John Walsh: Tales of the City

'I marvelled at how Flo, a slender reed of a girl, could sing like one of the Furies, like an avenging angel'

Let me tell you about this girl I know. She was only a kid when I first met her. Her parents lived down the road from us in Camberwell: Nick was in advertising, Evelyn was an academic, and their daughter Flo was a coltish child with straggly brown hair, a determined chin and a curious trick of narrowing her eyes when she looked around the room.

I remember when her parents split up and the children moved to a new house nearby, where the front room became Flo's boudoir. At 15, when I encountered her properly for the first time, she had acquired a sense of style and a couple of tons of vaudeville paraphernalia: the walls of her room were a crazy mosaic of Venetian masks, sequinned waistcoats, Polaroid photographs, rhinestone gewgaws, fans, gold slingbacks.

The girl herself had become my eldest daughter's best friend. They'd met at school, when they sat together in art class: directed to draw portraits of each other, Sophie fashioned a brutally stern, verité study of Flo's face; Flo drew Sophie as a sensuous romantic with huge lips, and was hurt to find the compliment un-returned. But they got talking and became hooked together on a thousand little Velcro strips of friendship.

They became inseparable. They lived in each other's rooms and each other's clothes. Any evening, you would find Flo drifting about our kitchen, making pots of tea but seeming never to drink any, picking at tiny bits of chicken or breadcrumbs like a bird. A secretary bird, I used to think, watching her move about: she carried herself very upright, held her head high like a watchful schoolmistress, and her long sensitive fingers seemed to peck at things. She never did anything as vulgar as sit down and actually eat a meal. You would almost have called her prim, were it not for the backless, halter-necked, gold-lamé waistcoat with which she liked to amaze middle-aged male guests on New Year's Eve.

She had a boyfriend who was tall, black-haired and godlike, and played guitar in a band. Her life became mercurial. One day, she was in love; the next she was utterly off the idea. She was happy as a clam; she was desolate. And one day, in an Italian restaurant, my daughter asked the piano player if he'd mind if Flo sang. It was not, said the man, the management's policy to allow any karaoke in Ciao Bella.

My daughter's huge blue eyes misted with fake tears. It was, she explained, her birthday and it would be such a favour. Flo got to sing. She sang, I think, "Summertime," giving the old Gershwin standard an unusually bittersweet melancholy. Soon afterwards, at the Groucho Club, she sang a Ray Charles blues in the bar and Rod, the pianist, beamed as she soared over the melody line or snuck up on it from below and shifted key as if her voice was wired into his scuttling fingers. She could, it gradually dawned on me, sing anything. She still had that curious tic of narrowing her eyes when she looked at you, as if a little suspicious about your intentions; I marvelled at how this slender reed of a girl could sing like an avenging angel, like one of the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance in antiquity.

Then I heard that she had been "taken up" by interested parties: Alex James, the cheese-wrangling Blur bassist and writer, would bring up her name in his Independent column. In a Soho dive one evening, I discovered young Flo chatting to (and towering over) the bumptious rock-star Johnny from Razorlight. I heard that she'd fallen in with an influential, two-woman club-DJ outfit called the Queens of Noize. Eventually, Sophie brought the news: her friend had been offered a gasp-making sum of money by a large record company to cut a record.

Everything seemed to accelerate. The next thing I knew, I was queuing up with Sophie outside the Astoria, the phenomenally grotty rock venue in Tottenham Court Road, among a horde of twentysomethings waiting to see a band called MGMT, or The Management. Before them was a support act called Florence and The Machine.

I was at the bar when she appeared on stage. Through clouds of dry ice, I stared at Flo in her ra-ra skirt and her ropes of hair. As the guitarist and drummer stirred a rock'n'roll torrent, she extended her arms, and seemed to push at the audience while she sang about broken hearts and busted relationships. Her lyrics were full of violence (their first single, "Kiss With a Fist", came out yesterday) but between verses, she spun around the stage with a kind of eldritch glee, like a kid dancing in the wind, like a malevolent sprite in a folk tale, exulting that her plan has worked.

It was fantastic. She sang about a woman who catches a bird, kills it and puts it into a pie; but when she opens her mouth, the voice of the bird emerges, telling the people about her wickedness. Possibly to emphasise her disinclination to be pushed around by men any more, she seized a large drumstick and belaboured a tom-tom before firing the stick over her head.

I looked at her father, beside me in the audience. "What the hell, Nick?" was all I could say. "Just don't ask me," was all he replied. All we could see was a girl transformed, through heaven knows what private traumas, into an 18-carat star. Nobody was responsible for this human alchemy; nothing had made it happen but the years and the torments of love, working their secret ministry on a girl with coolly appraising eyes and a voice like fury.