Lewis Capaldi made a self-deprecating nod to a Florence Welch lyric while onstage at Sziget Festival – check out footage below.
The Scottish singer was appearing on the festival’s main stage in Budapest, Hungary on Thursday (August 13), where he performed immediately before headliners Florence + the Machine.
“Is everyone looking forward to Florence + The Machine,” he asked the crowd to cheers, before launching into one of the most searing lines from the ‘Everybody Scream’ track ‘One of the Greats’: “Must be nice to be a man, and make boring music just because you can”.
After chuckling and pointing to himself, he said: “I was listening to that, and I was thinking, ‘Oh fuck, yeah.’” Welch has previously said the track, which Aaron Dessner of The National and Big Red Machine also worked on, was a “15-year outpouring of frustration” after being “ridiculed and derided for the bigness of [her] expression” earlier in her career.
The track was named as one of NME‘s 50 Best Songs of 2025. In at Number 15, the entry read: “Florence Welch has made an art out of fusing the mythic with the searingly personal. Over six sprawling minutes, she manages to interrogate her place as ‘One Of The Greats’ with the same wit and swagger that solidifies it.”
NME’s Jordan Bassett went along to see Welch’s set at Sziget, which was described as “what it might look like if Ari Aster directed a concert”.
“As her backing singers and dancers – clad in gothic gowns like they’d wandered in from a production of The Crucible – huddled together, Florence twirled around the stage, her blood-dress flailing dramatically,” the review read. “It’s a good job she didn’t play during the previous night’s solar eclipse, because we almost certainly would have all been turned into frogs.
“Dancing out to her own stage at the end of a runway, Florence was the grand master and high priestess of proceedings, in absolute control and with tens of thousands of bewitched punters under her spell.”
Welch previously revealed that the inspiration for the ‘Everybody Scream’ album came from undergoing lifesaving surgery during the ‘Dance Fever’ tour in 2023.
She has since opened up further about the procedure, revealing that she had suffered an ectopic pregnancy. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” Welch explained in a recent interview. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
You can find more advice and support around ectopic pregnancy here.
Around that same time, Welch had said that exploring spiritual mysticism and folk horror helped inspire the album – understanding the limits of her body and questioning what it meant to be “healed”. Other themes tackled include the exploration of womanhood, partnership, ageing and dying.
NME gave the record a full five stars, with Laura Molloy writing: “There’s no easy, radio-friendly hit here, nor a euphoric finale, with the album instead departing on a small exhale. ‘The gift of going through something awful is that you can embrace someone who’s been through it too,’ Welch said in a recent interview.”
“Album closer ‘And Love’, then, is her final embrace, fluttering away in a haze of classic Florence + The Machine harp and distant murmurs of “peace is coming”. It’s a succinct and surprising end to a tempestuous record, one that stays with you longer than the rage and anguish which, here, is as fleeting, yet deeply magical, as the changing seasons.”
As for Capaldi, the recent Sziget slot saw him confirm plans for a third album, which would mark the follow-up to 2019’s ‘Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent’ and 2023’s ‘Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent’.
“Thank you for continuously showing up and watching us when we come to this festival – it really means the world,” he said. “I’m gonna go away after… We’ve got six more gigs this summer, and then I’m gonna go away and make a new album for everybody – if everybody’s interested?”
When this was received with a cheer, he continued: “I promise I’ll be back as soon as I possibly fucking can be.”
