Electrifying synth-pop performer whose dancing is a tireless joy
Christine and the Queens All Points East, Victoria Park, London E3
Maybe you can dance, but I know you can’t dance like Héloïse Letissier. As the 30-year-old French synth-pop artist, alias Christine and the Queens, swung around the stage at Hackney festival All Points East, it was as much a raucous dance showcase as a headline act. You could see Michael Jackson in her pelvic thrusts; Pina Bausch in her emotive pantomime; drag queens, who inspired her faux-plural name, in her fiery snarl and strut.
This was Letissier’s biggest gig to date, and her most prominent since her glamorous turn on Glastonbury’s Other Stage in 2016 made her a heteredox star. She was the only headliner in last weekend’s formidable line-up – the Chemical Brothers and The Strokes led the other days – that wasn’t relying on decade-old hits to fill a field. Pansexual and genderfluid, with smart, witty songs that had the audience grooving with her, Letissier understands the crowds of 2019. If she relied a little too much on spectacle on Sunday night, with music as sharp as this, this electrifying performer deserves her arrival in the limelight.
Letissier never likes to be one thing. Both her electropop albums to date, Chaleur humaine (2014) and Chris (2018), are harlequin
collections, full of upbeat and downbeat characters talking of sex work, love affairs, suicidal ideation. These songs have equally slippery double lives, existing in French and English versions, and she kept sliding between tongues as she performed them on stage.
She chattered to the audience, too, about abolishing boundaries everywhere. Her words have the same “weird disruptive beauty” that she tells us she saw in a man on the street, and about whom she rushed home to write a song, Saint Claude, one of her softest and sweetest, with a heartfelt croon to it.
And yet – here on stage, there was no croon. The delicacy of Saint Claude was lost in a choreographed moment: Letissier on a raised gantry, stridently holding her red shirt aloft. (An expression of something forceful, I guess.) There were distractions elsewhere too. Last year’s single Doesn’t Matter became an unbalanced duet, Letissier staying fixed while a solo dancer whirled beautifully away; it came to seem as though she were soundtracking him.
On the other hand, there were spectacular gains. Damn dis-moi, an upbeat, sweat-soaked number, was made for the manic front end of a set like this. There was an acappella rendition of Bowie’s Heroes – the crowd, a little awed, let Letissier down by failing to sing along – and she returned light-heartedly to the gender theme with an impromptu to-and-fro between the last words of it, “I’m a man now”, and “you make me feel like a natural woman”.
Letissier’s albums have both peaked at No 2 in France and the UK. Given her level of critical respect, that stat feels anomalous, and the public needs to get better taste. Letissier’s dancing at All Points East was a wondrous, surging, tireless joy. The night could have been richer again if she’d allowed her songs to speak for themselves. Still, it’s only a matter of time before she gets the balance between pleasing and teaching the audience right.