Featured image: Press – Chuff Media
“Manchester on a Friday night – this is going to be so fun,” gushed Florence Welch to a packed-out AO Arena. She’s not wrong of course, if there’s anywhere that knows how to bring the energy – Manchester is it.
Surrounded by glistening chandeliers and bathed in white light, Welch opened the show with ‘Heaven is Here’ and ‘King’ from the 2022 record Dance Fever before ramping up the energy with the older ‘Ship To Wreck’.
She spent much of the evening as a blur of white fabric, twirling about the stage in a pair of chunky black pumps – the only dead giveaway that she broke her ankle on the first half of the Dance Fever UK tour back in November.
Connection and the idea of being close to everybody else in the room have been a huge part of Florence and The Machine shows for a long time and on this evening, it was no different. The singer is one of those that likes to feel close to her audience, perhaps most obvious when she came down to the barrier during ‘Dream Girl Evil’ to sing into the face of an adoring fan.
A lot of Welch’s music consists of hard-hitting lyricism about her personal struggles. There’s clearly a lot of catharsis taking place in every room she plays these songs in.
‘Hunger’ and ‘Morning Elvis’ provide an emotional few moments as hundreds of women in the room embraced their friends while Welch sang about her struggle with an eating disorder and substance abuse issues respectively. She has created a space in which people feel safe enough to express their vulnerabilities alongside her, which is a brief reminder of why live music is so important.
‘You’ve Got The Love’ followed on and the entire arena erupted with a huge fizz of energy, the joy in the room was at an infectious level and for this latter portion of the set it was hard to stand still.
The end of the night was fast approaching and Florence took the time to reminisce on a show the band played in Manchester back in 2006 at the iconic Deaf Institute, laughing about how they ended up in some student halls.
Fans were treated to a performance of ‘Never Let Me Go’, an old favourite that had made a glorious return to the set just for this tour. Very suddenly the singer made a call for ‘human sacrifices’, a request that would send a wave of panic through anybody not familiar with the rituals of a F&TM show. Except it’s only the cue for the audience to clamber onto the shoulders of their mates for the night’s closing tune, ‘Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)’ and what’s a better way to kickstart a weekend of fun in the city than that?
Featured image and gallery: Hoang Phan Notebooks were carried from one workshop to another. Writers from different generations sat around tables, sharing manuscripts and listening to each other. Outdoors, small groups strolled along Oxford Road, pausing before buildings steeped in literary history. This was the scene during the Manchester Writing School Summer Festival 2026, held…
Featured image: Katja Ogrin With many sore heads and limbs this morning after the most hardcore day of the festival taking place yesterday, many are recovering from the moshing and pit brutality of the previous day’s antics. As the tradition of a morning movie in the Serpents Lair prevails, the crowd sprawls out onto the plush,…
Featured image: Abbi Draper After an electrifying start to the weekend, with temperatures slowly climbing, many lather themselves in suncream, shed their band shirts and rise from their tents to trek towards the arena. Saturday has big things incoming for the humans of Bloodstock 2026. Some pace themselves for the day and hide from the early…
Featured image: Abbi Draper After a memorable Thursday opener, Bloodstock 2026 opens its gates once again onto the Hallowed Grounds of Catton Park, kicking off day two of its 25th-anniversary celebration of metal. As the sun rises on Catton Park, festivalgoers emerge from their tents to prepare for another day of mayhem. The morning brings…
Leave a reply