Florence + the Machine frontwoman Florence Welch revealed that a medical emergency is the reason she recently canceled several tour dates in Europe.
“I’m so sorry that I had to cancel the last couple of shows,” Welch, 36, began in a statement shared via Instagram on Sunday, August 27. “My feet are fine, I had to have emergency surgery for reasons I don’t really feel strong enough to go into yet, but it saved my life.”
Welch promised that she would be back on stage for the last two dates of her Dance Fever tour in Lisbon, Portugal, and Mijas, Spain, later this week. “Maybe not jumping so much but you can do that for me,” she added before reflecting on the way the themes of her 2022 album, Dance Fever, are now manifesting in her real life.
“Suffice to say I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions,” Welch wrote without disclosing further information about her health scare. “But creativity is a way of coping, mythology is [a] way of making sense. And the dark fairytale of Dance Fever, with all its strange prophecies, will provide me with much needed strength and catharsis right now.”
Welch was set to perform at the Zurich Openair and Rock en Seine festivals in Switzerland and France, respectively. She has been on tour supporting her latest album since April 2022.
Welch previously postponed part of the Dance Fever tour after breaking her foot during a performance in November 2022. “I’m sorry to say that after an X-ray I was dancing on a broken foot last night. It is not in my nature to postpone a show, and certainly not a U.K. tour, but I’m in pain and as dancers know, dancing on an injury is not a good idea,” she wrote in a statement shared via social media at the time alongside a photo that showed drops of blood on the floor near her microphone. “[I] have been told not to perform to avoid further damage.”
In 2014, Welch stopped drinking after realizing that alcohol had become a problem for her following the release of her first two albums. “Sobriety was really lonely at the beginning,” she explained during a 2022 interview on Munroe Bergdorf’s “The Way We Are” podcast. “I had got into music to drink. I was like, ‘These are the things I love the most. Singing, partying and alcohol — these are the things I’m good at.’”
She went on to encourage listeners trying to stay sober to stick with it. “If anyone is out there and struggling in the first two years, it does get easier,” Welch said. “It’s given me a level of creative freedom. Once I drank, the alcohol would just tell me what to do, or who I was hanging out with, or whatever, and I had no real independence with it. It sort of ruled my whole life.”
