One-eyed girls, and ghosts in the Machine

With songs inspired by the lows of Poe and the highs of Jekyll and Hyde, Florence & the Machine's rollercoaster year is topped by rave reviews of her debut album and her live shows, writes JIM CARROLL

FLORENCE MARY Leontine Welch is a terrible fidgeter. All during the interview, she fidgets and fiddles with the ornate rings on her fingers, the vintage watch on her wrist and the hair on her head. At one stage, she picks up the interviewer’s notebook, folds a couple of pages a few times and flings it across the table. She finds it hard, she says, to sit still.

Luckily for Welch, 2009 has been a year when she hasn’t really had to sit still for too long. It has been a rollercoaster 12 months for Florence & The Machine.

She began the year tipped for success by every observer and pundit in the music and media business. Then, the world beyond those cloistered confines began to take notice of this tall, striking young woman with the long red hair and a bunch of kooky, off-kilter, strangely chirpy songs about boys making coffins and girls with one eye.

From the moment her debut album Lungs was released, Welch was embraced by a number of different pop tribes. Here was an artist that both indie music fans and pop fans could get hugely enthusiastic about – but she was also someone who could find a pew on a playlist at RTÉ Radio One. At her Irish festival appearances this past summer at both Oxegen and the Electric Picnic, it was clear that here was a woman for all seasons.

“I was very naive about all this work at the start of the year, I never imagined there would be so much involved.” A visibly tired Welch is sitting in a meeting-room at Today FM’s Dublin studios where she has camped out for a few hours to do interviews and radio sessions.

Today, like every day this year, it's wall-to-wall promotion. She spent last weekend galloping around the country with shows in Dingle (for the Other VoicesTV show on RTÉ), Cork and Belfast. Later today, she'll accept a gong of some sort at Trinity College and play a show at Dublin's Olympia. Tomorrow, she's back on a plane to London to film her appearance for the Christmas edition of Top Of the Pops. The selling never stops. "There's only another week or two of touring left and then I have some time off, so that will be a relief," Welch says. "But you can't think about this promotion on any great scale, because otherwise you'd go mad."

This week marks an important anniversary for Welch. “I figured out earlier that I first hooked up with my manager Mairéad [Nash] at a gig three years ago this week and decided to start taking things seriously.

“Back then, I was still at art college and trying to sort out what I wanted to do, so it was by gigging that I came around to wanting to do this. I did two years of very intense gigging before the album was ever released.”

LONDON-BORN WELCH had been singing long before then. She had begun by singing in school choirs and at family gatherings, and persuaded her folks to pay for singing lessons. In her teens, Welch was a Nirvana and Green Day fan, going to punk gigs, and her first flirtations with live performance were inspired by what she saw and experienced on that scene.

She enrolled at the Camberwell College of Art where she studied illustration but, a year and a half into the course and with a couple of eye-catching installations to her name, her music career took over.

Now and again, she wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t gone down this road. “I’d probably still be in college, doing my illustration course and drinking way too much. I liked college, I had my little routine and I felt quite safe.” Instead, she chose to follow her music stars.

The most striking thing about Welch’s work to date are the surreal songs you’ll find on that primal, ecstatic debut album of hers. Dark, hugely energetic and oft times macabre (full of characters setting beds alight and gouging out eyes), these are the work of an eccentric wide-eyed lass obsessed by magic and wild, scary, old-fashioned tales.

Welch attributes this to “reading lots of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, having a huge thing about Victorian horror, Jekyll and Hyde and Jack the Ripper.

"They were what inspired me at the start. When I was writing at first, the songs were folk stories in a way, morality tales with some kind of twist to them. Bird Songis about a bird trying to tell a secret of yours, but the only thing that comes out of your mouth is the sound of the bird singing. Or Donkey Kosh, which is about the mistakes you make being in the form of a donkey and a jackal and you have to carry them around and feed them confessions. But the songs have become slightly more obscure as I have grown up and they've become less folky. At the start, they were more stories because I couldn't play any instrument and I wrote songs which were like poems. I spent a lot of time writing songs in library books and getting into trouble for that." For Welch, her songs become real only when she plays them to an audience.

"It was by playing live that I figured out the best shape for them. A lot of these songs had been knocking around for ages in different forms before I ever went into the studio. I never really know about a song until I perform it live, though I did get really intense feelings about Cosmic Loveand Dog Days. They had the sound I was after right from the start. But I was playing Kiss With A Fistand Girl With One Eyefor two years before I took them near a studio."

The hardest thing for Welch was actually handing over the album for release. “I was scared because that was that. I’m a perfectionist, so I can keep tweaking the songs live until they have the full impact I’m after. On the stage, I’m in control. With an album, though, you’re tied by time, money and a release date so I just had to close my eyes and let it go.” By and large, the reviews for the album and Welch’s performances have been rave ones. Occasionally, though, there will be a sour note, which means Welch keeps clear of her clippings file.

“It’s quite dangerous to read your own press,” she says, fidgeting with her rings some more. “Even when the reviews are good, I tend to find the one negative part and obsess on that. I have a physical reaction to seeing my own face when I’m not expecting it. I’m quite sensitive to stuff like that.

“People tell me I’m getting good reviews. But people also tell me that there has been the occasional not-so-good review.” That probably explains why she exerts so much time and energy on her live gigs. When you’re performing on a stage in front of people, it’s down to you, not the reviews, to sell your wares.

"More and more, the live shows are what make this whole thing so worthwhile," Welch says. "They're shared experiences. You see a girl in the audience and she's singing along to Dog Daysand you know that she has found something to connect with. Or you see two massive lads really going for it. You see how the songs have affected people. Every time I go on stage, I look at it as making new friends and having a night out with them."

LATER, AT THE Olympia, Welch and 1,500 friends have a whale of a time. Better and bolder than either of her earlier festival appearances, Welch whirls and swirls her way through the show. Every song sounds as if it’s about to spontaneously combust, such is the energy and power that Welch and her band apply to the proceedings.

When Welch is not dancing barefoot on the stage, she’s climbing the speakers to serenade the audience, or clambering into the boxes. Now and again, she does stand at the microphone to talk to the crowd and, of course, she’s fidgeting away nervously as she stands in the limelight.

Florence & The Machine close a euphoric set with their faithful version of Candi Staton's gospel-dance anthem You've Got The Love. It's a song that reminds Welch of happy days when she was still finding her feet.

“Two years ago, I was doing festivals for the first time with a full band and that song was just my anthem for going completely wild that summer. At our last gig of the season, we were closing Bestival and I thought it would be a good idea to do a cover version to sum up the summer and we decided to try that song.

“When we dropped the first line, the crowd went wild. I recorded it for fun and the power of the internet took it out of my hands. It sums up these emotions which are both sad and euphoric. It’s become our happy anthem.”

Lungsis on Universal Music