A man is on his hands and knees, scrubbing Florence Welch’s blood from a previously pristine white plinth. “No broken bones, they don’t think,” she says upon returning to the stage, her right foot bandaged after a conflab with a medic. She immediately launches into Choreomania, a song about a medieval phenomenon in which groups of people would be taken by the compulsion to dance themselves to the brink of death and beyond. It was, perhaps, always going to go this far.
Florence + the Machine’s recent album, Dance Fever, posited that movement is a necessity, as a tool for communication and as a release valve. Its songs were fuelled by Welch’s grief at losing the ability to tour during the pandemic, giving them an almost metatextual edge that she eagerly exploits here. By the time she has ripped through a couple of Choreomania’s verses she has run, still barefoot, from the front of the arena to the back and hoisted herself atop a barrier. There, arms spread wide, she roars: “You said that rock’n’roll is dead, but is that just because it has not been resurrected in your image?”
