Isabella Summers

Isabella Janet Florentina Summers (born 31 October 1980) is an English musician, songwriter, producer, remixer and composer. She is a founding member of English indie rock band Florence and the Machine. Biography Summers lived her first nine years in Hackney, London, and met Florence Welch as the young Summers would babysit Welch's younger sister Grace. When Summers was nine, her family moved to Aldeburgh, Suffolk. There Summers attended Woodbridge School, had piano lessons and grew an interest in music, crediting some influence from mixtapes made by her father with a very eclectic mixture of everything and anything from Beethoven to Bob Dylan, rarities, poetry, even the Shipping forecast". Hip-hop was a preferred genre, as her neighbours gave her a tape with Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle (1993) and 6 Feet Deep (1994) by Gravediggaz, and she would also spend evenings with fishermen's sons "who smoked loads of weed and listened to hard American rap." For her university years, Summers moved back to London in East Dulwich, where she would get a fine arts degree at Central Saint Martins. In the meantime she bought a set of DJ mixers to learn how to mix, while also doing side jobs such as being a runner for Top of the Pops and transcriptions and film digitizing for Alan Parker. Soon she was working with Dan Greenpeace on his 'All City Show' radio show on XFM London, an experience that led Summers to buy her first MPC which was installed at the cupboard of her shared flat. With the help of a friend she started a studio in a former plastics factory at Crystal Palace, and began making hip hop. During this time, Summers worked with, amongst others, Kashmere, The Iguana Man, IRS Crew, MBC Crew, Inja and The Last Skeptik. She would also have meetings with Welch during DJ work and art school, as Welch was attending the Camberwell College of Arts. As Summers was hired to remix songs by the band Ludes, Welch became a more common sight at her studio given she was dating Ludes' guitarist Matt Alchin, and even impressed Summers with her singing. One day, as Summers got into a creative rut, which she described as getting "sick of boys telling me what to do", she thought of writing pop music with a woman, and invited Welch to make songs with her. Following a day joining Summers' beats with Welch's lyrics, they began writing demos together, which were produced by Summers by banging on the walls to make drum sounds and using the string sounds from her keyboard.