M L FEATURE
FLORENCE & THE MACHINE - DANCE FEVER
by Sinéad Gleeson
Dance Fever is the fifth studio album by English indie rock band Florence and the Machine , released on 13 May 2022 by Polydor Records . They will be performing tracks from the new album at the AO arena in Manchester on Tuesday 22nd November . Here Sinead Gleeson writes about the meaning behind ' Dance Fever '.
With any event in life , there is a before and after . Before grief , birth , love . Before a global pandemic when it ( still ) feels like nothing will ever be the same again . For every artist , there is the quandary of what happens to their work when there is massive interruption to it . Abandon it , or keep going ? Finish what was started in the ‘ before ’, knowing that it may not be relevant , or even make sense in the ‘ after ’. All of us tried to survive , keep others safe , to recalibrate the worn routines of work and life . The job of the artist is to create , write , sing , even if the process is plagued by uncertainty and distraction . The end result – and the medium of the album itself - is shaken to the core , forever rearranged .
What can the artist do when presented with this sudden disruption … this strange new world ?
Move towards it , make a new world . Create a fable .
The music of Dance Fever are songs sung back to the sadness of the world since March 2020 . A narrative of movement and resurrection ; inferiority and a longing to be with others , of folklore and horror . A story of metamorphosis , of an idea that starts as one thing and then transforms – in spite of everything – into something new .
This is a fairytale in flux , one whose ending is still uncertain , but there is much to comfort and distract us until then .
The performer and the song circle each other , questioning their mutual relationship , each engaged in their own quest . The performer wonders if she will ever be on stage again , and the song itself deserts her , leaving the performer to wonder who she is without it .
In early 2020 Florence Welch was in New York and began recording the bones of a new album with producer Jack Antonoff . Barely one week in , the world shut down , and Welch was forced to return early to London . The songs were rooted in energy and liveness but as venues closed and studios shut , it was clear the songs – and the very process of making them – would have to change . With Antonoff in New York , and Florence in England , it became increasingly difficult to create across the divide so the singer decided to reach out to another singer / producer a little closer to home in addition to Jack ' s work on the record whose performing life had also been halted by the pandemic : Dave Bayley of Glass Animals , a musician and producer who started out as a DJ . Welch conjured up what she missed – clubs , dancing at festivals , being in the whirl of movement and togetherness , and slowly this crept on to the record . “ Me and Dave really bonded over our need for intensity at that time , any kind of release , and with his love of synths and my fascination with all things gothic and creepy , our own sound started to emerge .”
She read about the concept of choreomania , a group ritual of dancing to exhaustion , and in one case , of 400 women who danced themselves to the death in the middle ages . That kind of ecstasy , proximity , euphoria at the possibilities of movement served as a reminder of the loss of performance and dancing in clubs . Welch had written My Love in her kitchen as a “ sad little poem ”, and when she recorded it acoustically it just didn ’ t seem to work . Bayley suggested using synths and it soon expanded with floor-filling , chest-thumping energy . But there is something more in those beats than the loss of performance . Welch says she was heartbroken over not being able to see or hug her young niece , and the combined loss of these two sources of love was painful . Initially , she worried that it might be a conflict to pair such lyrical sadness with an upbeat tune , but realised that when she ’ d listened to it at home , alone , it was exactly what she needed – and that “ maybe other people would need it too ”.
The record is “ almost an analysis and breakdown of dance itself .” In the past , dancing carried Welch through sobriety and recovery and she learnt technical dance , which changed her outlook as a performer . In these current times of torpor and confinement , dance offered propulsion , energy and a way of looking music more choreographically .
Between geography and necessity , the album inevitably transformed into something else and it arrived , as Welch says , “ despite my protestations ”. It ’ s not just the poking sly fun at her own self-created persona , or the blend of styles — dance , folk , 70 ’ s Iggy , longingfor-road folk tracks that nod to Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris (‘ Girls Against God ’, ‘ The Bomb ’) — that ’ s unexpected , but the breath of influences beyond music : film , art and literature . The tragic heroines of pre-Raphaelite art , the gothic short stories of Carmen Maria Machado , and Julia Armfield , the visceral wave of folk horror film from The Wickerman and The Witch to Midsommar . Welch admits she wasn ’ t much of “ a horror aficionado ”, but during lockdown , with all its own fears and anxiety , the genre became a poultice , drawing out the sadness and mirroring the sense of threat in the world . Horror manifests itself throughout as a kind of possession ; that feeling that there is nothing more terrifying than
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