Florence Welch is one of the UK’s best live acts – and a moment of magic at her O2 gig sealed it

At the London O2 on Tuesday night, 20,000 fans genuflecting before her, Florence Welch broke into 2008’s “Dog Days Are Over”, its harp trills cascading into that thumping chorus. Two-thirds in, though, she pulled back. The band kept playing beneath her – quieter now, letting the tension build – while she scanned the room, singling out phones and refusing to let that ethereal vibrato rip until every last one of them was put away. “Be present,” she implored; the footage would be “f***ing awful” anyway. When every screen had finally gone down – really, all of them – she released the pressure and the place erupted, her audience bouncing in unison, arms astretch, like wheat beaten by a gale.

Of course, we’re living through a collective reckoning with our phones, everyone talking about presence and mindfulness and experiencing art rather than documenting it. But head to any gig and that reflex still kicks in: the song starts, the phone goes up, the souvenir gets captured for an Instagram story you’ll post and never watch again. Far be it from me to claim I’m immune – I filmed her rendition of “Cosmic Love” earlier in the set – but if anyone has earned the authority to make 20,000 people actually commit to the here and now, it’s Florence Welch. Why would anyone be watching this singular artist on a screen the size of a playing card when there she was in full gaze, shadowed by four incredible dancers twirling and crawling through dry ice, commanding the stage like some magnificent priestess?

Since her single “Kiss with a Fist” dropped in 2008, Welch has become the most successful British alt-rock artist of her generation – Arctic Monkeys aside. She’s been sampled by Kendrick Lamar and Drake, collaborated with Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, while Beyoncé has hailed her an inspiration. You can trace her sound through to the gothic maximalism of Chappell Roan and The Last Dinner Party. In 2015, when Dave Grohl’s broken leg forced Foo Fighters to withdraw from Glastonbury, Welch stepped up to headline the Pyramid Stage. Only two other British women have topped that bill this century: Adele and Dua Lipa. This is the kind of company she keeps.

And yet, for much of her early career, Welch was met with mixed reviews, dismissed as too theatrical, too earnest, too extravagant. When she broke her foot on stage at the London O2 in 2022 and bled through the rest of the show, the performance earned only four stars. The detail stuck. It became a lyric in “Music by Men”, a joke at her own expense and everyone else’s. On her latest album Everybody Scream – which is wild, profound and audacious – she addresses the double standard head-on with “One of the Greats”, an industry-skewering song she tore through at the O2 with vituperative glee. “I’ll be up there with the men and the 10 other women in the hundred greatest records of all time,” she sings, before adding, “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can.”

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It’s a line that could have sounded bitter, but didn’t; it sounded heartfelt, delivered with the bravura of someone who knows they’ve already won the argument. If boring male mediocrity gets canonised, then what Welch has achieved – five UK No 1s and global renown – should have made her untouchable years ago. From the beginning, Welch has written about women who are powerful yet fragile, grounding folklore and fury in experience. Everybody Scream takes those ululations, that baroque melodrama, and sharpens them into something more focused, more devastating.

In 2023, mid-tour, Welch suffered an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured during a festival performance in Cornwall. Emergency surgery saved her life; the fallopian tube couldn’t be saved. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she told The Guardian. She still hopes for children. “You Can Have It All” grieves that loss directly. More broadly, the album filters it through witchcraft, medieval mysticism and horror tropes, and is, at heart, about the physical and psychological toll of performance – the price you pay to be an artist, the question of whether the stage leaves room for a full life.

Which brings us back to the O2, to that exhilarating unfurling of “Dog Days Are Over”. We can talk all we like about having digital detoxes and being in the moment and experiencing the sweaty immediacy of a live show, but nothing changes until someone forces us to comply. In 20 years’ time, Florence + the Machine will be considered one of the greats. I’ll never forget seeing Welch on the John Peel stage at Glastonbury in 2009, climbing up the rigging while delivering a brilliant, career-defining set. I didn’t have a camera phone. Nor did many others. Yet that image of her in those enormous high heels, dangling one-handed, is one that I’ll never forget. If more artists start doing what Welch did on Tuesday, we might actually break the habit. Welch, certainly, has the love – and clout – to see this through.