Florence on 'Lungs' Part Two

Fri 3 Jul, 2009

Girl With One Eye

It wasn’t written by me. I started hanging out with a punk band called The Ludes and they used to play this song live, but never recorded it. Something about it really touched me, and I used to sing it with them, onstage. Then when they stopped playing it, I started playing it in my sets. I’m really happy it’s on this album – it’s a nice connection with that part of my life. In my teens that band totally inspired me. They were the reason why I started writing songs – and probably why I started writing such dark songs.

Drumming Song

This is about when there’s that electricity between you, and a boy, and it’s completely unspoken. When they’re standing in front of you and you can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything properly. I’m really geeky – if I like someone, I just become incapable. I remember with my first boyfriend, walking past the window of a pub, seeing he was in there and literally throwing myself on the ground and crawling on the floor because I was so scared! I feel things quite intensely, which is probably why the music is quite intense. If I really like someone, I like someone; if I’m sad, I’m sad.

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, and I wanted to make something that had that kind of beat to it. To me it’s the most forward-thinking music around. No one else is moving forward at such a pace!

Again, it’s really Gothic imagery – fairy tales and Edgar Allen Poe stories. I’d read a lot of Gothic horror when I was a kid. Also things like Sylvia Plath – I’ve always been a kind of literary miserablist!

Between Two Lungs

That was the first song I ever wrote by myself, so it’s crazy to me that it’s on the album. I was still at art college, but my first guitarist, Matt [Allchin, of The Ludes], had left and I wasn’t sure how I was going to be making music. I was still doing gigs, but I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. It started with the drums, dum, dum. I’ve always been interested in the lulls between notes and the atmosphere that silence creates. It’s all about the build, and the final release – the euphoria that you can get from music. But the silence around it, and the studio hiss – I love studio hiss!

It’s a song being built by someone who has no idea how to play anything, and is making it all up as they go along. The title actually comes from an 80s pulp book I’d found in a second-hand shop. It has some great titles in it. It became about a kiss – the air you share when you’re kissing someone. And the way it fills you up, and you don’t want the bubble to burst.

Cosmic Love

Cosmic Love was a joke title, but it stuck. The most hungover I’ve ever been when writing a song. I went to her studio after having been to a party, and I was lying on the floor wanting to vomit. We were working really hard on a song and just trying to make this shit piano part work, and all of a sudden I hit on one note, and I’d got it. We wrote the whole song in ten minutes.

for Part Three.



'Lungs' Standard Edition: AmazonPlayHMViTunes.
'Lungs Deluxe Edition: Amazon Play HMViTunes.
'Lungs' vinyl: Amazon.