By the time Florence + the Machine take to the amphitheatre stage on the second night of Splendour in the Grass 2015, the surrounding hillside has churned into slipstream to which you must either anchor yourself or surrender.
Yet the area is packed despite the treacherous conditions, from the basin in front of the stage to the very crests of the hills. Compared to the crowd frontwoman Florence Welch drew in Australia and New Zealand at the Laneway festivals in 2010, seven months after the release of her debut album Lungs, this is a more even mix of genders.
Dude bros in singlets hold their own among the flower-crowned girl gangs, a reminder it wasn’t so long ago that Florence was an indie darling with a small but enthusiastic following. Tonight, almost exactly a month since she rose to the occasion of Dave Grohl’s broken leg to headline Glastonbury, she’s a bona fide rock star, with a larger-than-life stage presence that we might one day compare to the likes of Jagger today..
The setlist draws from all three Florence albums: Lungs, Ceremonials and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, released only two months ago. Unsurprisingly, with the exception of the single Ship to Wreck, which the crowd already know by heart, her older material like Drumming Song and Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) is received with more enthusiasm.
She hasn’t yet got the back catalogue to warrant ditching Dog Days Are Over, her first big hit, and predictably its tinkling intro is met with a rapturous reception. But there are enough singalong, dancey (as far as the mud allows) numbers – Shake It Out and Spectrum, for example – that the absence of You’ve Got The Love isn’t noted.
Only Delilah and Queen of Peace, singles from the new album, are met with any indifference – and the stripped-back take on Sweet Nothing is poorer for the absence of Calvin Harris’ machine gun-fire synths.
Save for founding member Isabella Summers, the mechanics of The Machine change often. Tonight they include three backing singers, a brass section and – of course – a harp on top of the usual rock band lineup. But Welch is never overwhelmed, either by her band or the vast setting. She performs barefoot in a white, flowing cape-cum-jumpsuit, running, skipping, twirling from side to side of the stage, dropping to her knees, holding her hands together as though in prayer.
I say “as though” because I don’t know what’s going on in her head, but it’s hard to think of a musician who commits more fully to his or her stage persona, in this case, high priestess of baroque pop, and who’s to say it’s a persona at all? Earlier this week, humour site The Toast imagined a Florence + the Machine album “in which drowning is rare and love is not terrifying”.
There are moments in her performance here when this high drama, this reverence, seems contrived as when she holds an audience member’s head in her hands and sings to (... blesses?) her. But when she holds a pause indefinitely, eyes closed, as her band wait for her cue, it’s genuinely spellbinding, even at a distance, to see a musician match performance to lyrics, soul with song – to commit wholeheartedly to the world she has created.
Guardian Australia sponsors the Splendour Forum
