“You’re wondering, what is this? Is it a cult? Is it a British pagan dance ritual? Am I safe? Are they gonna sacrifice me? All I can say is, it’s really so much better if you just give into it, and you will be completely fine if you just do every single thing I say.”
Florence Welch
A few weeks ago, a tropical storm was aiming for Florida, causing many to prepare for the harsh weather and pull out their generators. As dark clouds begin to loom over the sky, Saturday night in Miami provided a magenta-dusted, gothic covenstead in the form of the FTX Arena, littered with flower-crowned fans waiting for the “glorious colonial ghost” — according to supporting act, King Princess — also known as Florence Welch to grace the stage. Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dance Fever’ tour is a celestial celebration of love, togetherness, and all things witchy.
The show begins with stark white, renaissance chandeliers rising to the rafters revealing Florence, donning a mint green, diaphanous gown, draped in lace layers that billowed around her as she twirled across the stage. As her Jesus-on-the-cross-like silhouette faded away, the lights bringing the singer into view, her rotund voice belted “Heaven Is Here,” serving as an empowering battle cry into the two-hour performance. The song’s first verse opens with “Draw me a circle and I’ll protect/Heaven is here if you want it” which perfectly encapsulates the entire essence of Florence and the crowd of fans who press against the barricade, only a few feet away from the stage. Florence stands as a pulsing symbol of femininity, strength, and freedom, in which her energy is happily absorbed by the crowd and given back to her in the form of unadulterated elation. The immediate connection between artist and devotee is noticeable to those even in the farthest part of the arena.
“Heaven Is Here” is followed by “King,” the first track from her most recent album. “King” is a punchy number in which Florence matter-of-a-factly chants “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king.” Followed by one of her most notable hits “Ship To Wreck” which undoubtedly brought out the largest reaction from the entire arena. Thunderous applause bounced off the walls as the London-born vocalist jumped and danced in time with the 2015 hit. The entire room was on their feet, along with the row of grown men sitting just ahead of me — say in their early thirties— dressed in business casual attire, who moshed harder to this song than anyone else!
Every song within the first act had me feeling that the energy had reached its peak, only for each performance to get increasingly more joyful. “Ship To Wreck” seamlessly transitioned into “Free,” an electric, synthpop tune with an infectious chorus of “As it picks me up, puts me down/It picks me up, puts me down/Picks me up, puts me down/A hundred times a day.” A large part of “Dance Fever” and Florence constructing the album is the fact that it was made during the pandemic. A time when everyone existed and interacted with one another through screens. “The frantic energy of that time, the sense of wanting to break out of that feeling” Welch describes is why she carried on with the album and equally explosive tour. In order to rid that feeling of isolation and reliance on technology, all phones in the arena were put away, per Florence’s request, for a shared experience of singing and dancing to “Dog Days Are Over” (another of Florence’s more popular singles, from the 2009 album “Lungs”) which concluded the first act.
The stage glowed a dark red, introducing the sensual second act. Welch proved her impressive vocal stamina with the amount of jumping and strutting across the stage she had just done and showed off her strong lower register with the dark and melodic “Dream Girl Evil”. Florence descended from the stage and into the large standing area of fans, lightly cupping someone’s face, leaning in, and singing “Make me perfect/Make me your fantasy… Am I your dream girl?/You think of me in bed” directly to their shaking and smiling form. She continues to make her way down the crowd, only for her to climb up on the metal bars of the barrier and tower over her followers, close enough for them all to feel her hair against themselves as she rhythmically thrashed above the audience.
The screens on either side of the stage focused on the image of her hand tightly grasping that of another fan as he supported her for the minute that she balanced there and that stuck with me. Their hand was unwavering as Florence appeared to them as an angel, a god, a cult leader as she would say, and her fingers wrapped around his tight. The blind trust she put in their hands that they easily accepted was a very powerful depiction of the symbiotic relationship between an artist and their supporters. Florence’s religious and elusive image is a large part of her persona as a famous musician and it works in the sense that seeing her before you can feel unreal, but it doesn’t overtake or cancel out the unapologetic humanness that is conveyed in her lyrics, which is why she’s managed to have a loyal fanbase for over a decade.
The show continued to switch between tracks from “Dance Fever” and songs from her past albums; the back and forth between heartstring-pulling ballads on lost love and electrifying indie-pop rock tracks always felt natural. Florence closed out the near hour and forty-five minutes with a haunting and guttural rendition of “Restraint”, her choking gasp timed with the shutting of the lights left the arena in a dazed state as she disappeared into the wings. Some left, while most stayed for the encore which consisted of “Shake It Out” “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)”, and “Never Let Me Go”. While the entire show was nothing short of completely immersive, I found that it was her performance of “Never Let Me Go” that was most significant.
“We haven’t sung this on a U.S. tour for I think ten years because… I have really strange feelings about it because I wrote this when I was very young and very sad, and very, very, very drunk… and so I said I will never ever sing this song again, people will forget about it, I’ll never sing it again, and then what happened is in that ten years you did not stop listening to it at all and like with everything in my life that I always thought was too broken or too sad or too much or too damaged if I put it into a song you have always brought it back to me with love.” Florence recounted before she delved into the four-and-a-half-minute ballad about swimming to the bottom of the ocean’s depth and staying there. “It’s the only way I can escape/It seems a heavy choice to make/But now I am under all/And it’s breaking over me/A thousand miles down to the seabed/Found the place to rest my head”, she heartbreakingly croons. “Never Let Me Go,” which is nestled in her sixteen-track, 2011 album “Ceremonials,” has dark allusions to depression and suicide which are not lost on her fans, but there is something quite cathartic about watching her in the flesh, singing the sad tune, now in 2022. It feels like she’s made it over the hurdle and is honoring who she once was that allowed her to become who she is now. Florence + The Machine’s “Dance Fever” tour is a highly deserved victory lap for thirteen years of fierce vulnerability met with European whimsy that can tap into just about anyone.