FEATURE:
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IN THIS PHOTO: Florence + The Machine’s Florence Welch/PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian
A Book That Celebrates the Music Queens of Today
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THERE have been a lot of…
IN THIS PHOTO: St. Vincent performing for the BBC Proms on 3rd September, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Paradise/BBC
thoughts on my mind regarding women in music. Not just legacy artists and legends. Though they are important. When it comes to women in music today, we recognise their work and there are album and gig reviews. There are news stories about them but, aside from that, what in the way of spotlighting and celebration? Maybe a book would not be the right format, as it would be always updated. However, there are so many women in music today who are inspiring and deserve something permanent. Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine is truly one of the modern greats. I want to come to a recent interview with The Guardian and some takeaways. Florence + The Machine release Everybody Scream on 31st October. Their lead has been speaking about the album, how she suffered an ectopic pregnancy and almost died. Such a brave and strong woman, she inspires and gives strength to so many others:
“After Florence Welch came close to death, she felt strongly that, more than people, she wanted to be with plants and animals. “It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she says. Since then, cats have kept coming to visit her garden. Not her cats – it is hard for her to have pets, what with all the touring – but neighbourhood cats, treating the place as if they live there. “I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she says. She sees patterns and prescience in many things, now. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”
In August 2023, Welch had a miscarriage. Days later, she learned that the pregnancy had been ectopic, meaning that the fertilised egg had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The fallopian tube then ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she says. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
After Florence Welch came close to death, she felt strongly that, more than people, she wanted to be with plants and animals. “It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she says. Since then, cats have kept coming to visit her garden. Not her cats – it is hard for her to have pets, what with all the touring – but neighbourhood cats, treating the place as if they live there. “I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she says. She sees patterns and prescience in many things, now. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”
In August 2023, Welch had a miscarriage. Days later, she learned that the pregnancy had been ectopic, meaning that the fertilised egg had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The fallopian tube then ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she says. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
We are in her summer house, at the end of her lush garden in south London, still blooming, late in the season, in tasteful shades of pastels and white. She sits on the sofa, wearing a long, pale-green gown, wrapped in a shawl. She shifts and reclines, stands up and sits back down. The door is open. The air is brisk. There is a pile of blankets in the corner, she says, in case I get cold. We talk for almost two hours about what happened to her, and how the catastrophe of it all became her extraordinary, excoriating new album, Everybody Scream. The record is as strange, uncompromising and brutal as she has ever been. It will be released on Halloween, and no wonder. It is full of witchcraft and fury.
PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian
Welch has long been such a fixture of the British music scene that it can be easy to understate how massive she is. When the first Florence + the Machine album, Lungs, came out, she was 22. (We are meeting on the day after her 39th birthday.) She had No 1 singles and albums at home, and she conquered the US, topping the Billboard charts with her third record. When Foo Fighters had to pull out of Glastonbury in 2015, she was bumped up the bill to headliner, a feat so rare for a British woman that, since the turn of the century, only Adele, Dua Lipa and Florence have managed it. Her performance that night made it clear that she was already a headline act.
In 2022, she released a single called King. It was a conversation with herself about whether to have children, or to continue life as a performer. Could the two coexist? It contains the line “I never knew my killer would be coming from within”, and it was the opening track on her fifth album, Dance Fever, which was also partly inspired by a 16th-century phenomenon in which women danced themselves to death. She thought, then, that she had made her horror record. “I really did,” she says, and sighs. “With that naivety … ”
At the end of the summer of 2023, Welch cancelled a handful of festival shows, posting a note to Instagram explaining that she’d had to have emergency surgery, that it had saved her life, but that she didn’t feel strong enough to go into the reasons for it, yet. “Suffice to say I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions,” she wrote, at the time.
“Having that line in King was a strange thing,” she says, today, her lip beginning to tremble. “Because I had an ectopic pregnancy, on stage.” She talks through what happened, slowly and steadily. Two years ago, she and her boyfriend – a British guitarist in an indie band, whom she prefers not to name, as she is protective of his privacy, but who she has been with, on and off, since 2011 – decided that they would try to have a baby. “It was my first experience of even trying to get pregnant, and I thought, there’s no way, because I’m ancient,” she laughs. She was about to turn 37. She got pregnant the first time they tried. “It was a big shock. But it felt magical, as well. I felt I had followed a bodily instinct, in that animal sense, and it had happened.”
The miscarriage occurred early in the pregnancy, so early that they hadn’t yet told anyone about it. “I think, because it was my first time being pregnant, and it was my first miscarriage, I was like, OK, I’ve heard this is part of it. I spoke to my doctor, and they are not generally dangerous. Devastating, but not dangerous,” she says. She was due to headline a festival in Cornwall a week later, and made the decision to continue with the performance. “Emotionally, I was sad and scared, but I think, also, I was coping.” This sense of pushing through is not unfamiliar to her. A few years ago, she broke her foot on stage, bled everywhere, and still finished the gig before seeking help. (She notes, wryly, that the performance got a 4/5 review.) “With physical stuff, I have a strange, otherworldly strength,” she says. “Emotionally, I’m an absolute nightmare. Literally, will crumble,” she laughs. “But broken bone? Fine. Internal bleeding? Let’s go.”
Everybody Scream is the antithesis of small talk. On it, Welch is grappling with a lot. There’s her new song One of the Greats, which she calls her “lunatic, enormous, poem-rant-joke thing”, and offers seething indictment of sexist double standards. In the video, she sits in the back of a limo, at night, in sunglasses and a suit, a rock star waving a cigar (she doesn’t smoke; it’s a liquorice stick). “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can,” she sings.
That’s a cheeky line, I say. “Yeah,” she laughs. “It’s all quite tongue-in-cheek.” That one is about effort, and how much is required of women, as opposed to men. “You [male performers] get to be up there and be hot in a T-shirt, and everyone’s like, it’s amazing!” With women, it’s different. “Your body is the show, the clothes are the show.” Many of her male peers have three children and continue to tour, “because they have a partner with the kids at home. What I’m sacrificing to keep going is more apparent, and bigger, as you get older.” It is understandable that this is at the front of her mind, though once again the song was prescient: she wrote it before the pregnancy. “I will get those things, hopefully. I will get to have a family, but I haven’t had both. Or so far I haven’t, and then when I tried, I was sort of violently rebuffed,” she sighs.
I don’t want to assume that it’s all autobiography, I say, but … how much of the lyrics are true? What happens, she says, is that she turns the real into the unreal, in order to cope with it. “I’ve shared parts of my life with [fans] that I haven’t been able to say to my closest friends,” she admits. “Addiction, and eating disorders, and whatever the fuck this one’s about.” After the trauma of the ectopic pregnancy and the emergency surgery, she thought that she wanted to put it all away. “But working again helped me. It was like little lanterns in a fog. I could just pick my way through. And I was so angry! There was a fury at how unsupported I felt by my industry, how clear it was, that it wasn’t built for me”.
I was recently watching St. Vincent at the BBC Proms. That was on BBC Four on 26th September. Another truly incredible artist, hearing her perform alongside Jules Buckley’s Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall was spine-tingling! A truly staggering talent who I think remains underrated, she is another music queen who I feel deserves pages written about her. Her performance, which was the last date in her All Born Screaming tour (the screaming connection between St. Vincent and Florence + The Machine!), was majestic. Rolling Stone UK awarded it a five-star review:
“Picture it: Jules Buckley and his orchestra navigating the ever-increasingly eclectic discography of the Grammy-winning St. Vincent (real name Annie Clark). Pair that with the singer-songwriter herself and you’ve got one hell of an evening at the legendary Royal Albert Hall.
In this iconic setting, you can fully appreciate the poetry of Clark’s writing. Songs like ‘Black Rainbow’ and ‘Live in the Dream’ feel almost technicolour – painted with fresh new colours. Speaking to Rolling Stone UK last year, Clark shared her desire to write a Bond theme, and the orchestral version of fan favourite ‘Digital Witness’ shared here feels like the perfect candidate.
It’s thrilling to see an artist on a stage just jamming out on an electric guitar with an orchestra that Clark very clearly not only appreciates, but respects immensely. Moments where Clark is guitar-less on stage felt like a peak behind the elusive St. Vincent curtain. Performances like this are what make the BBC Proms so special – taking a contemporary artist and placing them in an environment that they wouldn’t usually be in and the excitement of the unknown that comes with that.
Perhaps the most surprising part of the evening, besides when Clark entered the crowd during the iconic ‘New York’, is a rather subdued and pared back version of ‘Los Ageless’, from her 2017 album MASSEDUCTION. It backs up what conductor, arranger and orchestrator Buckley shared about the event before the show.
He said: “The concept here is not just to slap an orchestral wallpaper behind an artist, we’ve worked together to find a new interpretation of St. Vincent’s sound.” Clark puts it best herself at the top of the show, telling the crowd of the process of re-imagining her music like this: “It’s been glorious”.
In terms of modern music, women are very much dominating. So many contemporary icons that I feel should be joined together in a book. Whether it is the sensational CMAT or the Charli xcx, it is not only the music itself that warrants words of praise. It is what these women say in interviews and how they are not only reshaping the music scene but also culture too. I was affected by Florence Welch and what she said in that interview. What she has had to endure and how she still performs and writes. So many other women not only making incredible music, but they are also handling challenging experiences with incredible strength and resilience. It is not to dismiss men at all. I feel that the most compelling music is being made by women. These role models do get noticed in the music press, though we don’t go beyond that. Whether there were a documentary or other projects, it would be overdue seeing something dedicated to music’s women. The odd book here and there pops up, though there has not been anything published that highlights the finest female artists of today. I am not sure whether it would include legends and legacy artists. I just realised how there are scores of newer artists who are transforming music. In a scene still sexist and set up for men, they are hitting back. The best albums of the year have come from women. Whatever it is work from Little Simz, Blondshell, FKA twigs or Lady Gaga, this year has been another defined by brilliant women. I find their lives and words much more compelling than men’s. Maybe men are less open or seem more guarded. I am finding so much more strength and inspiration from music’s queens. I have named a few names, yet there are countless women in music today that deserve to be united in a book. It is long overdue that we spend time writing about phenomenal women in music and fill these…
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