Ex-Suffolk schoolboy at heart of Florence and the Machine

GLAMOROUS world, this pop-music business. Well, sometimes. Since mid-September, Tom Monger has been in purdah in a rehearsal studio on a south London industrial estate, practising with Florence + The Machine - the band best known for You've Got the Love. (That said, Noel Gallagher has been working next-door - and, as Tom points out, "It's one of the less claustrophobic rehearsal studios . . . at least it has windows, which most don't seem to.")

There's barely a day off as they seek perfection, ready for any promotional duties required to publicise their latest songs. Single Shake It Out is released tomorrow, while album Ceremonials is out at Hallowe'en. It's generally the newer tunes they're honing. "I think we're going to go through some of the old stuff today, just to make sure we haven't forgotten how to play them," he jokes during a break.

It's been a heady three years for the harpist who likes to smother the instrument's sound in electronic effects.

During that time the band fronted by red-haired Florence Welch has (among other adventures) supported Duran Duran at Edinburgh Castle and comeback group Blur, got the crowds bopping at festivals such as Leeds, played on The Late Show with David Letterman, been to Australia, and opened for U2 in America this summer. It's been so busy that Tom and wife Connie haven't been able to squeeze in a honeymoon.

Is it hard not to be awestruck, rubbing shoulders with legends?

"Well, I liked Blur back in the day. The last time I'd seen them was playing Ipswich Corn Exchange in 1994, round about the time Parklife came out and just before they went absolutely supernova. So to go from that as my last memory of seeing Blur live, up to seeing them in the Manchester Arena, was amazing." (Not just seeing them, remember, but appearing on the same bill . . .)

He also has fond memories of the band at the Corn Exchange in 1991 or so, round about the time of their first album.

"When I was growing up, it was quite rare to have these sorts of bands playing Ipswich, so when it happened it was a big deal. I remember it being a bit fallow for a while, and then all of a sudden The Wonder Stuff announced they were playing at the Ipswich Regent. Shortly after that the Levellers announced they were coming to the Corn Exchange, and then Blur said they were playing. All of a sudden three great bands were coming virtually at the same time."

In terms of his own time in the spotlight with Florence + The Machine, he admits the wall of sound created by the audience at the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury in 2009 was LOUD. "We did Dog Days Are Over and the crowd went ballistic."

What's it like to receive such adulation and affirmation?

"Erm, well there are days when you think 'Hold on a sec; what's going on here?!' It is quite surreal at times. It's easy to be blas� about it, I suppose, after a while, once you've done loads of festivals and they all blend into each other; but, then, when someone goes absolutely ape . . . it's nice."

In one sense, Tom is half a step removed from the hype. "Obviously Florence is the one who has to do all the media stuff. She's doing a video today for the new single." Are he and the other band members not in it, then? "No; we very rarely are."

A pertinent time to ask my "Blondie question" - about how, with all due respect, band members risk being overshadowed by a pretty and confident (and talented, of course) frontwoman.

Pictures of Florence Welch dominate the band's website, for instance, and she's on one of the covers of this month's 25th-anniversary Q Magazine. Even the publicist at Island Records doesn't have any pictures of Tom!

So: does he prefer being in the background or does he feel a little envious?

"It was always the idea that Florence + the Machine was Florence and an ever-changing collective . . . it just so happens that it's been a pretty stable line-up for the last few years. But, ultimately, it's Florence's baby and we all kind of knew that from day one, so we have come to accept that."

He adds, with a laugh, "Let's just say we do do an awful lot of work as well!"

Tom was born in Ipswich in 1975, the oldest of three boys, and grew up in Stowmarket. "My father worked at the Museum of East Anglian Life and our family grew up in the grounds. We were sort of renting a house in the grounds.

"We were very lucky, because we didn't have any immediate neighbours - which meant I could make as much noise as I wanted without disturbing anybody else."

His was a musical household, with parents George and Eileen both enthusiasts. They even started a folk club at The Pickerel Inn in Stowmarket after moving to Suffolk from Essex. Later, Eileen released an album in the mid-1980s called The Lilting Banshee, on which she played the metal-strung harp.

Tom's early years resounded to traditional Celtic music as the family travelled regularly to festivals and folk events.

He collected records from a very young age - his strategy determined by the physical record labels! The more colourful, the better. "Sometimes I'd get a record more because of what it looked like than being interested in the record itself. I particularly liked the Transatlantic label, because that was nice and colourful."

He was seven when he became really serious about making music himself . . . and it was all down to the group Madness.

"It was Our House. On the strength of me getting the single for Christmas, my dad went out and bought the album, The Rise & Fall - which is a bit like Madness going slightly psychedelic. None of this Baggy Trousers or House of Fun stuff; it was a little bit more bizarre than that. I just thought it was fantastic.

"I hadn't really listened to much pop music; it had been folk and classical - and the stuff I'd been listening to had been very straight. I think some of the folk artists I'd listened to had a touch of experimentation, but nothing in the way that this Madness album showed me what you could do in a recording studio.

"My musical vision went from black and white into glorious Technicolor. That was the start of my 'quest'."

With his mum playing the harp and his grandfather making them, it's no surprise it became Tom's instrument too. "He made me one when I was about four years old and a year later I started learning."

His first harp teacher was Margaret Crisp, who taught him the basics and how to read music. When he was nine he was invited to join the West Suffolk Youth Orchestra, and began playing an antique, 43-string Erard Grecian harp made in 1829. (It's still going strong, with a little restoration work along the way, and even appears in the video for Florence + The Machine's song Rabbit Heart.)

In the mid-1980s, when he started playing the pedal harp, he was taught by Patsy Wise. "She got me through my grade four harp exam, which to date is the only grading exam I've ever taken! For the harp, anyway. I've got a higher grade on viola than I have on the harp! And I'm a rubbish viola player!"

At 10 he began studying with Hugh Webb, and was asked to join the Suffolk Youth Orchestra.

During his time at Combs Middle School, Stowmarket - Tom says Simon Clover was a fantastic teacher - he twice appeared at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in the finals of the Barclays Youth Music Theatre Awards.

After school it was on to Trinity College of Music, in the capital, in 1994. A valuable experience, though not without its creative tensions.

It had never been Tom's dream to play classical music forever. He'd started playing Irish folk music, and rock music in several bands in high school. Trinity, he says, was used to students harbouring ambitions of becoming principal harpist of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, "whereas with me . . . well, I just wanted to play in a band! They didn't quite know how to deal with me, I suppose. I was stubborn and they were stubborn!"

He told another interviewer that "When I had to choose between audition training and a gig with the band I chose the latter. They nearly threw me out of the conservatory because they don't understand a gig to me can be as important as an audition to a classical harpist."

That said, he didn't have any problem in being taught classical music, or playing it, and recognises it has given him "some gentle pointers and hints about what I can use in what I am doing".

Work post-college has included solo recitals, orchestral and ensemble dates, session recording and street theatre, and collaborations with bands and singer/songwriters.

Always there's been the desire to experiment with the harp and different technologies. A key part of Tom's work has been electronics-based techno music with the collective he fronts, Lunamoth.

In 2005, Lunamoth's cover version of Bj�rk's song Army of Me was chosen by the Icelandic musician for a charity album in aid of tsunami relief.

And so to Florence + The Machine. Tom owes his involvement to a chance encounter with songwriter and music producer Isabella Summers.

"I knew these guys at a studio in south London: a little arts complex. They asked me if I could do a solo show in the gallery. I was wheeling my harp towards the studio and this girl comes running up to me. 'Ooh, is that a harp?' 'Yeah . . .'

"We got chatting and she said she was a producer working with this vocalist (Florence Welch). 'It would be really great if you could put some harp stuff down.' She sent me all these tracks - which were pre-Florence + the Machine, really. If I remember rightly, they were working together, then, as Florrible and Misrabella!

"She used to email me songs and I'd record the harp part in my flat, and then email it back to Isa. She'd mix it together.

"We did this for a couple of years. Some of the songs she sent me ended up on the album: songs like Dog Days Are Over and I'm Not Calling You a Liar. I know for a fact that some of my harp part on Dog Days was recorded in my flat.

"That's how I started - through a chance meeting with Isabella in the car park at Antenna Studios in Crystal Palace," he chuckles.

In the summer of 2008 he started gigging "proper" with Florence + The Machine and the rest is history.

Actually, there's a strong East Anglian core at the heart of the band. Not only is Tom Suffolk born and bred, Isabella has roots in the county, too.

She moved to Aldeburgh with her family when she was nine, and went to Woodbridge School before heading to London to study fine arts, work at a string of jobs and then take up music full-time.

The partnership with Florence, a long-time friend, started in 2006 (and it was Florence who nicknamed Isabella "Machine" for her electronic musical wizardry).

Isabella co-wrote five of the songs on the hugely successful album Lungs and now plays keyboards with the band.

Talking of instruments, harps are not commonplace in indie pop and rock bands - so much so that it seems to throw many listeners when one is included.

When Dog Days Are Over was released, none of the reviews mentioned a harp in the mix, Tom laments. Worse, one magazine credited a non-existent mandolin and a newspaper confused the harp with a ukulele!

Reviewers have mistaken the instrument for a piano; even a banjo. "No-one actually said it was a harp, so that was a little bit galling . . . but I've got kind of used to it after that."

Lungs was very harp-led; the second collection much less so. "I think they decided that rather than make the same album twice, it would take a little more of a background role on this one."

Tom does like to smother his chords with musical effects, which probably confuses the inexperienced ear.

"In Shake It Out you don't actually hear on there what you'd recognise as a harp, but it is on there. It's just under so many effects. If you listen very carefully, at the end of the record you'll hear a high-frequency twinkly sound, and that's actually the harp going through a crystal reverb thing. But you wouldn't know it's a harp."

For all the misfiring reviews, and the hectic schedule that makes days blur into one another, being a cog in the machine is firmly fun.

"I realise how lucky I am. I might complain about it from time to time, but I feel bad about it because there are people (musicians) out there who've been slogging away and will never be doing what I'm doing. So I do feel tremendously privileged. I do realise that, most of the time!"

Any drawbacks? "I think the main drawback is not being able to plan anything 'cos you never know what might be coming up gigwise. I still haven't been able to go on honeymoon; but that's the way it goes, so you have to be able to become accustomed to that."

What of the future?

"I have my own solo thing going on as well and hope to get to do a bit more work on that soon. I've got my laptop studio, which I carry around with me so I can work on things whilst travelling on tourbuses and planes. I'll carry on with that.

"Ultimately, musically speaking, I'd like to do something that would inspire others in the same way that others have inspired me.

"I've had people tell me that they were going through a hard time and found comfort in the Florence album, and to have been part of something that does that for others is a wonderful thing."

TOM Monger acknowledges he's always been a bit tongue-tied when meeting musical big-hitters and bad at small-talk - so imagine his shock when he looked out at the audience one night and saw Bj�rk in the front row.

It was about three years ago: a solo show in a pub in east London. "I didn't realise she was coming. I came out on stage and . . . Uh oh! The gig itself went really well. I didn't freeze until I was introduced to her, and then I didn't know what to say . . ."

Happily, the Icelandic singer was really nice. "She's a musical genius. People use that phrase too readily, but I honestly think she is."

Earlier, under his Lunamoth banner, Tom had made a cover version of the Icelandic singer's Army of Me that Bj�rk chose for a compilation charity album.

* Tom gets back to Suffolk from time to time, though it's quite tricky because of musical commitments. When he is in the county, he enjoys having a look around.

"So much of it has changed since I was living there. I've still got a very strong memory of what Stowmarket was like in the early '80s. You do get a bit nostalgic for your childhood, thinking 'Oh yeah; I remember that chemist's on the corner that's now a mobile phone shop', or something."

He married last year. Connie is a production assistant for touring bands, so they're both away a lot. "It's a bit like ghost-ships passing in the night, but we have spent quite a lot of time, this last year, together. You learn how to deal with it." Home is Sydenham, in south London.

* Tom, who generally plays an Aoyama Amphion, believes the cost of harps is a key factor in the instrument's general visibility. Certainly one doesn't see many schoolchildren taking it up.

"With a pedal harp, you're looking at, probably, at least �6,000. The one I use is about �12,000 - more like �13,000 now the VAT's gone up."

* Two years ago, halfway through a European tour, the trailer carrying all

Florence + The Machine's equipment caught fire. Everything was destroyed, including Tom's harp that he'd owned for 17 years. He got a replacement, but the incident "was like losing a best friend".