Top 100 10s - 92. FLORENCE & THE MACHINE - "Shake It Out" (Patreon)

British artists aren’t for the most part especially religious, but they do love to borrow the sounds and phrases and aesthetics of other people’s worship, and here’s a song which structures itself like an idea of a revival meeting, with lyrical hooks cobbled from school assemblies and stale sayings and whirled up into a secular exorcism.

Of the maximalists who thrived in UK pop at the start of the decade, which seems an age away now, Florence Welch is the most endearing in her vastness. Coldplay are too banal, Adele too grounded, but Florence at her best has that streak of wild absurdity and make-believe which lured me to pop in the first place. “Shake It Out” is her best song because it has her best chorus, but also because it commits so totally to its ideas -the organ drones and trembling keyboards and drum tattoos all working to call you to Florence’s dance. She’s pouring everything into selling it, too, her line readings turning cliche - “it’s always darkest” - into high drama, but also using them to pull in stranger, more pagan imagery - “tonight I’m gonna bury that horse in the ground!”

And yes, you could sneer at it - I know this because at first I did - fretting that the blowout approach shreds any chance of genuine mystery. Stadium hauntology - who thought that was a good idea? But it turns out it is a good idea. I don’t quite trust it but I love it; its force sweeps me along. Scale has its own powers, and there are more things to do with ghosts than conjure them.