Florence Leontine Mary Welch (born 28 August 1986) is an English singer and the lead vocalist and primary songwriter of the indie rock band Florence and the Machine. The band’s debut studio album, Lungs (2009), topped the UK Albums Chart and won the Brit Award for Best British Album. Their next four albums also achieved chart success. In 2018, Welch released a book titled Useless Magic, a collection of lyrics and poems written by her, along with illustrations.

Florence Leontine Mary Welch was born on 28 August 1986 in Camber well, London to parents Nick Russell Welch, an advertising executive and Evelyn Welch (née Samuels), an American immigrant from New York City who was educated at Harvard University and the Warburg Institute, University of London. Evelyn is vice chancellor of the University of Bristol. Through her mother, Florence Welch has both British and American citizenship.

Welch is the niece of satirist Craig Brown via Brown’s wife and Welch’s aunt, Frances Welch, and granddaughter of Colin Welch (James Colin Ross Welch), former deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph and former Daily Mail parliamentary sketch-writer, originally of Cambridge shire. Welch’s maternal uncle is actor and director John Stock well. She also has a sister, Grace, who inspired Welch’s song by the same name.

During her youth, Welch was encouraged by her Scottish paternal grandmother, Cybil Welch (née Russell), to pursue her performing and singing talents. Welch’s deceased grandmothers inspired numerous songs on Florence and the Machine’s debut album Lungs (2009). In her youth, Welch also sang at family weddings and funerals. Aged ten, she performed the song of Yum-Yum from The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan at Colin Welch’s memorial service. Welch’s parents divorced when she was thirteen, and her mother eventually married their next-door neighbour, Professor Peter Openshaw. Openshaw bought her a dog which Welch named Bubbles. Around this time, her maternal grandmother who had bipolar disorder died from suicide.

In Florence and the Machine’s 2018 single “Hunger”, she opened up for the first time about a teenage eating disorder. She has also spoken of being a highly imaginative and fearful child. “I learned ways to manage that terror–drink, drugs, controlling food…” Welch was educated at Thomas’s London Day School, Battersea and went on to study at Alleyn’s School, South East London, where she did well academically. However, Welch often got in trouble in school for impromptu singing and for singing too loudly in the school’s choir.

Despite an early love of reading and literature, she was also diagnosed with mild dyslexia owing to problems with spelling, alongside dyspraxia, a developmental coordination disorder that does not affect her reading ability, but caused issues with organization. Music and books gave her a reprieve from what she felt made her different from others. “I used reading as a form of escape. I was shy and sensitive, and so reading gave me a safe space.”

After leaving secondary school and “just bumming around Camberwell where I lived, working at a bar and thought that I should start doing something with life”, Welch studied illustration at Camberwell College of Arts before dropping out to focus on her music. Initially she had intended to take a year out from her studies to “see where the music would go and then it started going somewhere so [she] never went back”.

Florence and the Machine performing at the O2 ABC Glasgow during the band’s Lungs Tour
According to Welch, the band name “Florence + the Machine” had “started off as a private joke that got out of hand. I made music with my friend, who we called Isabella Machine, to which I was Florence Robot. When I was about an hour away from my first gig, I still didn’t have a name, so I thought ‘Okay, I’ll be Florence Robot/Isa Machine’, before realizing that name was so long it’d drive me mad”. In 2006, Welch’s performances with Isabella Summers in small London venues under the joint name Florence Robot/Isa Machine began to attract notice. In 2007, Welch recorded with a band named Ashok, who released an album titled Plans on the Filthy Lucre/About Records label. The album included the earliest version of her later hit “Kiss with a Fist”, which at this point was titled “Happy Slap”.

Florence and the Machine released their debut studio album Lungs in the United Kingdom on 6 July 2009. The album was officially launched with a set at the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, south-east London. It peaked at number one in the UK and number two in Ireland. As of 6 August 2009, the album had sold over 100,000 copies in the UK and by 10 August it had been at number two for five consecutive weeks. After its 25 July 2009 release for download in the United States, the album debuted at number seventeen on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart, ultimately peaking at number one.