"So you just let me suffer?" interrogates Florence Welch in the acted prologue to “What Kind of Man”, the first video released from her soul-baring, triumphant third album How Big How Blue How Beautiful. It's the first video in Florence + The Machine's ongoing collaboration with Vincent Haycock, who she previously worked with on “Lover To Lover” and “Sweet Nothing”. In Dazed's head to head conversation, the pair dissect their creative process behind the epic project. “I had this life, and then I put it all down as this record… now we've got to put it through a filter,” Welch explains. Working with Ryan Heffington, she drew on a tumultuous relationship breakdown as inspiration for the video's pugnacious choreography. “You can't fake it with your body,” she says between cuts to her raw, intense dance rehearsals. “So I think it was quite important for me to do it as a way of exorcising feeling.” As the songwriter talks of how the album stitched her back together, and it's clear that Haycock played no small part. “There's dancing, there's music and there's car crashes – and that's kind of how it feels inside.” She emerges from the wreckage with a renewed sense of artistic purpose.
