Florence + The Machine paints the Proms blood red

Florence Welch is known for her commanding stage presence – spiralling across the stage in a blur of silks and dancing so hard she’s prone to breaking bones.

But for her debut at the BBC Proms, the flame-haired singer was unusually restrained. She barely moved from behind her microphone stand, letting the music convey the drama instead.

The concert was an orchestral revamp of Florence +The Machine’s Brit Award-winning debut album Lungs, now 15 years old, and a document of the star’s “messy and chaotic” teenage years.

Its wildly combustible songs were the perfect material for Jules Buckley’s orchestra, who ramped up the album’s gothic overtones with harpsichords, lutes and long crescendos of percussion.

Kiss With A Fist became a sort of witchy hoedown, Blinding opened with a sinister cacophony of whispered incantations, and You Got The Love made ample use of the Royal Albert Hall’s “Voice of Jupiter” pipe organ.

Enhancing the eerie mood, the venue was bathed in blood-red lights throughout the concert, with Florence in a flowing claret dress, her sleeves swaying in time to the music.

The audience got into the mood, too, wearing pre-Raphaelite dresses, Toreodor jackets, crowns of flowers and, in one case, dressing head-to-toe in fairy lights.

It was the perfect marriage of material and setting. “Renaissance meets rock,” as Radio 3 presenter Georgia Mann put it.

Billed as Symphony Of Lungs, the concert was the most in-demand Prom of the 2024 season.

The initial release of tickets in May was snapped up in a matter of hours, and more than 20,000 people joined the online queue for on-the-day tickets, which cost just £8, on Wednesday morning.

The concert marked Florence + The Machine’s only UK show of 2024, in what was supposed to be a year off.

“When [the invitation] came in, they were like, ‘We know you’re off, but would you…?’ and I was like, ‘Yes!’” she told Vogue magazine.

The orchestral score was put together over several months of drafts, revisions, and rehearsals, overseen by Jules Buckley, the conductor who’s been charged with “ripping up the Proms’ rulebook”.

Over the past decade, he has staged concerts based on Stevie Wonder and Nick Drake’s music, as well as Proms dedicated to grime and dance music.

He said Florence’s music was especially well-suited to the orchestral treatment.

“You’ve got this incredible virtuosic harp playing, you’ve got a whole swathe of percussion, and you’ve got the harmonic sequences of the songs, which are often very romantic,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ahead of the concert.

“We’re not planning on making it all dainty and quaint. We’re putting the pedal down.”

He wasn’t exaggerating.

When classical music meets pop, it often feels like the songs are drowning in molasses.

But Buckley respected what Florence called the “handmade, personal, rough around the edges” arrangements she’d written at the start of her career; letting the melodies breathe, and holding the orchestra back until they were really needed.

Highlights included a muscular version of Drumming Song, with soaring harmonies from the London Contemporary Voices Choir; and a joyfully enormous arrangement of Cosmic Love.

Girl With One Eye, in which Florence plucks out a love rival’s eyeball, was punctuated by blasts of tuba and a twinkling harpsichord – accentuating the dark comedy of the lyric with a musical nod to the Addams Family theme.

And the hit singles Dog Days Are Over and Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)

The singer seemed to be relishing the chance to revisit her old songs, even performing Howl – a track she’d previously banished from her repertoire “because it’s really hard on my voice“.

There was only one minor mis-step, when she launched into the bridge of Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) too early.

“I’ve been practicing my cues with Jules all day and I’m still a little confused sometimes,” she said, laughing it off.

“Jules says, ‘You’re coming in in eight bars’, and I’m like, ‘what does that mean?!'”

If the audience noticed those nerves, they didn’t care.

As they bounced to a fevered version of Dog Days Are Over, and swooned to the gothic romance of Between Two Lungs, it was clear why Florence still inspires such devotion.

Fifteen years after Lungs made her a star, the power of her voice and the passion of her lyrics are undimmed.

I was left with just one question: Why has she never recorded a Bond theme?

1. Drumming Song

2. My Boy Builds Coffins

3. You’ve Got the Love

4. Bird Song

5. Swimming

6. I’m Not Calling You a Liar

7. Kiss with A Fist

8. Howl

9. Girl with One Eye

10. Hardest of Hearts

11. Rabbit Heart

12. Blinding

13. Hurricane Drunk

14. Cosmic Love

15. Between Two Lungs

16. Dog Days

17. Falling

You can listen to the concert again on BBC Sounds.