Florence Welch Says A Year Off ‘Boozing’ Gave Her ‘A Bit Of a Nervous Breakdown’

She said it's helped make her 'most personal album ever', though...

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by Sophie Wilkinson |
Published on

While You Got The Love has basically been everywhere – in adverts, radioplay, our own earworms – for the past few years, its singer, Florence Welch, of Florence + The Machine, has been a bit more of a wallflower. She'd decided to take a year to relax after the time between her two No1 albums Lungs and Ceremonials, saying: 'Blurred together, we didn't take any time off.'

However, that time off wasn't ideal, because the devil makes work for idle thumbs (and gullets), and soon she had developed an 'on-off relationship with booze' and had 'a bit of a nervous breakdown'.

She told Radio 1's Zane Lowe that that year was 'up and down…chaotic'.

She said: 'It was a bit of a crash-landing in the year off, I was still going to events but something wasn't quite right, I was spiraling a bit.

'I wasn't making myself happy. I wasn't stable.'

However, we figure she's talking in past tense, so things must have cleared up a bit. Plus, she's got a new album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, to promote. Which doesn't only keep her too busy for boozing (well, at least it means she won't be doing it too much) but, very selfishly for us, it means we get to hear all the musical emotion and struggle that an on-off relationship with booze can create.

It's a shame that some of the best music seems to come from a hardship of some sort, but as Florence herself put it: 'It was a vulnerable time for me when we first started making the record and because of that it's the most personal record I have ever made.'

Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.

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