‘This is going to get more dramatic than I anticipated,” Chris proclaims after his drummer showers him with roses midway through the show. But it’s hard to tell how much of the dialogue between songs is scripted in this two-hour rock opera dramatising Christine and the Queens’ latest album, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. Sometimes it’s filled with monologues about pride, or St Michael’s sword, at others tongue-in-cheek jabs at the audience for getting up to pee during the “ritual”.
That’s how Chris describes his headline show at Meltdown festival multiple times: a ritual. Much like the angels in Tony Kushner’s 1991 magnum opus Angels in America, on which the album is based, music is presented as a disruptive force – one with the power to terrify and transform. The play follows Prior Walter, a young man dying with Aids in late-80s New York as he’s visited by angels in a series of visions and prophetic dreams. The stage design tonight brings some of this imagery to the fore. Performing among Rodin-inspired sculptures, fragments of staircases and a line of wooden chairs arranged like a church pew, the band play feverishly, pushing the songs to their limit in lockstep as if the whole night is on the brink of collapse.
