Florence Welch was dancing around a stage in a storm, caught in the elements, hundreds of fans screaming for her. So far, so normal. Hours before, though, she had started to bleed heavily; her doctor told her she’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage. Later, in hospital, it was found that her fallopian tube had ruptured and she had “a Coke can’s worth of blood” in her abdomen.
That experience (as she put it in a recent interview with The Guardian: “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death”) provides the inspiration for Florence and the Machine’s sixth album, Everybody Scream. It arrives on Halloween, bristling with all the spellbinding detail, ritual sacrifices and exultant incantations you might expect from Welch.
