Florence + the Machine
British Summer Time, Hyde Park, London
★★★★
It’s a rare thing that musicians sound better live than they do on Spotify. But Florence Welch sings a note-perfect set – even when jumping up and down, whirling around, or crowd surfing over her fans.
Shining with androgynous, enigmatic beauty, she opens with the dramatic “June”, the line “hold on to each other” sung with gravitas as she stands on a tree-cloaked stage beneath the open sky.
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In “Hunger” – one of her newest songs, which nestles amongst a track list of greatest hits such as “Rabbit Heart” and “Kiss With A Fist” – she reaches out, smiling to her audience, singing that perfectly poetic “you made a fool of death with your beauty” before wafting around the stage like Isadora Duncan, dancing in a floor length signature billowing gown of yellow and green to a backdrop of videoscapes of the sea, verdant grassy fields, plants, hands, fabric, skin – all sun-saturated, ambient-hued.
Between tracks Welch seems overwhelmed, as if she might cry with happiness. Her voice is soft, she keeps telling the crowd she loves them, claiming she’s not very good at speaking between songs, but she does have some important things to say – like the fact that this festival is 70% women.
“Welcome to the matriarchy. It’s fun. This festival was bought together by women. Maybe we should do this in other places?”
Referencing her idol Patti Smith, she sings “Patricia”, with a strength that belies tenderness. The lyric “it’s such a wonderful thing to love” has the audience clapping rhythmically, carrying the pace before “Dog Days”, which gets everyone up and bouncing. “Jenny of Old Stones”, dedicated to Arya Stark, brings it back to a delicate, haunting place as the breeze begins to cool and the moon starts to glow over the forest-like stage.
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Petals burn on the screen; we see a close-up of grapefruit flesh being squeezed and torn apart as “Big God” becomes the first echoey and ethereal encore. Then comes Flo’s last request as she asks the crowd to “be our choir”; a request that needs no repeating as almost everyone in Hyde Park lets rip with “Shake It Out”, as if living the lyrics of “dancing with the devil on your back” before we drift off into the night, into the moments of darkness before the dawn, lamenting that this will be Florence and the Machine’s last London show for a little while. THEARTSDESK,COM
