Christeene review – life lessons from drag queen of the apocalypse
‘The pigs have infiltrated the palace,” Christeene remarks drily at the outset of this uproarious and profoundly moving show. As the drag creation of Paul Soileau, her appearances tend to be in clubs or dive bars, for confrontational shows full of nudity and blistering electro tracks such as Fix My Dick or Tears from My Pussy. But here, she’s in the main hall of high-cultural temple the Barbican, with dancers and a 10-piece band. She professes confusion at her string quartet – “They put wood between their legs … I don’t know where they learn this witchcraft!” – and says it’s the first time she has ever used anything so square as a mic stand.
Her performance is of The Lion and the Cobra, the 1987 debut album by Sinéad O’Connor, described by Christeene as a “warrior woman”. She proceeds on stage in a long cloak and a white veil, like a pagan priestess, and at the ululating climax of Never Get Old unleashes the full power of her voice: a ragged beam of guttural noise that has few peers. Think Tina Turner or Diamanda Galás at full stretch, at the pitch of Slipknot’s Corey Taylor.
The cloak and veil are discarded to reveal Christeene’s core look: dazzle-painted eyes, dirt-smeared athletic limbs, ripped vest and buttock-exposing jockstrap, like a wrestler who got caught in a nuclear war on the way to practice – “things I have no business wearing”, as she says. As she changes in and out of these homemade creations, her between-song patter, in a cartoonishly Texan drawl, is hilarious. But like an evangelical preacher, she works these asides into fire and brimstone sermons that rail against the manipulative conformity of mainstream culture and indeed religion.
These are themes O’Connor was already exploring on her debut, and as Christeene’s band conjure the same raunchy heft that the Bad Seeds give Nick Cave, her message of radical selfdefinition is expressed in the lyrics: “I know no shame, I feel no pain,” she yells in Mandinka. Peaches, trussed up in fetish gear, is in spectacular voice guesting on Troy, and John Grant adds to the withering swagger of Drink Before the War in teetering heels. The result is, as Christeene describes it, “a buffet with no sneeze guard” – a reminder of how self-censoring and timid so many musicians, and people, are in comparison.