Girlfriend by Christine And The Queens

Héloïse ‘Christine’ Letissier expounds on her perfect marriage of mid-’80s synth-funk and 2018 sex’n’gender pop provocation to LAURA SNAPES.

Girlfriend is MOJO’s Track Of The Year: how about that? It feels really rewarding. For me, I’m not the villain in that song but it is me working on a new defiance. Girlfriend was the first time I lashed out – the address and the tone is really different from the first album. I had thought, “Will people totally hate that from me? Or will they just embrace the slight humour of it?” It was like a bet I made, but it was a cool thing to do as a performer, to emancipate [myself] a bit through that track.

How was this song born? It came out of a real love of collage. I love Serge Gainsbourg’s Love On The Beat: he’s on top of a really ’80s New York sound, singing about sex. It’s like something that shouldn’t have happened but it did and it’s wonderful. And I thought, “What if I do a really American, almost generic sound, and I’m putting French on top of it?” I’m using classic G-funk to be really precise about my anger. It was the starting point of the second album: the idea that I would work on a more up-tempo, more aggressive sound.

You sing: “Don’t feel like a girlfriend/But lover/ Damn, I’d be your lover.” As a queer woman, had you ever heard a song that related to your experiences before? I was kind of haunted by Prince’s If I Was Your Girlfriend, which is the opposite of what I’m saying. But because of the gender-bending of that song, I was like, “Oh, what does it mean to actually be a girlfriend…?” It was acceptable that Prince could daydream about it because he’s Prince, but the classic concept of the girlfriend is all about the other concepts I don’t like about being a girl; the girl next door, you know? All those conceptions that felt a bit narrow.

There was some static in France over the fact that you had used Logic Pro software presets. Did people get over it? I didn’t understand the controversy from the beginning. I don’t know if it’s resolved still. I think some people still use that idea to say that I’m not actually a real musician – but I think it goes along with [making people] accept that I’m a producer. I will never shy away from using a sample if I feel that it’s cool – as long as I’m using it deliberately and freely, I don’t see the problem.