Songfacts®:

• Florence + the Machine is the recording name of former Camberwell Art School student Florence Welch and her backing band. She left Camberwell after a year and a half to pursue her professional music career. This sexually charged number was written when Welch was hanging out with art college dropouts. She told The Sunday Times: "It's about giving as good as you get."
• "Kiss With A Fist" was Florence + the Machine's debut single, released in 2008 ahead of their first album, Lungs. It got some attention in their native UK, where it went to #51, but in America there were few radio stations bold enough to play it. The group's next single, "Dog Days Are Over," was a breakthrough, establishing the band in many territories. Florence was just 22 at the time and brought a lot of intensity to her songs. Over the next few years a lot happened in her life and her music reflected that, but no matter what, her songs always packed a punch.
• Despite the lyrics appearing to be about a feuding couple smashing plates over each other's heads and setting fire to the bed, Welch denied this is a song about domestic violence. She told The Independent June 27, 2009: "It's just a silly rhyme I thought up when I was 18!"
• The song is not about domestic violence - those kicks, slaps and smashing plates are all metaphors. Florence Welch addressed this in an interview with Uncut magazine January 2010, when they suggested that she was saying being beaten up by your man is better than being ignored by him. She responded: "I want to make it clear that a man has never beaten me up and I would never advocate that in a song in any way whatsoever. There are no victims in that song. They're both beating the s--t out one another, there's no victimisation in it. The song is describing a highly destructive relationship, but one which both partners enjoy. But it's all metaphorical."
• Welch told the story of the song in an interview with QMI Agency: "It was such a long time ago that I wrote it," she said. "I was 17. I was hanging out with a lot of punk bands, a lot of art-college bands, and they were writing really tough songs. And I guess I just wanted to write, like, not your typical love song. I was just messing around, and someone was playing this kind of country, bluesy riff, and I just sang it. And the first time I sang it, it just came into my head when I was doing an open-mic session. And I just got on this riff, and then I wrote the rest of the song. It wasn't about personal experience. A lot of the stuff I write about is imaginary relationships and, like, imagining chaos."
• This was used in the 2010 Chuck episode "Chuck Versus the First Fight" when Chuck and Sarah argue with each other while beating up bad guys.