Late October has been a big moment for British pop stars who made their debuts in the mid to late 2000s. Rakewell will leave the Lily Allen discourse to others, with only a plea that it would also be nice to read something about her new album’s actual music; vocodered bossa nova, for example, is an interesting choice even if it’s not your thing.
However it was Florence Welch who made your roving correspondent sit up straight during her appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers last Thursday, which was the eve of the release of Florence + the Machine’s new album. The singer-songwriter has spoken of her shyness in life versus performance and there was plenty of evidence of that here. Rakewell was however disarmed by Welch’s paean to the Warburg Institute, where the singer has been reading books about witchcraft, magic and medicine in part, she has said, to make sense of a near-death experience.
Florence is, of course, the daughter of eminent Renaissance scholar Evelyn Welch, and she has mentioned the learned institution in published interviews more than once. This time, however, the interviewer followed up and Welch was happy to tell the world more: ‘There’s a library called the Warburg Institute and they have lots of things on the Renaissance and they have lots of medieval texts, but they have one of the biggest occult libraries in Britain, and it’s a library based on esoteric principles rather than the alphabet’ – at this point Rakewell was absolutely willing Welch on to explain Aby Warburg’s concept of the ‘law of the good neighbour’ in relation to books.
Things, however, took a more personal turn when Meyers asked, ‘How psyched were they when you showed up.’ Not at all, Welch replied: ‘They’re really unfazed. They’re much more psyched when my mum goes there […] they’re like “Evelyn Welch is here, this is amazing”.’
While late-night talk shows have good reason to fear for their futures, Rakewell couldn’t be more enthusiastic about this new direction – though what advertisers, already scarce, will make of it, only time and Meyers’s contract renegotiations will tell.
The Warburg has already given the encounter a big thumbs up in the form of one of the better YouTube comments of recent times: ‘Wishing a big congratulations to Evelyn’s daughter on the release of her new album.’