19 July 2012
As a lifelong pop fan I normally look for fast-acting bangers rather than slow-burning growers, so it’s rare that a tune or album I previously didn’t get into suddenly clicks for me at a later date. However, that’s what happened for me with the first Florence & The Machine album, Lungs. I can even specify that later date: 31 December 2009. Would you like the actual time? Mid-afternoon, around 3 pm. The place? Paris, in an old-fashioned English pub called The Bombardier near the Panthéon. The weather? Wet, cold and gloomy. And me? Also wet, cold and—due to various life reasons plus the usual New Year’s Eve dread—gloomy. So, in the anglophone soft-furnished warmth of an English pub in Paris on a rainy winter afternoon, I huddled around a mug of hot tea and listened to the pub sound system play Florence & The Machine’s first album in full. I won’t say it changed my life or expanded my mind, more that the soaring choruses and arty ambition made it the right music for the right moment, it lifted my mood, and for me it clicked.
My listening experience of ‘Spectrum (Say My Name)’ is not so romantic; I have the impression the only way I’ve ever heard it thus far in my life is on TV ads and montages. No problem with that, by the way: the hustle is real, and only one person on the planet seems able to make a living from music these days. I mean to say that Florence Welch’s bombastic, shoot-the-moon chorus—its classic Florentine style—is all I know of it. So, her subdued and vague verses that I’m hearing here now are not the simmering build of first-album hits like ‘Dog Days Are Over’ I expected but a perfunctory when-are-they-gonna-get-to-the-fireworks-factory filler before we crash into the money-maker: that admittedly spectacular chorus. And in fairness, the second verse features the familiar yet likeable pounding bass piano chords of co-writer and producer du jour Paul Epworth, who had contributed similar oomph to Adele’s uptempo tracks and Emeli Sandé’s ‘Next To Me’. Did I just hear a click?
The ‘Spectrum (Say My Name)’ we actually get at number one is a single remix by another hot property of the time: Calvin Harris. He and Welch will team up for another Irish number one single later in 2012 – and we’ll meet Harris again at the top of the charts even sooner.
