Florence and the Machine: Nottingham Bodega – 11/11/09
Many will have heard of Florence but not be aware of it, from the promo adverts for 4music. That overplayed song, which was on every advert break on a music channel constantly for a month. However, Florence and the Machine (full name Florence Mary Leontine Walsh) have a lot more to offer than this one annoyingly catchy song.
Unfortunately for both the audience and Florence at this show, the support band The XX had to pull out of the gig due to illness. This left little for the audience to do (many who rightly expecting a support act had been there since half past seven) except get restless and sample the bars extensive range of over-priced bottled beers. So when Florence (who once performed using only a dust bin lid) finally came to the stage just before ten o’clock to a fairly modest audience, the South London art college drop out had a lot to prove. She graced the stage in a flourish wearing a short sparkly blue sequined dress, with her face adorned with sparkling gold make up.
She opened the set with relatively unknown song ‘Between Two lungs’, a song that allowed Florence to show the audience that for the next forty five minutes, all eyes were to be on her. The crowd seemed captivated by her amazing vocal abilities but most men had seemed to also notice that her dress was incredibly short, revealing occasionally more then Florence possibly would have wanted people to see.
Having first appeared somewhat nervous, she finished the rendition of ‘My boy builds coffins’ revealing to the audience that she was ‘in a really bad mood before the show’, but all had been forgotten now that she was entrenched in performing.
A crowd favourite seemed to be ‘Birdsong’ - a song about killing a bird, eating it and then when you talk only being able to sing the birds song. It opens with a charged drum and guitar introduction then drops to just Florence and a harp, and it’s really when she sings unaccompanied that you can appreciate the true beauty of her vocals.
Next came two brand new songs that still seemed in their early stages, mainly because the band could not agree on the speed of the songs (‘Cosmic Love’ and ‘Falling’).
The first half of the ten song set profiled Florence’s folk inspired soulful side, however the pace picked up with Donkey Kosh and the song many had been waiting for Kiss with a fist. It is the more up-beat songs that she appears to enjoy more, running around the stage, laughing and interacting with the band.
She closed the set with her new single Dog days are over, and by this time Florence had well and truly convinced any cynics that she is here to stay and with that, a mere thirty-five minutes after she came on, she was gone. Although the show was brilliant and she made up for no support with her talent, with no encore the set did seem a bit short and having seen her at Glastonbury earlier this year it would have been nice to see some of her cover songs. This performance (her first headline tour) however, did give a taste of things to come, and exciting things to look forward to from the album expected early next year.
Review by Kevin Angel
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