Early Life
Born in Camberwell, Florence is the niece of the satirist Craig Brown and granddaughter of former deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph and former Daily Mail parliamentary sketchwriter Colin Welch. She is the daughter of Evelyn Welch, an American Professor of Renaissance Studies and Vice-Principal for Arts & Sciences at King's College London and Nick Welch, an advertising executive. Her British father, Nick, contributed a "rock and roll element to the family mix"; in his twenties he used to live in a West End squat and attended the Squatters' Ball organised by Heathcote Williams where The 101ers played regularly. A self-confessed "frustrated performer", if Nick, as he put it, "nudged Flo in any way, it's only been to listen to the Ramones rather than Green Day". Evelyn had an equally strong yet completely different influence on her daughter. A visit to one of her mother's lectures left teenage Florence deeply impressed. She explained, "I aspire to something like that but with music. I hope that my music has some of the big themes—sex, death, love, violence—that will still be part of the human story in 200 years' time".
Florence was educated at Thomas's London Day School then went onto Alleyn's School, South East London, where she did well academically. Welch often got in trouble in school for impromptu singing. Welch has been diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia. Following her meteoric rise to fame, she suffered a bout of depression. Upon leaving school, Florence studied at Camberwell College of Arts before dropping out to focus on her music. Welch's fascination with terror and doom was intensified by the death of her grandparents within a few years of each other. At ten years old, Welch witnessed her grandfather's deterioration, and her maternal grandmother, also an art historian, committed suicide when Welch was fourteen. When Welch was 13 years old, she and her mother moved in with their next door neighbour and his three teenage children. According to Welch: "We get on brilliantly now, but it was a nightmare then. I just used to stay in my room and dance around."
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