The Bowery Presents

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Florence And The Machine
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Let’s talk about magic. Because music, at its best, is a kind of magic that lifts you up and takes you somewhere else. “I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tall building, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe,” says Florence Welch. “It’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you’re either going to explode with it, or you’re just going to disappear.”

Florence writes her best songs when she’s drunk or has a hangover, because that’s when the freedom, the feral music comes, creating itself wildly from the fragments gathered in her notebooks and in her head. “You’re lucid,” she explains, “but you’re not really there. You’re floating through your own thoughts, and you can pick out what you need. I like those weird connections in the universe. I feel that life’s like a consistent acid trip, those times when things keep coming back.”

Florence herself is a mass of contradictions: she’s tough yet she’s terrified, a bundle of nerves and passion, of darkness and pure joy. “I feel things quite intensely, which is why the music has to be so intense. I’m either really sad or really happy, I’m tired or completely manic. That’s when I’m at my most creative, but it’s also dangerous for me. I feel I could write some good songs, or break some hearts. Or tables. Or glasses.”

As a performer she can seem fearless, but she’s also far too quick to pass judgement on herself. This is the woman, after all who got into Camberwell art college by making a huge floral sign telling herself ‘You are a twat.’ She says she’s a geek, who loses all control when in love. She’s also something increasingly rare and precious in a time of karaoke pop: an artist who has found her own, authentic voice.

Her soaring, epic vocals, quirky melodies and self-contained musical world have already won her the 2009 Critics Choice Award at the Brits. Some compare her to Kate Bush. You’ll also find touches of Tom Waits and Nick Cave in her dark visions, and if you heard a little of Bjork too, she’d find it a compliment. But mainly, Florence is out on her own: an exhilarating place to be, she points out, but also a little scary.

Her debut album ‘Lungs’ is made of harps, choirs, drums, elevator shafts, bits of metal, love, death, fireworks, string quartets, stamping, sighing, strange electronic wailing, lambs, lions, sick, broken glass, blood, moon, stars, drink, coffins, teeth, water, wedding dresses.. and the silences in between. The songs are full of Gothic imagery, of fairytale flights of fantasy, and although much has been read into her lyrics, Florence says it’s usually simple. “Everything is about boys!” she laughs. “The whole album is about love – and pain. People see my lyrics as crazy, but to me it’s an honest, heartfelt album. I didn’t set out to be wacky. I just want it to be emotive.”

Florence grew up in Camberwell, south London, the oldest of three children. One of her earliest musical memories is standing on top of the trunk where her dad kept his vinyl collection, dancing with him to the Rolling Stones. She started singing along to Nina Simone and Dusty Springfield at home, expanded her vocal range with arias, then became a pre-teen skatepunk before getting lost in the Camberwell art college squat party scene. It’s an eclectic mix, but for her, the common thread is always the emotion. “Anything that has real feeling in it always excites me. Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Going To Come’, Eva Cassidy singing ‘Wade In The Water’, even Rhianna’s ‘Umbrella’ – I’m obsessed with music. I’ll play Beyonce, Lil Wayne, Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Going Down’.

Florence found her own space by going out to clubs and pubs, by singing onstage and in her bedroom. By the time she left school, she’d already written songs like ‘Kiss With A Fist’, and knew she wanted to make music but not how to go about it. So after a year working behind a bar she went to art school, making tents under the desk to sleep off her hangovers while trying to convince her tutors she was an installation.

It wasn’t until she wrote the haunting ‘Between Two Lungs’ that it all came together. Instead of percussion, Florence pounded the studio walls with her hands. She built the melody on the piano even though it’s not an instrument she knows how to play, and recorded the backing vocals first, before writing the top line. It’s bonkers and totally unconventional, but of course it is also glorious – a strange but yearning song about losing yourself in love. “I’d found my voice, and I just felt euphoric,” she recalls. “It’s been a real process of me learning that the way I wanted to do it was actually the right way. This whole album has been about having faith in myself.”
Holly Miranda
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How 27 year-old Holly Miranda arrived at The Magician’s Private Library is a tale every bit as wild as the record’s otherworldly title suggests. It’s a story of overcoming zealots and dodging mobsters. It takes in small-scale fraud and subterfuge. It wouldn’t have been possible without Belinda Carlisle, Trent Reznor and one of the 21st century’s preeminent creators of sound: album producer Dave Sitek.

The story of the LP’s recording is equally compelling. Made before Holly had a record deal, during a month’s sessions at the TV On The Radio man’s Staygold studio in Brooklyn, it sees it’s makers starting at 7pm and recording straight through until 9 am. Every night. Holly picks up the story: “My rehearsal space was down the hall. Dave was sleeping on site. We slept all day, recorded all night for about three weeks. It was a pretty intense experience. If my prior recording sessions were school, this was like getting a master’s."

The end result, as you’ve probably heard, is one of the most enthralling records of 2010. From the fantastical spell of ‘Forest Green Oh Forest Green’ to the horn-laden atmospherics of ‘Joints,’ The Magician’s Private Library is a record intent on taking you on a journey. It’s a record equally in love (‘Waves’) and in dreams ('Sweet Dreams', 'Everytime I Got To Sleep', 'Sleep On Fire'), dark, bold and sonically ambitious – horns & beats, MPC & strings, synths & bells & reverb, all here.

Dave Sitek and Holly Miranda first met 5 years ago in New York City. "Dave was in the process of building his studio, next door to my rehearsal space and Headgear Studios (where he recorded the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs & TV On The Radio records). We just met hanging out the lobby. We became friends and I’d bring him demos I was recording at home. Sometimes he’d make requests for songs. It started with a cover of ‘God Damn The Sun’ by the Swans. And then we went back and forth for years like that.

“There was an idea we’d make an album together one day, but between our touring schedules and figuring out how to pay for it, it wasn’t easy y’know? Eventually, when we finally made it into the studio, I had about 40 demos I'd recorded at my apartment, or on the road in the back of the van.”

One of the songs, ‘Sleep on Fire,’ was inspired by a friend in the building who was asleep in his bed when fire broke out in the apartment below. “Luckily, someone was awake in the living room and carried him out,” she says, “When they were able to get back into his apartment they found that only the spot beneath his bed had burned, had actually fallen through to the floor below. That image always haunted me. So the song’s about not wasting your time here. Sleeping like your bed is on fire."

As for The Magician’s Private Library itself, just where is this bewitching place described in the title? How can we find it?

“’The Magician’s Private Library’ could be anything and anywhere….” Holly begins, “But I got the title from my schizophrenic Uncle, my Dad’s little brother who I’ve always been really close to. We were on a boat ride one day and I cued up ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’.’ It was the first time my Uncle--who’d been in a mental institution since he was 23--had heard that album. It got to the middle of the record, y’know, the part where the guy is really laughing? And there’s lot of background talking and I was kind of like…maybe this wasn’t the best thing to be playing for my Uncle Ronnie. So I stopped and asked him what he thought of the album. He turned to me and said ‘I think it sounds like the magician’s private library!’. That was 5 years ago now, and I’ve always had it in mind for the album title. The record is actually dedicated to him.”

But before Magician’s Private Libraries, La Blogotheque sessions and Vanity Fair shout-outs, prior to support slots with The XX, Friendly Fires and The Antlers, in advance of rave write-up’s in Dazed & Confused, the New York Times, album cameos from TV On The Radio members Kyp Malone and Jaleel Bunton - there was church. “I went to church, five days a week for 14 years,” Holly reveals with a hint of a southern accent courtesy of her childhood, split between the state of Tennessee and her birthplace in Michigan.

“I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music. The movies were a no-go. I didn’t have cable, I didn’t have MTV - certain cartoons were deemed demonic - like The Smurfs! Motown was actually OK, because my parents had grown up in Detroit.”

In a house where music was deemed devilish, Holly had to find other ways to get her hands on this particular contraband. It came via her older sister, who’d established quite the racket ripping off a US CD subscription service (Columbia House) by getting free CDs sent to her house under pseudonym’s like Belinda Carlisle. “My sister’s seven years older than me so she’d come home stoned and crash out, I‘d go in her room with a flashlight and steal CD’s to listen to…that was the first time I heard The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Elvis and Aretha Franklin.” Not that this arrangement lasted too long…

“One day my Dad found the CD’s. He read the Nine Inch Nails lyrics about fucking the devil in the backseat of your car, broke that CD in half and made my sister go to a record store and sell the rest!”

Within a few years, a 16 year old Holly had decided she’d had quite enough of Detroit and headed to NYC. She crashed at her sister’s pad and started playing around the city. The good news: This led to her first record deal. The bad news: unfortunately, it was with the mafia, funded by their profits…

“I figured out I wasn’t really signing with the label they said I was,” she explains “and the contract they wanted me to sign was total bullshit. The lawyer THEY appointed for me advised me NOT to sign the deal! When I didn’t, they told me that I’d never work in the music industry again, made some threats... I went back to Detroit for a few months to hide out and started working on new music. That was a pretty eye opening first experience to have with the entertainment industry.”

Having avoided the horse’s head in the bed treatment, Holly not long after formed The Jealous Girlfriends, ran into Dave Sitek in that hallway, goes solo, and well, you know the rest…
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