Cartwheels in Your Honor: My Journey with Florence + the Machine

Last year, Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine asked their fans to write down their stories with the band’s baroque, mammoth-sounding, rock-operatic music. Any kind of story was welcome, and she asked for them through social media, which is how I became acquainted with the challenge.

My friend J. urged me to write something down and mail it to Ms. Welch, but, like with most things in life, time just flew by, and before I knew it, the deadline had come and gone. The previous year, as I had just gotten with the program with the not-so-new smart-phone age - I am a late-everything with technology, and resisted progress until my dinosaur of a telephone finally broke and I had to move on quickly, and stormed into a smart-phone retailer, bellowing, Ok that’s it, show me what you got! – and out of pure coincidence was in the last hundred pages of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one of the first places I stumbled on was Florence Welch’s Between Two Books Instagram account, and happily realized she, too, was reading the same novel while touring the Down Under leg of the How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful –tour.

Aside from our love for books, I share also with Ms. Welch a deep passion for vintage clothes. Her outfits never cease to amaze me. It was only last Christmas, when the Glastonbury 2015 gig aired on TV, that I couldn’t stop telling my man what a fabulous glittery pantsuit she was wearing; she looked like an evolved version of the young Stevie Nicks, and my man agreed, adding, that the suit would look equally fabulous on me, with my short hair instead of Ms. Welch’s flaming red locks. Well, duh, I replied, secretly ecstatic and giving him ten extra points for consideration, before we both fell into our respective Florence clouds for the rest of the show.

My three stories about Florence + the Machine and their music revolve around their three issued albums. While these stories will not appear in the book, where the fans’ stories were bound as I understood the challenge, here they are, just for entertainment, while we wait for the fourth, drooling yet fearful, for how can it be that everything they put out is always better than the one before? When Ceremonials came out, the headline in Q Magazine read: Her Masterpiece… Already? My thoughts exactly. When How Big… came out, I had to collect my jaw from the floor. What can there be next?

Lungs. I had only recently moved to my mother’s hometown, Tampere, and just gotten work from a large, international firm I had been employed by before my move. Before I was able to get my foot in the door by an opening in the staff I had been working a few months at this completely menial job, where I had to get up at five, work under a superior who was openly hostile towards me and spoke ill about me behind my back to other employees. I not only threw my back out for the very first time of many to come at this job, but suffered a number of times from the meanness of Madam Scrooge so that I actually came home in tears. Getting work from a familiar firm, at a post a knew well, with people whom I quickly became friendly, and, later, friends with, was no small thing, and I relished every day I didn’t have to make a right turn as I left my house in the eastern part of the city, but took a firm left to the bus stop, and commuted to work.

Lungs wasn’t a brand new record then, but I had been on a musical stand-still for a long time, and hadn’t heard of the band, or if I had, only in passing. It was spring, and there had begun an interesting development at work with some of my work mates. We would come to the workplace early, make our preparations for the day, and just before we opened for business, we would sit down at one of the round tables with different colored cups of coffee, and discuss music, movies, where to shop for killer jeans, whatever was on the agenda that day. This habit became a re-introduction for me into making something out of apparent nothing, an education of the best kind for us all about what it meant to have like-minded people around. They say once one becomes an adult it becomes a near impossibility to make new friends, and while some of the women and men I got to know are quite a bit younger than I, I most certainly counted myself in the “30+” –box already, steadily yet without a sense of any pride, the synergy and the effortlessness of our weaving those relationships felt almost paranormally smooth.

As we compared notes on these short sessions before our day officially began, one of my new friends once mentioned Florence + The Machine to me, saying she herself didn’t find it superlative, but given my preferences, I might. It was still that dying time of the CD, and having benefited from my friend’s advice before, I hurried down to Swamp Music to purchase the album. And she was right. I loved it.

I took to listening to it on my way to work on my portable CD-player. My bus ride to work took me by the grand cemetery where my grandfather’s ashes are scattered, and one day that spring, as I was once more riding the bus on my way to work, You’ve Got the Love blasting in my earphones, the bus stopped at a red light by the cemetery. The weather was beautiful: the sun was shining hard, the spring birds were everywhere, nesting and chirping, and the birches were pastel green with new leaves. I was hot in the sun, and opened my jacket a little, looking idly through the window into the large holy ground behind the great greening trees and the brick fence. Grandfather had been the ethical touchstone in our family, and had died when I was in my early teens. I remembered him well, if not realistically. He had died on the operating table, in a routine surgery. He had been suffering from cancer, but the operation should not have been a matter of life and death, it had been meant to be one of many, and no one had had the faintest idea we would never see him again. It is so thin, this thread, I thought, almost casually, before I realized I was in tears.

The light changed, the bus was moving again, and after You’ve Got the Love ended I had to put the music away. Somehow it had triggered a strong sense of – something in me, together with the view, and while I have since listened to Lungs probably about a thousand times, the memory of that song always brings me back to that hot spring day in the bus, crying for my grandfather at the red light by the cemetery.

Ceremonials. I came home for some holiday or other with a boyfriend. Ceremonials was out for some months already, and I was all over it and had it with me on this trip to the countryside. I had been told only recently that my parents were planning on selling the house I grew up in, my childhood home, the only house I had ever lived in before moving out on my own for the first time. This was a huge blow, and the trip over was the first time after receiving the awful news.

I like to take long walks, and on the days of our stay, I took extra-long hikes along the countryside, walking past my old school many times, past the giant slope we used to go sleigh-riding as kids, I ventured to the bird-watching trail, the narrow path along the swamp and the under growth to the smaller of the two lakes, I took the long road to the Medieval Church and to its graveyard and past them both, up to the hill where the old watch tower still stood erect, white and forbidding with its “No Entry – Frail Footing” –signs and exquisite view over the big lake and its islands and the woods all around me, the pine trees tall and furry, the birches and the firs and all others in full green, so beautiful it made my heart ache. I walked and walked for miles and miles, with Ceremonials playing in my earphones, over and over.

I ventured on the fringes of the large fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed, spied squirrels and all sorts of birds and common lizards, witnessed the two swans by the grove far away at the edge of the field, took the trails along the abandoned sheds and warehouses and the huge, ancient, red brick horse stable. I walked past the Grand Manor, its surrounding grass and pond and flowerbeds immaculately taken care of, the house itself rising in pastel yellow and white from between the willows, the famous seven ghosts of the previous owners sad in their respective windows, the saddest one being the strange lady in the attic, her billowing lace nightgown making her the most ethereal phantom I had ever seen, her long red hair disheveled and curly and covering her pale face just enough so that I could not tell whether she was looking at me from her tiny window, or just musing her captivity inside.

I visited all the places that were important to me as a child and as young adult, and on the record that was playing while I did all that, the memories of those places were being imprinted as ghosts. Like holograms, like tattoos, right on top of and embedded inside, all of those songs.

When we left my house that time, I bid my parents farewell, and we took off. I felt a huge lump in my throat getting bigger and bigger, and, passing the manor, I told my boyfriend to stop the car. He had barely pulled over to a bus stop, as I stepped out, leaving the door open, and burst into bitter tears. A considerate man, he did not come outside, but waited inside the car as I had myself a good cry, collected myself, and, calmed, came back inside. We never spoke about the incident.

How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. It was only after I had confirmed and payed for mine and my man’s first trip together to Paris for a week, when the date of Florence + the Machine’s gig at Flow Festival was published, and as fate would have it, it of course coincided with the trip.

I was simultaneously ecstatic and heart-broken, even more so, when the new album was released and it struck such a nerve in me I could not put it down for months. My friend J., also a Florence-fanatic, and I made a diabolical plan for her to have her man take her, by force if necessary, to the show; someone in our extended family just had to be there. The plan succeeded well, and afterwards J. would describe Ms. Welch’s bare feet, completely white outfit, the bellows, the set list, the beginning with What the Water Gave Me, and so forth. It was as if we were little again, only now with surround sound and Spotify and YouTube to consult, and the next few meetings we would drink endless glasses of white wine, munch on pasta and chocolate, and enthrall ourselves once again with all the fabulousness that was Florence + The Machine.

Interestingly, my man wasn’t yet in the club at that time, so I refrained from lamenting my missing the gig too much, although I did think about it prior to our trip; I am, as a rule, a lazy participator in things like live shows, what with all the other people shoving and singing aloud and crowding me – it is an occupational hazard to develop this kind of discomfort around large mobs while on leave from our own large mob, and I was sincerely sorry that one of those rare acts to move my sorry ass from the couch came to the country just as I was moving my sorry ass to another country.

The last moment I thought about it was just before taking off, at the airport. My man was being checked with metal detectors, one of his every time facts at the security check from being a diabetic with the intravenous insulin pump. He had to take the pump off and turn and twirl for the airport security guards, and while he was doing it, I noticed he was wearing his older than anything Donald Duck –boxers, with the name on the waist band like Calvin Klein’s. My heart filled at once with a mixture of love, desire, ridicule, and tenderness, and I teased him all the way to the plane about his brilliant underwear choice at the security check.

The next time I thought about Florence + the Machine was a week later, back in Finland. Our trip’s soundtrack had consisted of nothing but jazz piano, especially Bill Evans, and as a romantic getaway there really is no equal to Paris, so – out of sight, out of mind.

I was kind of glad about that.

Whether it was because of the beautiful trip to the world’s Love Capital, or just having learnt to ration it properly into tinier dosages, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful has never felt completely worn out for me, and out of the band’s catalogue, it is my Desert Island Florence + the Machine album.

For J., my Lion-Hearted Girl.