In the Darkness with You

Transmissions from London on Florence + The Machine's Symphony of Lungs.

Andy Paradise / BBC

London is less chic than I remember. Maybe because I’ve been staying in Soho, where bruvs congregate outside pubs to chug down pints and follow girls in short skirts with their eyes as they prance by. Maybe it’s the time of year, that strange stretch of days before summer has truly ended and autumn has yet to begin. Brown leaves crunched under my feet on walks through Regent’s Park, but the trees are still mostly green, the air thick and damp, the sun still out past dinnertime. Whatever the reason, the romance I remember is in short supply. The old buildings, whitewashed and red-bricked and molded like cakes, don’t inspire the same reverence, the same weight of hundreds of years of history. I just see the doner dives and electronics stores and feel mostly nothing.

But that’s just the city.

I came here on a whim to see Florence + The Machine’s Symphony of Lungs at Royal Albert Hall. As part of BBC Proms, Florence Welch teamed with Jules Buckley and a full orchestra to bring her debut album Lungs to new life 15 years after its release. Florence has been my number one diva since I first heard “Cosmic Love” on the playlist of British pop piped into the men’s department of Bloomingdales Soho, where I worked for a hazy six months the year I turned 21. I saw her on the Lungs tour three times—twice in one day when I trekked to Central Park at dawn for a morning show performance and returned that night to see her Summerstage set. Lungs is maybe my favorite Florence album; How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is her best in terms of craft and execution, Ceremonials is the most theatrical and ambitious, but Lungs is raw and haunting, capturing the fever of reckless youth in Welch’s ecstatic, howling, singular voice. Lungs broke open something inside me that has never closed, thank god, and it will always be special to me for the connection to that specific moment in time and its enduring brilliance.

If you have never seen Florence + The Machine live, trust me when I say this: she sounds better in person than she does on a recording, which is almost never the case. At Royal Albert Hall, in a blood-red Rodarte gown, hair loose and barefoot, Welch floated across the stage, her voice soaring over the crowd, lifted higher than ever by Buckley’s arrangements. The songs hit me in different parts of my body: “Cosmic Love” filled my chest with celestial light, “Girl With One Eye” sat in my gut like hunger, “Rabbit Heart” rushed through my arms and legs like electricity. Welch said onstage that she hadn’t performed many of these songs since they were recorded, including bonus tracks that never made it to the final album like “Swimming” and “Hardest of Hearts,” and it was a joy to hear these songs I never thought I’d see live again, like the ghostly “Blinding” and, my favorite song off Lungs and one of my top Flo tunes period, “Howl.”

The show had a no-phone policy that was mostly adhered to, and the entire room paid rapt attention to the woman in red on stage, spellbound by our high priestess. There was a hushed reverence for this woman who appeared as if pulled directly from a dream, with a voice larger than life while singing but soft and sweet during her rare spoken interludes.

The first time I ever (successfully) dropped acid was at Florence + The Machine’s show at Terminal 5 in 2010, and it’s a night I’ll never forget. Having pushed my way to the front of a crowd throbbing with sinister energy, I felt panicked, anxious, unmoored from reality—until Welch stepped onstage, clad in white with her flaming red hair, and brought me the closest I’ve ever felt to something truly divine. That magic was still there in Royal Albert Hall, the symphony sweeping me away into a collective experience bigger and older and deeper than I could ever hope to be. 

Maybe London isn’t chic anymore, but I still found a little wonder here.