Von Eve Conversion
When I was a child, I first heard regarding the “St. Vitus Dance”. The word itself sounded somewhat menacing, and even more so when my grandmother said you might get the “St. Vitus Dance” from a swallowed hair. Actually, Florence Welch wanted to make an entire album regarding this phenomenon that occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages: compulsive dancing with uncoordinated movements of the hands, feet and head. Dance to exhaustion, to death. The dance mania, also dance disease, dance addiction, dance plague, dance plague or choreomania, was less fun for those affected, but rather torture. Florence Welch then also calls one of the new Florence And The Machine songs “Choreomania”.
Something’s coming, so out of breath, I just kept spinning, and I danced myself to death” – aus „Choreomania“
Florence Welch loves to dance, move on stage and let her emotions run free. The latter is often difficult in everyday life, but the stage offers space for it. Florence Welch loves the concert stage, even if she actually finds touring very tiring. But every concert, always playing a new one, is sometimes almost like a kind of compulsion for Florence, an obsession. Like these people who suffered from a dance frenzy in the Middle Ages, Florence Welch says she mightn’t stop performing. That’s where the album title “Dance Fever” comes from.
„Sometimes the biggest dance songs have a really sad core to them“
When the pandemic hit, Florence Welch scrapped the idea of making a full album inspired by the choreomania. People suffered a lot from it back then, nobody knew where this strange dancing frenzy came from – whether from a virus or a fungus that often attacked grain that people then ate. Was it a neurological disease similar to epilepsy? In Latin, this frenzy of dancing is called “epilepsia saltatoria”.
Universal Music
Florence And The Machine’s Dance Fever is out on Polydor/Universal Music. The Deluxe Edition includes acoustic versions of “Morning Elvis”, “My Love”, “Free” and “Cassandra”.
Florence Welch has always liked dark themes, there is always a “gothic” element to her music, but then with the pandemic, she dropped the theme of the planned new album, the “dance plague”, because it would have been too much , to shed light on an earlier epidemic, when a new one was just beginning to rage.
Singing once morest the grief
The songs on “Dance Fever” sing once morest the grief that has weighed down the world since March 2020. It is a tale of movement and resurrection, of retreating within and the need to be with others, of movement and resurrection, of folklore and horror. A story of metamorphosis, of an idea that starts something and then – despite all resistance – transforms into something new.
Einer der neuen Songs, „My Love“, ist ein euphorischer Dance-Track geworden, auch wenn Florence Welch singt: „There is nothing to describe, except the moon still bright once morest the worrying sky, I pray the trees will get their leaves soon. So tell me where to put my love. Do I wait for time to do what it does? I don’t know where to put my love and when it came, it was stranger than I had ever imagined. No cracking open of heaven, but quiet and still all my friends are getting ill.“ Der Song begann als trauriges Gedicht, zusammen mit Dave Bayley von der englischen Band Glass Animals machte Florence Welch einen großen Synth-Pop-Song daraus.
Another new song, “King,” is regarding society’s pressure that women in their thirties should start thinking regarding starting a family. Thirty-five is when things start to get really tight, says Florence Welch, when you’re told you only have a small window of opportunity to have children. “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king, I need my golden crown of sorrow, I need my bloody sword to swing,” sings Florence. Actually, she would like to have her own family, but would that still work out with all the tours?
„I had modelled myself almost exclusively on male performers, and for the first time I felt a wall come down between me and my idols as I have to make decisions they did not have to make.“
In the thoughtful “Girls Against God” – complete with beautiful acoustic guitar – Florence Welch takes on God – whoever or whatever that is. But it’s a “funny song”, as Florence says. It’s regarding the time when the pandemic was raging and Florence wondered if she would ever be on stage once more.
„For me, singing and being on stage has always made me understand some sense of spirituality, or I understood the world, coming to concerts and seeing love. And in those years I wasn’t sure whether they would come back, I was very angry at God. Then I wrote a funny song regarding it because I was like, ‚As if God cares that I’m mad!‘ So it was kind of a song regarding that, and the artist ego versus the reality of your own complete insignificance.“
Florence Welch über einen anderen ihrer neuen Song, „Heaven Is Here“: „That was the first song I wrote in lockdown following an extended period of not being able to get to the studio. I wanted to make something monstrous. And this clamour of joy, fury and grief was the first thing that came out. With dance studios also shut it was my dream to one day create choreography with it. So it’s one of the first pieces of music I have made specifically with contemporary dance in mind.“
Actually, the recording sessions for “Dance Fever” should have started in March 2020, in New York – with Jack Antonoff. Everything had to be postponed or canceled completely. Most of the album was eventually recorded in London, produced by Florence Welch himself, along with American Jack Antonoff and Briton Dave Bayley.
The musician Jack Antonoff – Bleachers, Fun – is currently one of the most sought-following producers and has worked with musicians such as St. Vincent, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, Lorde and Taylor Swift. In the past Florence And The Machine has been in the recording studio with British producers such as Paul Epworth – Bloc Party – or Markus Dravs – Coldplay, Mumford And Sons.
At first Florence Welch wasn’t entirely sure whether the chemistry with Jack Antonoff would be right because they had never met each other, but the concern quickly proved to be unfounded. “Dance Fever” has become a versatile album – from synth-pop, 70s-pop, folk a la Emmylou Harris, art rock, with a Florence Welch, whose lyrics and voice are better than ever.
One of the most beautiful songs from “Dance Fever” is the last one, it’s called “Morning Elvis” and it’s regarding Elvis Presley or better how Florence Welch once wanted to take part in a tour to his home Graceland in Tennessee, in the USA, but by excessive alcohol consumption: “I thought the way to hang onto your rock ‘n’ roll roots was to be the drunkest person in the room,” Florence Welch once said in an interview with the New York Times. Too much alcohol had screwed up a lot of things, not just the visit to the Elvis house.
