Hayley and the Machine

Finally I got to see Florence and the Machine in a big solo show. She overawed me last night at the Hammersmith Apollo, with her huge show(wo)manship, and even bigger voice. Florence is totally worth falling in love with...Haunting voice, beautiful red hair, more energy than I expend in a week with each song.

Being the biggest show she has ever performed in London, we were spoiled with an entire string section, a choir and a HARP. She handled the crowd with an amazing blend of gratitude and arrogance. Listening to the songs from Lungs tumbling out of her with (if possible) even more emotion than on the album made me see even more vividly her world of emotion turned gothic fable. Her voice blew the cobwebs out of every corner of the Apollo, and out of my brain, and from the croaking of her voice when she chatted to the audience between songs, she gave everything and a little bit more to make the evening both familiar and riveting. Apart from the plain and simple fact that she is awesome, there is a reason I am so transfixed by Florence, her power and femininity, the tales she tells through her music, the mythical nature of her lyrics and melodies.

Anyone who knows me, or indeed has been following this blog, will know that music is central to my very existence. I sit in my office all day listening to the radio, I iPod in and out of work, bopping along to anything from the Foo Fighters to Edith Piaf. I have eclectic, but definite taste in music. Music is an instinctive pleasure, based on feeling, memory and submersion. It is also subjective. Different music speaks to me at different times.

In my ebullient late teens I felt a great affinity with the ultimate feel-good anthem “I’m Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the waves, I have wept through the end of many eras with Time of your Life by Green Day on repeat, my dear friend Julie and I once listened to Vampire Weekend compulsively in the car to cheer us up after a completely disastrous weekend that included a car wreck and missing out on a music festival), and who hasn’t stared rather self indulgently into a mirror, mascara running down cheeks ala Gene Simmons, with the mournful tones of Damien Rice as the soundtrack to any range of life crises.

Yes music has the capacity to heal and help us, as well as the ability to immediately transport us back to the time and place it became poignant. Sometimes that can be painful, sometimes redemptive, always powerful. Music has saved me many times in my life. A song or an album has proven to me I am not alone in feeling the way I do, comforted me when I was staring into the rather black abyss of depression, kept me company during nights of insomnia, given me the vicarious power I need to get through the day.

And so, my latest saviour comes in the form of fire headed fay Florence. Florence and her wonderful Machine gave me a soundtrack to a year of exploration, loneliness, loveliness and learning. Moving to London was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and one of the most necessary. That is for an array of reasons, which I may go into one day, but not now. 2009 was a year of reconnections with my roots, in the form of my beloved family, of rediscovery as I learnt who I was away from a group of friends who had become a family, and of reunions as I returned to a group of friends. All of this came with a triumphs and challenges, and the unavoidable melancholy of missing people and making change. But through it all I had Florence promising me that “the dark days were over”, the empowering Drumming song setting up a tribal chant in my heart, reminders that I need to become “Lion Hearted” and not “Rabbit Hearted”, and I couldn’t help but recognise the ghost “in my lungs…that sighs in my sleep, Wraps itself around my tongue, As it softly speaks. Then it walks, then it walks with my legs, To Fall, To Fall, To Fall, at your feet.” Walking through London’s crowds, in underground tunnels all over the city I felt the emancipation of admitting that “My fingers crawl your skin, try to tempt my way in, You are the moon that makes the night for which I have to Howl…”

And so after the stirring journey, of seeing my early London anthems sung by their mistress, I couldn’t help but have a very small weep as she sung the words, “The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out, You left me in the dark. No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight, In the shadow of your heart.”

Thank you Florence.