Dog Days Are Over - Demo

For many of us, "Dog Days Are Over" was our introduction to Florence + the Machine, a London-based group led by the spiritually minded singer-songwriter Florence Welch. The song has loads of momentum, making it a striking live song for Welch, who seems to draw energy from the crowd when she performs it. It was released as their second single (following "Kiss With A Fist") from their debut album, Lungs.

This paean to the inevitability of happiness was inspired by a giant text installation called Dog Days Are Over by the artist Ugo Rondinone, which Welch used to see every day riding her bike over Waterloo Bridge. Florence told Mojo magazine April 2012 about the rainbow-hued text: "It was plastered over the south Bank in London for six months and I rode past it on my bike every day. It's a reference to the dog star, Sirius: when it was closest to the Earth, all the animals would get languid and sleepy; when it moved away, they'd wake up. I've tried to get in touch with him to say thanks."

The instrumentation on this song is really interesting. Those strings at the beginning are a harp, an instrument featured on many early songs by the group. According to Welch, most of the other sounds "came from a tiny Yamaha keyboard." Also, the percussion sound was "hands on the wall while hitting a drum underneath it at the same time and the beat was really accidental" (per an interview with CultureDeluxe). She added to BBC Newsbeat: "It was just a song that I did at my friend's studio in Crystal Palace [south London]. We didn't have any instruments and we were in a studio the size of a loo."