—by Tom Moth

Tom Moth has been playing the harp since he was 6 years old. His teachers include Hugh Webb and Sioned Williams. Read more at tommoth.co.uk.

You never know where your next gig will come from. A chance meeting in a South London parking garage in the spring of 2007 lead to me recording some harp parts on a few demos with this new English indie rock band called Florence + the Machine, and about a year later I was invited to play some live shows as part of the band. Ten years later, I’ve played countless shows, and the band has reached worldwide fame. We are currently on tour in the U.S.—the first leg of a world tour to promote the band’s latest album High As Hope. It’s hard to believe that in the last decade we’ve gone from playing clubs, dives, and toilet venues (where each band member has roughly five square inches of stage space, if they’re lucky) to amphitheaters and arenas, with proper stage sets and a huge road crew. So on this tour, I’m a little bit nostalgic about how far we’ve come. I’m trying to slow down, take in the experience, and enjoy the ride.

…I was attempting to tune while Motorhead was cranking out “Ace of Spades” about 10 feet in front of me. Though I appreciated their performance, it did little to calm my nerves

It would be hard to describe a typical day on tour. Each venue brings its own set of challenges. Generally speaking, the crew commences building the stage and the sound and lighting rigs in the early hours, a process that takes most of the day. I don’t have a dedicated harp tech, but Justin, our guitar tech, does a truly amazing job of setting up the harp, tuning, replacing strings, etc., while Toby the MIDI tech looks after the electrical side of things, making sure all my effects are working. My bandmates and I usually turn up sometime mid-afternoon to do a soundcheck, then prepare ourselves for the performance in the evening. Soundcheck gives me the chance to warm up; due to logistical reasons, it’s the only part of the day where I can do this. Warming up is always a challenge on the road. It can be especially difficult at festivals when the gear is inaccessible for most of the day, and I can only get to the harp in the changeover right before we go onstage. Sometimes I can get there a bit earlier, but most of the time there will be another act performing at the same time and you can’t really contend with that. A particularly notable example of that was when we were headlining the Glastonbury Festival in 2015, and I was attempting to tune while Motorhead was cranking out “Ace of Spades” about 10 feet in front of me. Though I appreciated their performance, it did little to calm my nerves.

A number of times, renting a harp has been necessary for both tours and one-off shows. This has led to some interesting scenarios like turning up at the venue to find that the rented instrument is a prop harp or a harmonica. A promoter at one of our early shows was absolutely delighted to have found a harp for me in the local area—a brand new, unplayed instrument. It was beautiful, but every string was at least a semitone flat. He hadn’t specified that we needed a tuning key, and I hadn’t brought mine. Lesson learned. In the last decade of touring, I’ve gotten to know many harpists in various corners of the world who have been super helpful when it comes to locating and renting instruments, and I’d like to extend my gratitude to them for all the support and assistance they’ve given me over the years.

This time however, I’m using my own instrument—an acoustic Aoyama Amphion 47-string pedal harp, miked up with a couple of contact condenser mics inside the soundbox, which go into the effects boxes and then into the P.A. Using an acoustic harp in our setup can cause some sound problems. The harp easily picks up noise from the drums, bass, and ambient sound, and it wallows around inside the box. But we have been lucky enough to have worked with a number of excellent sound engineers who have eliminated these unwelcome artifacts. We’ve also greatly improved our monitoring from the early days. We used to use onstage wedges, which caused feedback issues with the harp, so we had to ditch them and I had to rely on what I could hear in the front of house for my own monitoring. These days we use in-ear monitors, which has made things much easier.

My harp is transported in a custom-made flight case inside a truck with all the rest of the gear. The early days saw the harp pushed in the back of cabs or tied securely to the wall of a splitter van. Disaster struck on our 2009 European tour when, travelling between gigs, the trailer carrying all our equipment caught fire. Almost everything was destroyed, including the harp I’d had for the last 12 years. It was, and still is, heartbreaking. I had so many great adventures with that harp, and it had coped miraculously with many strange situations, but it was unable to escape that time.

When we wrap up the U.S. leg of our tour, we are off to the U.K., Australia, and Europe. It’s been wonderful so far—the band is sounding better than ever, the audiences have been amazing, and I feel very honored to have been part of this album and tour.

Rocking out

British harpist Tom Moth has played on a lot of songs in his 10 years with Florence + the Machine. We asked him to recommend a few of his favorites if you want to have a listen.

+ Dog Days Are Over From the 2009 album Lungs, it’s probably our best known song. It starts with the harp, despite the fact that pretty much all the music reviewers at the time thought it was a ukulele or mandolin, and some still do despite there being plenty of video evidence of it being a harp.

+ Cosmic Love • This song is also from Lungs with a great harp part.

+ Too Much Is Never Enough • A track from the band’s Songs From Final Fantasy XV E.P. in 2016.

+ Tiny Dancer • This was our contribution to a tribute album titled Revamp—the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. The album, which was released earlier this year, features reworkings of Elton and Bernie songs by contemporary artists.