Florence + The Machine close the Everybody Scream tour at Reading festival

Florence + The Machine headlined Leeds Festival on August 28 and Reading on August 30, and the second night brought their Everybody Scream tour to an end.

Leeds fell on Florence Welch's birthday, and the crowd worked it out and sang "Happy Birthday" back at her mid-set. She then led what she called a small ritual, asking the audience to put their phones down. "It's hard, and it's frightening, but do you trust me?" she asked, before telling them to spend the song with the people they came with.

At Reading she put it more bluntly, asking every person at the festival to put their phones away because filming the song would stop them experiencing it, which she suggested was the reason they came. With rain tearing down through "Dog Days Are Over," the crowd went up as one on the final chorus.

It was the band's first Reading appearance since 2012. Welch told the crowd it was the first festival she ever wanted to go to and that her dad took her when she was 14, calling the headline slot a childhood dream.

IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen joined her for "One Of The Greats," a song the pair wrote together and recorded in a single take. He had already played it with her on the tour's opening night in Belfast in February and again at Madison Square Garden later in the year.

Everybody Scream arrived last October as the band's sixth studio album and their first since 2022's Dance Fever, and the tour behind it ran UK and European arenas from February, then North America, then the European summer festivals. Both weekend sets are logged on the festival tracker with the rest of the rock, indie and pop summer, a season that also brought Lewis Capaldi turning one of Welch's lyrics on himself at Sziget and a Royal Blood secret set at Reading.