Florence Welch joked that she would “eat this later” when a fan threw a fake “bloody-severed hand” on-stage.
Florence and the Machine were performing at New York’s Madison Square Garden as part of the ‘Dance Fever’ world tour when the bizarre gift was lobbed towards her.
She reacted: “It’s a beautiful bloody severed hand.
“How did you know?”
She then quipped in the TikTok footage shared on the band’s page: “I’m gonna eat this later.”
The ‘You’ve Got The Love’ singer then placed the hand on a stage prop behind her before carrying on with the concert.
Fans are lucky there is a ‘Dance Fever’ tour, as the singer recently admitted the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic made her contemplate shelving their latest album.
The ‘Dog Days Are Over’ hitmaker explained how the global health crisis made it challenging to finish ‘Dance Fever’, specifically the travel restrictions between the US and UK, and it wasn’t until she and producer Jack Antonoff penned the tracks ‘King’ and ‘Choreomania’ that Florence knew they had something too special to give up on.
She said: “There were so many moments where I had nearly gave up on this record. There were so many moments where I nearly went, ‘It just feels like the way that the world is, this is just too hard to finish.’
“I started with Jack [Antonoff], and we were meant to make the whole record in Electric Lady in New York in … March 2020. I went to New York. I had my suitcases packed for a month, we were going to make the whole… we had a bunch of amazing songs done. The first song we wrote together was ‘King’ and … so Jack had wanted to work together for a while, and we met and we got on really well. I found him really great to talk to. I never start working with anyone at this stage in my career, unless we get in the studio and do something, and that really tells you whether something’s going to work. You’re never like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this,’ until you’ve had a play date, and on this play date we wrote ‘King’ and then ‘Choreomania’. I’d had ‘Choreomania’ and it was in a very demo-like state, and what Jack did to it, he took it so far. I was like, ‘This guy’s really good. He’s really, really good.’
The strength of those two songs was like, ‘Okay, there’s really something here,’ and then we agreed to start the record together. We got to New York, in that one week we wrote ‘Free’ and we wrote ‘Back In Town’.”
The 35-year-old singer also admitted she went through a grieving process when live music was cancelled at the height of the pandemic, and didn’t know whether she’d return to the stage.
She said: “I felt like this cathedral of touch that I had built had just flattened overnight. And the grief and the loss of… It’s also, it was like, ‘It’s my job.’ And I just didn’t know if it would come back and I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else? Because, there were so many false starts as well of like, ‘We can go to finish the record, or we can’t, there’s another variant. We’re going to get to New York to do it. Oh, we can’t. Everyone in England has COVID, you can’t leave. America doesn’t want you.’
“And so, there were so many false starts of whether this record would even finish.
“And you would see a tour go up, you would see it get cancelled.”
The flame-haired star had gotten so used to life off the road and felt “abandoned” when the one place she goes to for a “relief from self” wasn’t there anymore, and she started to doubt whether she wanted to tour again.