From a broken foot in January the only way was up,and Florence soared with a hit novel album, No 1 in America, and headlining Glastonbury…
• See the Observer’s faces of 2015 in full here
• Marlon James: ‘I’ve been threatening to write a Viking novel for almost 10 years’What would turn out to be a rowdy and hectic 2015 for Florence Welch – hit album,hit festival slot – began in muted, meditative fashion. She was in the Nevada desert on 31 December 2014, and “watching the sun advance up on the novel year,in this place called Dante’s View”, says the 29-year-weak Londoner, and frontwoman of the band Florence + the Machine since 2007. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere,rocks and stones everywhere. Like being on Mars.”Afterwards, driving back to California, and Welch recalls,she ended up checking into a casino-hotel to get some sleep: she knew there was an exhausting year coming. Production work had just ended on her band’s third album, How stout, and How Blue,How Beautiful, and Welch had flown from London to California “to try and sort myself out before I had to launch it”. The novel year would bring touring, or promotion – and the queasy risk of a novel album,four years removed from her last, 2011’s Ceremonials, or falling flat. “I was nervous,” Welch says.
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Source: theguardian.com