Florence Welch became more creative when she stopped drinking.
The 32-year-old singer – who fronts Florence + The Machine -revealed she was forced to stop drinking alcohol as she was a “party monster”, and it became easier to work on the band’s latest album ‘High As Hope’ once she was sober.
In an interview with Elle, she said: “I’d gone through a lifestyle change — as in, I’d had to stop drinking. I was a party monster and it was getting to the stage where I was just mashing myself to bits all the time. The scariest thing is, I used to think what made me creative was the fact I was a big hedonist. But towards the end, it was actually quite hard to make songs because I was in so much pain and all I was writing about was: ‘How do I get out of this trap?’
“The theme of my writing was like: ‘I’m stuck, I’m f***ed, I don’t know how to make this stop. Help, help, help!’ ”
By making a big lifestyle change, it meant a shift in Florence’s songwriting and she was delighted that it has been accepted by her fans.
She explained: “I sort of stopped [the abuse] just before I made the track ‘How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.’ To show people this side of yourself, which is so frightening to you, and for people to accept it with love, and to sing it with people, was a really big catharsis. So I just found that my brain was more open. I just kind of wrote it down and let it all go.”
The ‘Shake It Out’ hitmaker has opened up about drinking in the past and confessed it was a way for her to cope with rising to fame back in 2009.
She previously said: “That’s when the drinking and the partying exploded, as a way to hide from it. I was drunk a lot of the time, on extra dirty Martinis – my way of drinking three shots at once. I was never interested in ‘a nice glass of wine’.”
