Chris – the figure at the centre of Christine and the Queens – is loose in the aisles of the Festival Hall auditorium, one arm encased in a knight’s leather gauntlet, shirtless but for some nipple tape. He clasps hands with one or two fans; kneels down before one woman, who places a hand gently on his head as though in blessing.
A performer who has morphed personae over the course of four studio albums, Chris’s latest iteration tonight is made of powerful stuff: sinew and muscle. The French singer-producer’s physical presence tonight suggests a full recovery from the knee injury that dogged the rollout of last autumn’s album, Redcar les Adorables Etoiles (Prologue). (Redcar was another persona, leaning into Chris’s embrace of masculine pronouns.) His moves tonight encompass Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire; they nod at statuary, flamenco and vogueing, and remain almost as important as Chris’s transcendent vocals. But for all this display of ripped artistry, tonight’s show – the second of two that close the Meltdown festival, curated by Christine and the Queens – also finds the left-field pop outlier grief-stricken and lost. He is tormented by lust, consumed by yearning and plagued by visions. He inspires awe – and no little tenderness.
It’s quite a contrast to the more streamlined, minimal 80s pop of Christine and the Queens circa 2014’s Chaleur Humaine and 2018’s Chris. In a baffled review of CATQ’s most recent 20-track album, the three-part suite Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, NME concluded: “Is he OK?”
The answer is probably “not exactly”, and this two-night-only performance of Paranoïa, from end to end, feels like a deep dive into a fever dream, working through themes of existential loneliness and the complexities of love, while invoking otherworldly beings. One declared jumping-off point is Angels in America, the award-winning Tony Kushner play turned TV series, where angels visit a character hospitalised with an Aids-related illness. (He might be hallucinating.) Another is Pachelbel’s Canon, which underscores Chris’s echoey vocal on the sad but joyful Full of Life, as he grapples with oceanic feelings.
Tonight, as well as angels – archangel Michael is one of many statues on stage – other supranatural beings include the disembodied, robotic voice of Madonna, who acts as a kind of godlike AI figure known as The Eye, whose tone is often maternal. Chris’s own mother, Martine Letissier, died suddenly in 2019. Her loss reverberates through 2020’s La Vita Nuova EP through to the opening stanzas of Paranoïa’s Tears Can Be So Soft. (“Miss my mother at night,” Chris sings.) According to a recent interview, Chris has the letter M tattooed on both eyelids, one for his mother and one for his grandmother, who also died young.
This is a gig, then, but also, a very intentional piece of theatre that, in part, seeks to break down time and space in response to death – not unlike Nick Cave’s Ghosteen, where the singer engaged with ghosts and heaven and refused to rule out further lives. “This is a ritual!” Chris reminds us from time to time (he used the same phrase last November when presenting Redcar live).
These metaphysical concerns are rooted in the material, physical plane, though. Chris is also “missing his lover”. The pain of unrequited love, of not being someone’s “boyfriend”, of being “seul” (alone, on Aimer, Puis Vivre) is as palpable as the pain of loss. The humid, sensual tracks are among the most memorable tonight: Angels Crying in My Bed (slinky), Track 10 (intense), Let Me Touch You Once (sung bilingually in an agony of desire, addressing a blinding white light).
Ultimately, though, this is a show as frustrating as it is magnificent. Although seeing Chris in the flesh makes greater, more embodied sense of Paranoïa’s passionate themes, there remains a surfeit of overlapping ideas that lack clarity (water, light, blood and the colour red are four more themes bouncing around). The tracks are long; the intensity of Chris’s feeling just about sustains numerous workouts that often feel musically circuitous. But then, this is an album full of tension, and precious little release.
Paranoïa, Angels and True Love was made alongside A-list producer Mike Dean, who has worked with Kanye West, Lana Del Rey and the Weeknd. It’s somewhat ironic that Chris’s big, slick LA album actually seems more dense and thorny than Redcar, which was written solo, in something of a fugue state, after Chris and Dean wrapped Paranoïa (but released first). Inside Paranoïa, Angels and True Love is an absolute classic album fighting to get out, one where Chris’s “sorry, broken, crazy, raging heart” is showcased authentically, but less long-windedly.
While the Redcar shows didn’t feature a band, Chris’s instrumentalists unleash portentous rock operatics tonight, as well as digital R&B that often recalls the Weeknd fronted by Kate Bush, often murky, just as often delicate. The band are extras, too: the guitarist sits in a pew-like arrangement of chairs for Marvin Descending, the hirsute drummer throws flowers, then later helps Chris into a tailcoat mounted with angel wings for a climactic Shine. But this show is all about one person’s torment – and it’s hard not to be moved by this living synthesis of overwhelming feeling and tensed flesh.
