Florence Welch has stopped to catch her breath. "It's International Women's Day!" she trills. Welch has just spent "You've Got the Love" skipping gymnastically from one end of the stage to the other, as though in preparation for an Olympics floor exercise. Singing while flouncing is one of the sterner tests of a performer, but Welch clearly has the aerobic capacity of one of those dolphins that races motorboats. Her cover of the Source's song rings out clear and true.
Even better, it's not as though this crowd are here to hear Welch's break-out pop hit of 2009 and then head for the car parks – a particularly cruel calculus that sometimes accompanies crossover success. No, they are here for all the windy, undulating songs about sinking down, drowning, rising up and shaking it out that have marked Florence Welch's giddy ascent to pop's major international leagues.
Soon, big drums will signal the start of "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" with its shivery a cappella interlude, its rousing house piano and a coda of arpeggiating harp. Right now, though, Welch wants as many girls as possible hoiked on to men's shoulders to mark the occasion. There could hardly be a more female place to spend IWD than this gig. There's a full moon, and the oestrogen is high. Welch is resplendent in a cape over a catsuit (designed by Alex Noble, the guy that does Lady Gaga's garb) that locates her somewhere between Wonder Woman and a Scottish Widows advert.
She has already said hello to her mum out in the crowd, stoically hiding her own big emotions behind a video camera. She doesn't normally come to her gigs. "They're all right, Mum, you see?" Welch says, indicating the sold-out audience, the first of three strung together over this weekend. It's a sea of female faces – quite a rarity outside pop shows. Behind the scenes, too, Welch is managed by two women, still an exception at this level (although a quick poll of Twitter the following day swiftly garners more than a dozen female managers, mostly at the boutique end; A&R is the real boys' club). Welch's minder, meanwhile, is no neckless gorilla but her younger sister, Grace. According to a recent on-the-road feature in Q, Grace is in charge of getting her highly artistic sister, her money, keys, passport, robes, scarves, train and millinery from A to B.
Even the spirits summoned by Welch's tribal, operatic pop tonight are female. Her set opens with "Only If For a Night", a song about her grandmother coming back to her in a dream. Two men, however, are intimately involved with these songs: producer-enabler Paul Epworth (he pushes faders for Adele too), and Stuart Hammond, Welch's now twice-ex, and the object of much of the emotional rise and fall.
The triumph of Lungs, Welch's 4m-selling debut, and Ceremonials, its successful follow-up, has brought Welch to places with more vaulted ceilings. She comes mob-handed tonight, with her Machine (keys player Isabella Summers, plus a four-piece band) augmented by a string section whose scything is a little predictable, but not so you'd mind.
More riveting are the interjections of bassist Mark Saunders on extra percussion; his impression of funky thunder adds much texture. Songs such as "Only If For a Night" and "Shake it Out" disturb century-old mortar because of him. The choir, meanwhile, adds yet more wind-power to an event so blustery it should be of interest to green power companies. These massed voices, though, fare even better as a call-and-response mechanism on "Leave My Body". Here Welch, too, unleashes her best vocal, elastic and soulful, playing off against the neo-spiritual hoot of the voices at the back. Welch has announced an MTV Uplugged album in April where this dynamic repeats, with a gospel choir. Most special of all tonight is the harpist Tom Monger, whose elegant plucking impresses throughout, never more so than on "Spectrum", Welch's mighty set-closer.
Longtime Flo-rists might pine for the days when you could see the whites of Welch's eyes as she stage-dived. Now she just stage-dives in videos (into a clot of choirboys for the recent single, "No Light No Light"). Tonight, this stormiest of climaxes from Ceremonials is a triple drum assault, with Welch bashing away on an extra tom.
But these big spaces suit the bombastic direction Welch's muse has taken since the starker blues of her early songs. Welch may once have seemed the quintessential bohemian eccentric, but she is thriving in a female-dominated mainstream. The bigger, it seems, the better: how strange, but satisfying, that the Ceremonials songs sound so much more at home in this beautiful brick hangar than they do on headphones.
