Florence + the Machine singer Florence Welch has opened up about the experience of being on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans, and has bizarrely described it as being ‘like an exorcism’.
In an interview with Absolute Punk, the singer said, "I feel like I suddenly come back to myself on stage. During the songs, you transcend yourself. The best way to be in the performance is to be without pause and be essentially in the moment, in that moment of expression.
“I always find it's really cathartic and it's almost like an exorcism, but then zip, I'm always just back to myself. I think I should get a bigger between-the-song persona, so then I'm not wandering around the stage like some mad old auntie that's saying hello to people and falling over.”
She continued, “I'm excited for the third record. It's been a gruelling couple of years, but I'm glad I got the second one out because it was ready and it did feel ready. It felt like a sequel almost to Lungs that needed to come out for me to let people know what I was about. Lungs, for better or worse, was maybe a slightly confused record. That was the good and bad thing about it. It was more like a scrapbook.
“With Ceremonials, it was as if I had averted the sound. I pinned it down and controlled it. Now it feels good because it feels like there's a lot of options right now."
This all sounds very poetic and arty… and a tad scary!