“He’s all broken/ Fallen from the stars…” laments Redcar, also known as Christine and the Queens. In this new presentation, the artist now using he/him pronouns is a “suited, demented, broken-down man”. Much of Redcar Les Adorables Étoiles finds him yowling (mostly in French) into a dark maze of lost and looping grooves, his questing vocals echoing over the unyielding crunch of Eighties synths and the occasional agonised electric guitar. Imagine the Eurythmics and Jean-Michel Jarre hooking up to jam through on an operatic jazz odyssey in an underground car park somewhere beneath a rain-drenched Paris at 2am, and you’re about there.
To understand the pain and disorientation Redcar is expressing, you need the back story. In a tearful interview with The Guardian last week, the 34-year-old French artist born Heloise Letissier spoke of the sudden loss of his mother, Martine, to a heart infection in 2019. He explained that – even as he made a name as the increasingly boyish singer of “Tilted” (2014) and “Girlfriend” (2018) – Martine had needed some part of him to remain a daughter for her. Now she is gone, Redcar is free to jettison that female identity. But he was then hurt to find himself attacked online by some members of the trans community for his resistance to surgery. He maintains that “I don’t owe anyone scars […] What needed to be changed was self-hate, dysphoria and self-harm.” Somewhere in the middle of all this came a break-up with somebody Redcar says he still loves. So: a lot.
