In the terrific video for Florence + The Machine’s new song, “Free”, the most dependably thrilling pop star of her generation lets rip to the poppy synth beat, while the manifestation of her very British anxiety (a perfectly cast Bill Nighy) paces around her clutching coffee, jabbing at his mobile phone and ordering her about. Anyone who’s seen Florence Welch live will know that she has always flung herself to wild, electric extremes in pursuit of ecstatic performance. But she’s never been more keenly aware that she’s also in flight from her own circuitry: “Running from something that’s in my head.” The sharpening of her self-knowledge adds a fresh crackle to Dance Fever, her fifth album with The Machine.
The album’s title was inspired by Welch’s fascination with the medieval “dancing plague” – also known as choreomania and St Vitus’ Dance. It was a form of mass hysteria during which groups of people broke into spontaneous dance, unable to stop until they dropped. Outbreaks usually coincided with periods of hardship and religious festivals, and the dancers were often (though not exclusively) women. The phenomenon is also the subject of a novel out this month (Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Dance Tree). It doesn’t feel surprising that artists have been drawn to themes of (much-missed) public gatherings in our age of mass online hysteria.
