Ceremonials

“I think I came to the studio with a bit of a hangover, and it was one of those strange days where you’re not really sure where a song comes from. Paul [Epworth] just had these chords on the organ, and they sounded optimistic and very sad at the same time. And I was thinking of regrets, like, you know when you feel like you’re stuck in yourself, you keep repeating certain patterns of behavior, and you kind of want to cut out that part of you and restart yourself. So this song was kind of like, ‘Shake yourself out of it, things will be OK’. Sometimes I have to write a song for myself, reminding me to let it go.I wanted to just shake something out, shake out these regrets, shake out these things that haunt you. It was one of those songs that came in about half an hour and when you’ve got a hangover, it is almost like a hangover cure. You’re like, thank you! But then, the end refrain of ‘What the hell’ is really important as well, because you’ll dance with the devil again at some point, and maybe it will be fun. I’ve heard he does a really good foxtrot.’

The music video for Shake It Out was filmed at the Eltham Palace in London. What does Flo say about that?

“Think of a psychedelic 1920s dress party with a demonic twist.We were kind of going for a sort of ‘Gatsby at West Egg’-style house party but with maybe slightly ritualistic and sort of satanic undertones and séances. That was such a fun video to shoot, for me especially, because I had all my friends down there, and they all came and we all got to dress up and do a casual séance in this beautiful art-deco mansion. It’s basically a party house; there’s one room which was purely just for cutting flowers. It was magic”

‘We played a new song called “What the Water Gave Me.” The title is about a Frida Kahlo painting—that one where her feet are in the bath and all of her nightmares and dreams are in the bath with her. It got me thinking about the water and the sea. When I was growing up, there were these news stories that kept popping up in my life about children who would get swept out to sea, and the parents would dive in after them. I’d seen these news stories crop up again and again, and it made me think of this idea of the sea being this entity that needs a sacrifice—like, if it’s going to take your children, then you have to give yourself. It got me thinking about the power of water, like in Virginia Woolf, and that sense of really being overwhelmed by something.’

It kind of had the potential to be really mellow, it would be sort of massive pop song. Eventually I’ve done so many versions of it, I couldn’t control it anymore. I was trying to put everything back in the box and I played it to so many people and I thought: I just don’t know anything! I’ve listened to it so much, I don’t know what to do. And it was a funny thing, because the song was called ‘Never Let Me Go’ and it always felt like I couldn’t let it go and I only realised the significance of that after I had a conversation with Paul (Epworth). (…) And it was the one song I could never let it go…

‘I’m, like, obsessed with sad songs with happy tunes. I think, I really wanted it to be… like, to take that feeling ‘Oh, God, it’s happening again!’ You know what I mean, that feeling of…impending sort of sadness. I think, maybe it’s… kind of my way of dealing with things and maybe…it’s to take that sadness and turn it into something, like a kind of… sing, sing with joy – in that sense tackling it, I guess.’

It was inspired by ’60s Soul numbers such as “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” “I’ve been listening to loads of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Freddie King wrote this amazing song “Going Down”. It’s me saying, ‘I want to make a song just like this.’ And ‘Lover To Lover’ was me wanting to make a song I could imagine a male Soul singer doing. (…) It’s like just refusing to feel the judge and kind of not caring about the outcome which is never how I really feel about anything but I find in songs you can convey emotions”

‘The first song we wrote, it was ‘No Light No Light’ and I had quite clear idea how it should sound like. The intro was written in a tour bus in Amsterdam on Rob’s birthday! And we went to all night restaurant called ‘Midnight’ in Bruxelles, to celebrate and go on a tour to Amsterdam. It was 4 in the morning, me and Isa, we decided we should write intro to this song. We recorded the bus rumbling and this weird base sound. And the bus arrived at the 6 a.m. and we’re like ‘Right! We must find the bar and celebrate!’ And the only place where serve us a drink was a sport’s bar so we were sitting drinking bright green Midori.

But this song is made all the way of this record. So, cheers to Midori!’

And what is ‘NLNL’ about? ‘It’s my way of apologizing, saying something without really saying it. It deals with my lack of relationship conversational skills.’

Dark, mysterious, magical, full of conflicting emotions. Song rarely performed live, but if it appeared on the setlist- it just blowed our minds. “Seven Devils” appeared in the trailer to promote the second season of the HBO series Game of Thrones, as well as in the season one finale of the ABC series Revenge. It was also used in the trailer for the 2013 romantic fantasy film Beautiful Creatures.

And what Flo said about it? ‘I think Seven devils could be consider to be seven dead sins but I wasn’t really thinking about that. That was amazing Chester Himes’ book called ‘If He Hollers Let Him Go’ which is kind of tragic life of this boxer in the 30’s, really talented but he actually drafted into the army. The language in it is really beautiful and one point he wakes up in the morning and he’s like ‘I woke up with seven devils inside me’. And that phrase stuck in my head.’

‘I think with Heartlines, the sound if it, we wanted it to sound like something really epic, like a gigantic battle on the sea – mermaids versus pirates, but also almost like a tribal song. Because it was like… a kind of a song like a journey, so I wanted to have that feeling that it was, like, really rolling forward. But, yeah, I think it’s really fun to play it live.’

It was the very first one that I recorded actually and I was thinking about it in a sense of a colour theme and all the different colour images in my head… It’s like me opening to the whole world. Then, I was also thinking about it as being a symbol of homosexuality, a rainbow. How it connects love, freedom and tolerance. And this spectrum of colours has become to me a symbol of getting all the things that lie in store for me. And of course in some sense the idea of love, freedom and overcoming the fear, this moment that the relationship makes the colours more intensive and world become a brighter place. It’s about the one who appears in your life and makes everything more colourful. And besides this, I am not scared of the world anymore. This song is one of the brightest, and obviously one with a positive message on the record.

I think love for me it’s just feels like one long note, one long scream and a noise and to try it put into a words will be so hard. It’s like a something inside to try compose that into some sort of poetry. That song is definitely about being so confused how to express that feeling. The title comes from a book or from a movie, but I saw it in the newspaper and I thought it was so beautiful … it couldn’t get out of my head and that’s how it is in my notebook, about one such thing creates something completely different. This was also even with Dog Days Are Over.

Leave My Body was kind of about living that moment and not having any past or future, you live purely in the moment with that song, with that note. There’s nothing else and I think there is a sense like you’re leaving your body. I do get the feeling sometimes that I think I’m just trapped inside my own head and my eyes are not big enough or something, I wanna be able to see everything around me and you’re stuck between those two points of vision and sometimes you just feel trapped. You just want to get out of yourself and I think performing it’s just like not wanting, you don’t have to have regular things, you don’t have to be married, you don’t have to have future or the past, you just be totally in like oblivion for like a split seconds. You just want a moment. You don’t need anything else. I think that was like a song to myself.I was trying like maybe to live in that moment a bit more.