge of charisma. She often gets compared to female artists like PJ Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux, which I can sort of understand, but for me Florence is very much Florence. Like the sound of her name, she is floating, flouncy and flowing.

She moved with grace, yet commanded the stage a like a male artist, and I don’t mean this as an insult. She completely owns her talent by projecting confidence and there is something masculine about the feel of the energy she projects with her large gait, which allows her to bound from downstage center to downstage right, then left then back again.

Her level of energy makes me think more of the magnitude of Mick Jagger, minus anything sexy. The draw on Florence is not anything to do with sex, or being sexy. Off course she is a little bit Hipster, just like a good chuck of her audience, recognizable by their Retro chintz dresses, beards and vintage scarves, which later on ended up being thrown onto stage.

Her big dramatic gestures hold the audiences’ attention. Florence can hold a dramatic pause like no other artist. These bold movements and postures turn her into the Diana of Metamorphoses. Her stage performance is equally defined by her spinning movements, which transform her from a diva goddess, into a hippie whirling dervish... adding an eccentricity and bizarreness to her shows. There are three elements to Florence’s stage persona, and even I sometimes carn't totally work it out.

The Goddess / Priestess, the trippy hippy, and the good daughter/ sweet girl next door, who connects with the audience, but who is also quite earnest. At some moments she seems to get high on the twirling and zones out. I love the drama of the moments when she seems to break off into an almost schizoid performance, where she is reaching inside to connect with an inner World.

It shouldn’t really fit together, and maybe it works because of the dissonance between the different personas. Florence and the Machine’s music means a lot to me... listening to 'Lungs' throughout the first half of 2010 helped to get me through one of toughest moments of my life. I will always love the music for that reason... my one disappointment of seeing her live at the Roundhouse for first time was a kind of annoyance with the girl next door persona, that entered the space between songs and invaded the space of the Goddess.

This is not because I wanted her to be less human, or bigger than life. It is entirely personal to me, because I found these moments too sickly sweet. Maybe this persona is not one of her stage masks, yet it is a mask... because it masks her darkness. I think this also makes her a bit more earnest then I imagined she would be, this is something I hadn’t perceived before.

I felt the shadow self that is present and confronted and played with within the lyrics of many of her best songs, was missing from the stage personas. I didn’t get the sense that she didn’t have that side to her, only that it was hidden from us and not used to enrich the performance. Halfway through the set she played a soft acoustic version of ‘Cosmic Love’ from the first album ‘Lungs’ and dedicated this performance to her dad.

I really feel we should have all found this very touching, and most of the audience seemed to, yet I wasn’t sure how authentic our collective response really was. It felt like people were doing what was expected. It was a conditioned response. I felt like I had just overdosed on sugar. Vocally her performance was strong and brilliant, she took three songs to warm her voice up making me wish that 'What the water gave Me', from her second album 'Ceremonials' had been lower down in the set.

It is a great opener, but it is one of my favourite songs and I would have loved to have heard this live in her full voice with a but more oomph, without the guitars playing so loudly over the top. She played a good sample of her most popular songs from the first two albums, but the set list was weighted towards her new album 'How, Big, How Blue, How Beautiful' with seven songs from that album included in the set.

‘Shake it out’ the other song that made it from the second album 'Ceremonials, is still one of her most popular songs. She played a slight variation, which put the power in her voice to the fore. It was at this point that both she and the audience had got into the flow as she invited them to sing along. ‘Shake it out’ is also one of those songs that hints to confronting and overcoming inner darkness.

I would have loved for her to have also included ‘Seven Devils’ off of this album, and perhaps play this instead of ‘Cosmic Love’ as it really fits in well with the high Priestess / Goddess persona, with it’s is references to the chakra system. Considering this set is geared more to a feel good fun vibe, it is not surprising that this didn’t make it in.

There were lots of great and memorable moments, like when she came into the crowd to sing ‘Rabbit Heart’ from the first Album ‘Queen of Peace’. This was the one of the best performance this evening of the songs off of the new album. ‘Dog days are Over’ was a great choice for the last song before the encore and I felt that this is also were her performance peaked in terms of her vocal power.

It was also at this point in the set that she encouraged members of the audience to embrace each other and then shed their clothes, as a sort of metaphor for releasing emotional baggage. Ray Wolfston, the Music Trespass mascot suddenly became very huggable and he almost lost his favourite shirt. Florence was showered in an assortment of jumpers, hats and scarves.

The encore ended the night on high and gave the performance a symmetry. ‘What kind of Man’ is from the latest album and she finished with ‘Drumming Man’ from the first album. Both songs are very strong and rhythmic as you may well gather from the title of the last song. She finished the set by running off of the stage... I am not sure which persona this fits but it worked anyway. For me this performance made Florence and the Machine the highlight of the Apple festival this year.