Florence Welch told fans to put their phones away to get the full “experience” of Florence + The Machine’s Reading Festival set.
The band took to the main stage to headline the festival on Sunday night (30.08.26) – their first time performing at the world-famous festival since 2012.
They performed tracks such as Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) and You Got The Love, with redheaded frontwoman Florence putting on an energetic display.
She admitted that Reading was the “first festival I ever wanted to go to”, and her dad took her when she was just 14.
She added: “This is my childhood dream, so thank you so much.”
It was Dog Days Are Over that prompted the biggest reaction from the crowd, with Florence pleading with “every single person at this festival” to “put your phones the f*** away”.
She added: “Filming this song will stop you from experiencing this song, and is that not why you came?”
The group’s Reading Festival performance comes after they dropped their most recent album Everybody Scream last October (25).
The record was their first since Dance Fever in 2022, with Florence admitted that some of the songs on the album were inspired by her ectopic pregnancy.
She was forced to have emergency surgery during the Dance Fever tour in 2023, and came close to losing her life.
Florence said in an interview last year: “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death. And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
She added to NPR: “I’ve always – I have spoken about for a while, like, the kind of strange, prescient nature of songwriting.
“And, you know, I had been writing songs about motherhood, like King, and there was especially a line in it that was debating and defying whether motherhood was for me, and there was a line that was like, I never knew my killer would be coming from within.”
