Chris, iconoclastic songwriter and singer of Christine and the Queens, had nowhere to hide last night. As the 6 Music Festival entered its second night, so did he, shirtless in a black waistcoat, the rest of the band clad in black too.
There was no stage set to speak of. No visuals, no light shows, no bells, no whistles. Maybe it was this lack of distraction that made it all so completely spellbinding.
With three albums down and another to come in the summer, this was the world debut of his new live show, a pared down, minimal representation of some of the most arresting music to have emerged from France in decades.
Read more: BBC Radio 6 Music Festival lineup, tickets and all you need to know as it returns to Manchester
Seamlessly shifting between French and English, he opened proceedings with the moody Ma Bien Aimée Bye Bye and Les Etoiles from the most recent set, the operatic Redcar Les Adorables Etoiles (prologue), his darker, more brooding album from 2022.
It’s the voice that strikes instantly - crystalline, pure, flawless, in fact. Powerful, somehow impossibly perfect. Between tracks, philosophical poetry poured out, enough to rival another magnificent Frenchman who once held the stadium barely 200 metres from the Victoria Warehouse in his thrall.
“I am a knight without a sword,” he proclaimed before iT, the opening track from Chaleur Humaine, the 2014 debut, which hinted at the direction he would take both musically and personally, all the time moving around the stage like flowing water.
5 Dollars, Goya Soda and Doesn’t Matter from the transformative Chris find the crowd in full voice, though much here also introduces us to new collection Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, which is due to arrive in June.
It’s a brave move to end a show with so many songs his audience will not yet know, but he does it regardless, a spotlight pinning him to the stage before the audience is bathed in blinding white light during Lick The Light Out, the single which, when it emerges, will feature Madonna.
The encore finds him returning to the stage, the waistcoat gone, and now robed in a black trenchcoat, and angel wings strapped to his back for To Be Honest, another new album track. It’s a powerful moment, one of so many in what was an emotional, cathartic, exhausting and exhilarating headline performance from a future icon of pop music.
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