Florence Welch: An insiders guide to the offbeat darling of British music

After an impromptu performance in a pub set her on the road to stardom, Florence Welch has gone on to bag a Brit Award, a Mercury Prize nomination – oh, and a mention from Prince Charles. Benji Wilson gets the story so far from pop's most colourful – and unconventional – new voice

From pub to pop: The rise and rise of Florence Welch

Many of the things you need to know about Florence Welch, the flame-haired frontwoman of this year's hottest musical ticket Florence and the Machine, are right there in her stage performances.

Take a recent London gig, for example. Fuelled by a couple of vodka tonics, she twirled and whirled in scandalous hotpants and a floor-length mesh cape, then clambered on to a speaker stack, and perched motionless on top like a pensive bird of prey while the band played on. The thought occurred: uh-oh, she's going to try and fly. Luckily it also occurred to a security guard who hauled her back down. And then the song ended and she was a pleasant, polite 22-year-old again, thanking the crowd so much for coming.

'Singing takes over your whole body and your brain. It's like coming back from a weird
place every time you stop,' she tells me when! we meet a week later. It's the ability to go to that weird pl! ace that makes Florence this year's most off-kilter, downright exhilarating pop star.

She looks sensational, her album Lungs has been nominated for this year's Mercury Prize (to be announced on 8 September) and she has a voice loud enough to smash chandeliers from a distance. But most of all she has an eerie presence – 'like Kate Bush on Red Bull,' I wrote in my notes at that gig – that makes her seem just a little bit special.

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In July with her Mercury Prize nomination; performing at last month's
T4 on the Beach

Florence says this fey otherworldliness was there from childhood. She grew up in a bohemian South London family, the eldest of three children born to an ad-man father and an American art historian mother.

'I was imaginative, a bit of a dreamer but quite a timid child. I wasn't confident – I think childhood is one of the most uncertain and terrifying places to be. I don't know if I'd want to go back there. But I do remember being completely involved in imaginary games that would last for days, weeks. It was always magic, sorcery, living in trees. A lot of just living in imaginary worlds. I don't think I've lost that. It's just now I'm doing it as a job.'

Her playmates were the people next door, who went on to become her brothers and sisters. (Her parents separated when she was 13; her mother moved in with the next-door neighbour, and Florence found herself with four new st! ep-siblings.) 'I had quite a chaotic upbringing, what with the! amalgam ation of two families into one house. That was quite a strange time, but we've all turned out well-rounded individuals, much to my mother's relief. Much to her credit as well.'

'I was a chubby kid! Really awkward until the
age of 16'

Her mother, as it happens, was at the gig where her daughter shinned up the speaker-tower. 'She said she enjoyed the gig but it was too loud and she wishes she could hear what I was saying more. She doesn't like the music industry.' I! n short, Florence's mum Evelyn (with whom she still lives) worries about her little girl getting her head turned by the money, the parties, the people.

'She'd much rather I was doing something else, but she does say that when she sees me on stage that she understands why I do it. But she so wishes that I was just at university.'

Florence was never really going to end up 'just at university'. At Alleyn's co-educational school in Dulwich, where she sang in the choir, she says she was treated as a bit of a lost cause. 'I daydreamed my way through it.'

What was she focused on instead? 'Falling in love with a boy in a band. Not someone famous. Just a boy in a South London punk group. I had one best friend at school and we entered this world of art students and these amazing crazy parties and gigs. That's what made me want to be in a band. By the end of school I felt like I wasn't really there any more.'

The established route to the South London scene she craved was via Camberwell College of Arts, and at 18 she went there to study illustration. She dabbled in avant-garde installations ('I remember drawing lots of cannibalistic stick men who'd eat each other in really violent ways') then got down to the real business of banddom. 'I went to art college because loads of amazing people I knew had gone there and it was always an ambition of mine to get an art degree. Or to be an art college dropout!'

And drop out she did. How Florence got signed is rapidly becoming part of modern music lore. Although she had been 'messing around doing backing vocals' while at school, and had been part of scratch bands since a phase as a 13-year-old punk, she'd never thought of herself as a frontwoman.

But in December 2006, when she was 19, and a year and a half into her course at Camberwell, Mairead Nash, one half of the indie/disco DJ duo the Queens of Noize, booked a friend of Florence's to DJ at a night in a pub. 'I went there dressed in a full tuxedo and I was really drunk, running around going, "I can sing!"'

'My mum would much rather that I was doing
something else. She wishes I was just at university'

Florence cornered Nash in the loo, and treated her to a half-cut rendition of Etta James's Something's Got a Hold On Me. Instead of requesting police assistance, Nash asked Florence to perform at her open club night a week later.

'We had an hour to rehearse, I had no name, I had about three songs but no backing music and totally took a chance. But while I was doing it I was like, "This feel! s right." I'd always thought I needed to be in someone else's band. I didn't think I could stand up on my own and do it.' She could – and Nash agreed to manage her.

Although by that point she had already written some of the songs on Lungs, most of them came, as so often, from a break-up. She is now back with the boyfriend (Stuart, a literary editor) but it was traumatic at the time. 'I was quite heartbroken and really manic. When you're in that place it's good to have something to do because otherwise you get really self-destructive. I think it sort of saved me from the wilderness, from the hurricane!'

Stuart provides her with new fiction to devour, and she'll happily talk about the books, but less so the boyfriend. 'I don't think he really likes me talking about our break-up. It was a painful time for him, too. He loves all the songs…but I don't really like to talk about him.'

Either way, the songs ! had the right effect. Two years after singing to Nash in the l! oo, havi ng only released a pair of independent singles and before any major tour, Florence was on stage at Earl's Court in February accepting this year's Brit Award for Critics' Choice (Adele picked up the same award in 2008). It was still five months before Lungs would even be released.

'I felt so out of my depth, like I didn't belong. Take That were coming down in a spaceship, Girls Aloud were doing a burlesque show and there was me, shaking… I went backstage and just burst into tears afterwards.'

For a while she felt too exposed, with too little airplay to justify the mantle the indu! stry had placed on her shoulders. 'But now I can look back and really feel like that helped me. People who would have not thought to listen to my music, well, maybe it made them go and listen.'

'I burst into tears after the Brit Awards. I felt so out of my depth'

Since then, she has inevitably found herself lumped in with the Upcoming Female Artist brigade. Typically, Florence is unflustered by the bracketing. 'We just all happen to be female. I've met La Roux – she's a really, really nice girl,! comes from South London like me. I love her album. Victoria [! Hesketh] , Little Boots, is really sweet. VV Brown, lovely… Marina and the Diamonds, her stuff is great and she's such a sweet girl.

'Everyone is really supportive of each other and we're all going through the same thing, the highs and the lows. I don't ever feel like there's rivalry. There's a real sense of, "We're in it together." But we're all different artists and if you listen to our music you can tell that none of us is doing the same thing.'

Yet, as wowed crowds from T in the Park, Oxegen and Glastonbury will testify, none of the current crop of chanteuses quite match up to ! Florence's on-stage clout. She simply sounds bigger than any of her contemporaries – she is bigger than them, 6ft tall and striding the stage on six-inch heels like a punk Ophelia – and she looks like no one else out there.

'I've always been interested in clothes. I became friends with my best friend at school because we wanted to dress up and go to burlesque nights and places where we could wear the most outrageous clothes ever.'

By outrageous, she means the outer limits of most people's glam-fantasy dressing-up box. At 11, she says, she was dressing up as a witch in pur! ple lipstick, the first of many phases. Little Old Lady was 'b! rogues a nd cardigans and ankle socks'; Little Lord Fauntleroy was 'boys' shorts and blouses', and somewhere in between came a preppy period ('white socks and loafers; every day. I had a ponytail and I stood really still.').

She first dyed her hair bright red when she was nine,! and since then it's meandered through the entire annoy-your-p! arents s pectrum, only returning to her trademark auburn 18 months ago. She describes her look now as – deep breath – 'half gothic bat crow winged fantasy, half golden 70s Stevie Nicks white witch. And a smattering of disco go-go hotpants.'

It takes some figure to get away with that kind of mix 'n' match wardrobe, yet she hasn't always been the lissom six-footer she is now. 'I was a really chubby kid! Really awkward until the age of 16, then I just got tall, levelled out. I was even skinnier than I am now when I was 17.'

Florence says that although she does worry about her weight – 'I th! ink every girl does. No one's completely happy with their body' – her concern is less about getting fat than getting too skinny. 'I have a tendency to lose weight – everyone in my family has it, my dad's really skinny. We get too distracted and forget about eating. People are always encouraging me to eat more.'

Today she's in a vintage black dress with a sort of built-in white-trimmed cape, and a battered pair of beige suede brogues. But she's happy to defer to a stylist for her stage look, shoots and videos because, she says, 'I don't know what is going to look good on camera. But we work together really closely. Aldene [her stylist] introduces me to new designers like Hannah Marshall and Felder Felder, who are really amazing. So it's a mix of young, upcoming designers! . That's exciting – you're making something; they're making so! mething. '

Most recently she performed for the Prince's Rainforests Project alongside Paul Weller at the Eden Project, and in spite of all that has happened to her in the past 12 months – Glastonbury, a top ten album, the Brit Award and now that coveted Mercury nomination – she says that event stands out. 'Prince Charles came on the screen above the stage and said thank you to the artists who played. I think he said my name. I was like, "Oh my God, thank you sir!"' She laughs. 'Him having said my name? Now that's really weird.'

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