![]() It’s your “Once upon a time …” fairy tale. ![]() They said that theater can be everywhere – you can just be a character, you can do something else with it. They did my education! They were like, “Did you see Paris Is Burning, gurl?” We were talking about finding a character because I talked about being a stage director and being in and out of theater. The drag queens took you home with them, right? See Elton John, Christine and the Queens Perform Evocative 'Tiny Dancer' My face looked like Berlin – people were like, “Oh, she’s not in a good place right now.” But I was searching for joy as well, and to trigger something, so that was me being a bit more alive. Lou Reed, Berlin, trying to match the mood. What you were listening to on the Eurostar to London? I was like, “That’s it! I’m over the edge!” I used to be afraid to take a bus before, so taking the Eurostar on my own, that was so rock & roll. You see more diversity, and when I came to London, I wanted to feel welcomed somewhere. I was like, I can’t stay there in my flat, crying, with my door shut – I have to do something. She was born when you fled from Paris to London after a terrible breakup. Let’s talk about Christine as a character. I watched In Bed with Madonna and I was like, how is this modern still? I fell in love with the character, as a woman. I was really Michael Jackson, Prince and Bowie, and Madonna arrived when I was kind of older – around 18. So she spanked me and I was like … otherwise no one could spank me, but it’s OK because she’s Madonna. Yeah, I think that’s very much about that, but this is why we like her as well, because she’s unapologetic she’s really in control, and she wants to be this dominatrix character. Is there a sense of, “By the way, everyone, I am still the Queen?” Madonna spanked you onstage, just as she did with Amy Schumer. In person, Letissier’s English is not only impeccable, it’s also elegant: She describes Chaleur Humaine as being melancholy “and at the same time luminous.” She is warm and funny reflecting on her early gigs, she shrugs, “In some cities, I was just this girl singing onstage about having a dick.” She is horrified by Donald Trump’s political success, pulls silly faces often and has a love of awkwardness: “No one is normal,” she tells RS, “but some people are made to feel that they are not.” It’s this phenomenon that she seeks to address via the mighty vehicle of pristine, heartfelt pop. There is, simply, no one quite like her in contemporary pop. Leading a troupe of identically dressed male dancers onstage, she mixes up Michael Jackson–style dance moves with expressive vogue-ing flourishes, singing lines like, “I’m doing my face with a magic marker/I’m in my right place, don’t be a downer” (“Tilted”). “Christine is just me choosing everything,” says the queer artist, and her genuine delight in her art is what makes Christine so magnetic as a performer. She’s a bona fide sensation in Europe (the Belgian gold disc of her 2014 debut album, Chaleur Humaine, hangs in the bathroom), and her path to success has already become something of a rock & roll fairy tale – replete with a clutch of kindly British drag queens taking a downcast Letissier into their London home and helping her find her real identity as Christine. ![]() On the verge of her first major American headlining tour – which kicks off tonight in Chicago – Letissier invites Rolling Stone to her quiet, airy house in Paris to talk about the events that transformed her, irrevocably, into her current alter ego. “Everything is wonderful,” says Christine and the Queens’ Héloïse Letissier, “but at the same time it’s been intense.” The French singer has just returned from a week of shows, TV appearances (including a talked-up cover of Beyoncé’s “Sorry” on the BBC) and festivals in London, after a whirlwind year that’s seen her duet live onstage with both Elton John and Madonna, the latter of whom even administered a ceremonial spanking to this eccentric, exhilarating pop star in the making.
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