More about: Christine And The Queens

In 2018, I decided to come out as trans. I made the decision following a conversation during a long car journey with friends. The song ‘5 dollars’ by Christine and the Queens had been playing on the car stereo, and one of the people in the car with me had brought my attention to one of its lyrics.

“Some of us just had to fight for even being looked at right.” 

It’s not super clear in the song who the ‘us’ is that the writer is referring to, but my friend in the car said the lyric resonated with them as a queer person. Less than an hour later, I’d resolved to come out of the closet. 

Having lived for five years now as a trans woman in an increasingly tumultuous political climate, this lyric feels more potent than ever. I have spent the last five years fighting to be accepted – by family, by friends, by society at large, by the readers of online magazines.  

For the artist behind the lyric though, it feels like a different kind of fight in 2023. It feels clear to me that the last thing Christine and the Queens is concerned about is acceptance. Freedom, liberation, transcendence, euphoria, ascension – maybe. But acceptance feels neither here nor there. 

When sitting down to write this review, I had to give serious thought to the nomenclature. For Héloïse Adélaïde Letissier, who for most of his career has been known largely as Christine and the Queens, names are at once paramount and nebulous. In 2018, he released the album CHRIS, and seemed to suggest that this was the name he preferred. Then last year, he brought out the divisive concept album Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), alongside which he announced not only a new name (Redcar) but also a new form of address – he/him. 

But as the artistry around Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) unfolded, it became clear that – at least to some extent – the titular Redcar was an alter-ego. There was something deliberately sleazy about Redcar. Red-gloved and intensely charismatic, he was like an otherworldly drag king, somewhere between Emcee from Cabaret and Cartoon Network’s Johnny Bravo. With this in mind, I can’t have been the only person wondering if the he/him pronouns were one with the persona. Apparently not – they’ve stayed up on the official Christine and the Queens Instagram page, and it seems to be what all major press outlets are going with. However, it would be difficult to argue that anything about Christine and the Queens’ identity is straightforward right now. It’s gone beyond indistinct and become almost confrontational. 

Of the statements the artist has made on the matter, none has perhaps been more definitive than when during Saturday night’s concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, a member of the audience opts to shout “I love you, Christine!”. Without even looking in their direction, the figure on stage replies “My name is Red”.

So, clearly Redcar wasn’t the flash-in-a-pan stage persona some of us had thought he would be. But there’s no denying the fact that ‘Christine’ remains a pervasive presence here. After all, ‘Christine and the Queens’ is the name emblazoned on the posters advertising the Royal Festival Hall show and its accompanying festival. And the opening act for the evening is a drag cabaret, so – if we are to accept that Letissier still sees himself as Christine on some level – the “and the Queens” part of his title feels more literal tonight than ever.

The cabaret performance itself is an interesting one. We’re presented with a range of diverse performers who are no doubt some of the most cutting-edge in the game. The compere lists some of the venues where they’ve appeared before, including The Glory and Dalston Superstore. The Royal Festival Hall therefore is an odd fit for many of these acts, who are greeted by a seated, mostly silent, 6music listener audience rather than the sweaty East London queers they’re likely used to. When Trans Creative founder Kate O’Donnell reveals her bare breasts to a ginger response from the genial crowd, I sort of feel like I’m at an exhibition at the Tate Modern. 

On one level, these East London drag artists are clearly exploring similar thematic ground to Christine and the Queens. Both are acts from typically low-brow art fields (drag and pop music) plonked in a high-brow space (The Royal Festival Hall), where they each publicly unpack questions about gender expression. 

But on another, the two performances couldn’t be more different. The drag cabaret is comedic and care-free. Letissier’s performance meanwhile is one of the most self-serious and intense I’ve ever seen on stage.

To some degree, I knew what to expect here. I knew we wouldn’t be getting a greatest hits set. I knew we’d probably be hearing most, if not all, of Letissier’s new record Paranoia, Angels, True Love. What I didn’t expect was the theatrical odyssey we got. 

The scenery is elaborate, with cherub statues, church pews, and staircases leading nowhere. The Christine and the Queens band consists of Darren King at the drum kit, Steven Cowley on bass and keyboards, and Elle Puckett on keyboards, bass, and guitars. Most of all, I’m relieved to see the drum kit – more so than the early material, this latest Christine and the Queens album relies on acoustic drums, and King does the parts justice. 

"It’s not an overstatement to say that what we’re experiencing here is as much theatre as it is concert."

As it turns out, the band aren’t just musicians tonight – they’re actors too, with all their movements precisely choreographed. Early in the show, Puckett sits at the church pews praying. Later, King leaves the drum kit at points to place silver masquerade masks on the faces of their bandmates or to hand a bunch of flowers to Letissier. Puckett at one stage does an almost-dance-routine alongside the frontman; Cowley sits beside him later at the pews and plays the role of a celestial messenger, a Godlike voice booming from above. 

I cannot stress enough the extent to which everything here feels meticulously planned. It’s not an overstatement to say that what we’re experiencing here is as much theatre as it is concert. When Letissier speaks between songs, every word is rehearsed. He doesn’t introduce himself and doesn’t really introduce the songs in the typical way – instead what we hear is opaque poetic abstraction. 

“I am going to linger in pride because I am full of life,” he tells us. 

“You probably don’t realise this, but this is very ritualistic,” he insists. 

Within the first few songs, Letissier removes his waistcoat to reveal his chest. His nipples are covered by flesh-coloured plasters, though you get the impression that he’d rather they weren’t. He performs the rest of the show like this, slipping in and out of seeming as though he’s exposing his vulnerability and asserting his masculinity. Both acts feel powerful. 

He plays Paranoia, Angels, True Love in its entirety. During the show’s second act, he leaps off the stage and ascends the aisle between the seats. For a few minutes, he’s standing mere feet away from me. I can see every bead of sweat, along with the prescient tattoo on his forearm which reads “WE ACCEPT YOU”. He starts to reach out and touch members of the audience and there’s something undeniably messianic about him. He marches across a bay of seats and holds the face of a young, visibly queer fan in his hands. He presses his forehead against theirs and the fan closes their eyes, soaking the moment in. 

For the most part, I let Letissier’s poetic sermons (and that’s what they are) wash over me. I soak up their themes – references to mothers, sons, flowers, and angels are abundant – and I feel as though I do get some meaning from the words, which seem to be about ascension, self-actualisation, and the construction of a new religious paradigm in the image of a post-gender future. But during these sections of the show, I do find myself wishing the material had more of a sense of humour.

In the lead-up to the release of Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), the eponymous Red made his first forays into theatre, posting a series of avant-garde monologues online. In my mind, these monologues recalled the work of Irish theatre practitioner Samuel Beckett, who – like Letissier – wrote in both in French and English, evaded questions about the meaning of his work, and explored questions about religion and gender. 

Central to Beckett’s oeuvre for me though is his use of comedy. A large part of what makes plays like Waiting for Godot so brilliant is how funny they are. Beckett was always as much clown as he was poet, and this was an element I saw in those Redcar videos. Unfortunately, here in the Paranoia, Angels, True Love live show, that humour has disappeared. And this lack of comedy is one of the reasons I start to disengage with the theatrics as the show wears on. Perversely, I find Letissier harder to take seriously when he’s not clowning. Towards the end of the show, drummer Darren King adorns the frontman with an enormous pair of angel wings. When it’s clear that Red is wearing these earnestly, it becomes harder to look him in the eye.

And maybe that’s a me problem. Maybe it’s time I ‘embraced cringe’. But I do think Letissier ought to take some of the responsibility for failing to entirely engage me for the full 90 minutes. After all, he addresses his audience directly only twice during the show – first to clarify his name, then to chastise us for going to the loo. 

“I saw people going to the restrooms,” he says. “Don’t do that during a ritual. Pee on yourselves. From where I stand I am about to tell the truth.”

The moment gets a laugh from the crowd, but it’s tricky to discern to what extent Red expects us to find this funny. Clearly he’s not actually demanding that we wet ourselves in our seats, but the aggravation at the audience’s toilet breaks feels genuine. It seems obvious to me that Letissier feels that it is imperative that we stay put while he orates. 

On the one hand, this is plainly ridiculous. But on another, if we are to accept this show as theatre, then going back and forth from the loo does start to feel disrespectful. And after all, it’s Red’s superlative levels of self-belief that’s made this whole exercise so compelling. 

In spite of all of this, I unfortunately do maintain a certain amount of ironic distance from the whole spectacle throughout. If I squint, I can even start to see what Red is doing here as an exercise in camp – and I’d argue that while campness is something it’s possible to aim for and achieve, art is at its most camp when it doesn’t know it’s camp. Then again, the extent to which the artist behind Christine and the Queens recognises himself as camp is a mystery to me. 

At the end of it all, it’s Letissier’s vocals that make the greatest connection with me here. It sounds like a boring thing to say – that after all the theatrics, the poetry, the gender play, the nebulous nomenclature, it’s the vocals that hit me hardest. But the reality is that it was only when he was singing that I felt truly spoken to by Red. I admire his ability as an actor, but it’s as a musician that he communicates best. For the album, he recorded all his vocals in one take, and has faced some criticism for this, since some of the resultant performances arguably sound a little too raw. So, hearing these songs live, it was a rare case of the vocals going above and beyond what was put on tape. I can honestly say I walked away with a better understanding of Paranoia, Angels, True Love. 

I’d be interested to know what others thought as they walked away. I heard a person in the row behind me complaining that they hadn’t known a single song, and it’s true that it would have been nice to hear ‘Tilted’ or ‘People, I’ve Been Sad’. Or ‘5 dollars’, the song that ended up defining one of the biggest decisions of my life. But to have expected that from the show would have been like expecting a backflip at the Snooker World Cup. 

The opening act, ‘Trans Filth & Joy’ finished with the trans performers walking out on stage with placards bearing slogans like “REFORM TRANS HEALTHCARE” and “TRANS RIGHTS NOW”. And this kind of activist art is patently crucial. It’s important that whatever backlash we face, we continue to shout in the face of cis hegemony.

But as a trans person, it’s also refreshing to see powerful work from the likes of Christine and the Queens, who refuses to even look his oppressors in the eye. His work is his own, his gender is his own, his music is his own. Everybody else is just a lucky observer.   

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More about: Christine And The Queens