Hunter co-wrote the song with musician Arthur Bates, with help from producer Ariel Rechtshaid. "Arthur and I have had a very long, intense, chaotic and very close friendship," Hunter tells NPR Music via email. "He's also been a major influence on me personally and artistically. I love him. When we're together, the air is full of intense melancholy, reckless abandon and a very goofy kind of dark humor. Somehow, in our years of knowing each other, we'd never written a real song together. We got together specifically for that purpose, in Houston, the town where we met, and wrote this song in about an hour. The lyrics were inspired by an advice column in an old copy of Ouimagazine I found in Arthur's apartment. The woman writing in to the column seemed genuinely torn between her love for her husband and her desire to f**k around.
"I find that kind of selfishness entirely relatable, the kind of thing all of us know about ourselves and find nearly impossible to admit. Those kinds of simultaneously internal and yet universal struggles bring me to tears. What if we could all acknowledge just those kinds of flaws, accept them, resolve not to judge each other? I mean, who wants this misery? This alienation? The greed that follows generations of repression? The jealousy, oppression and injustice that come next? No. Hell no. If that's reality, I don't care to be a part of it. Or at least that's how I let myself feel from time to time, until I realize I love people and I'm part of the community of humankind and if things are gonna be better for anybody it's on me to do my part. Might seem like a lot but, for me, it's all in this song."
"Real Thing" follows last year's full-length Escape From Evil. The video was conceived and directed by SSION (a.k.a. Cody Critcheloe). Lower Dens is heading back to Baltimore after their current tour, with plans to work on a new album.
A week before our interview, Björk and I came face to face in the New Wing of London’s Somerset House, a former Inland Revenue headquarters reclaimed for culture. In typical Björk fashion, she arrived not as a human but a surreal shadow figure, shrouded in a sparkling frenzy of kaleidoscopic matter. The colours, she’d tell me, illustrate the emotional palette of her latest album, 2015’s exhaustingly brilliant Vulnicura. “Neon yellow,” she explained, “for the danger and emergency of the heartbreak saga, and lilac for the cure, with a hint of red for the wound.”
At the time, the symbolism had slipped my mind, because Björk was transforming before my eyes: her insectile mask sparkled golden, her aura fluoresced and her marionette hands made an odd paddling motion, bombarding me with cosmic confetti particles. As she stamped out a rogue, vicious beat, she grew and grew, until the monolith of her body was all I could see. When the music stopped, everything went black, and I removed the VR headset.
The harrowing experience, based around Vulnicura track Notget, forms part of the new Björk Digital exhibition, which has arrived in London this month after early runs in Tokyo and Sydney. The project began three years ago, when Björk and her crew began to send “drone-based terrain capture technology” into Iceland’s volcanic wilderness. The preposterously gorgeous scenery they captured forms the virtual arena for Björk Digital, which headset-clad viewers can navigate by staring at an icon and getting sucked into the corresponding experience. Among those completed so far are Vulnicura tracks Mouth Mantra (recorded – yes – inside Björk’s mouth),Black Lake – shot in a lava tunnel half an hour from her home – andStonemilker, in which you hover over a black beach, wait until Björk appears in emergency yellow, and allow her to spend seven minutes making art of obscenely penetrating eye contact. Although it took staggering effort to create, the acceleration of VR technology means the project exists in a constant state of renovation. “We got fucking carried away,” one organiser said, chuckling to hide his grimace.
To illuminate the exhibition, Björk has arranged to meet one afternoon at an upscale East London hotel, not far from the V&A Museum of Childhood. Along its corridors scuttle waiters with silver trays and serious waistcoats. Inside an ornate first-floor room sit presidential chairs, a table with coffee options and, turned to the window, a regal figure in an engulfing black dress, with padded shoulders and thick purple veins. Inside the dress is Björk. She turns, with a young-old smile, and apologises. “I’m very happy,” she says, “but real scruffy.” Throughout the chat, her exquisite manners and sporadic giddiness put me in mind of a lyric from her song Pluto: “Excuse me, but I just have to explode.”
Although it’s 4pm on a Monday, Björk is still nursing a punishing hangover. Last night, on a whim, she travelled the breadth of the country to party with an old friend in a field. (“DJing for cows,” she recalls fondly.) She perks up when describing the exhibition’s response from Vulnicura fans, whose visible distress appears to indicate a resounding success. “In Sydney, I actually had the luxury of seeing all the people watch the video – people holding hands and crying, people who never tried VR before,” she marvels. Of the extraordinary Notget experience, she adds, “It had to be a larger than life character, like a giantess – but it’s not me. I’m trying to tap into the myth of all wounded women.” How so? “Notget is a song that starts as a very wounded and defeated person,” she continues. “But by her discovery halfway through the song, and with her mantra, ‘love will save us from death’, she grows and becomes unbeatable. This is not, for a second, trying to show me as this person with no doubt. On the contrary, it’s about me overcoming the doubt.” She smiles. “And emphasising that we all go from the state of not believing in love to believing in it.”
Björk Gudmundsdottir lived with her parents, a feminist hippy mother and struggling electrician father, until she was two. When they divorced, her mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, fled to a Jimi Hendrix-worshipping commune, where Björk would join her aged five. In the meantime, she stayed home with her father, Guðmundur Gunnarsson, inventing songs and listening to her grandfather’s prehistoric stories of the first power lines to arrive in the old Icelandic countryside. From a young age, her comfort with electricity and technology converged with the melodramatic landscapes around her. Lonely half-hour walks to school, past black volcanoes she believed might erupt any moment, were an excuse to compose epic walking songs.
Given her radically liberal upbringing, nobody was surprised when Björk styled herself as a precocious, anti-corporate renegade. Even so, the intensity was alarming. Her punk ethic was fomented, along with her collaborative impulse, in Smekkleysa, aka Bad Taste, in her early teens. The record shop, label and book publisher doubled as a DIY collective at the heart of Reykjavík’s mid-80s bohemian punk scene, a coterie of absinthe-brewing artists, surrealists and “photocopy poets” who launched an empire from their low-rent print-room.
“One of my favourite things is the feeling of going into the unknown. Put on my rucksack, and march into some unknown terrain”
When times were hard, they made a quick buck on handmade Christmas cards. Embedding herself at Bad Taste was a daring move for Björk, who, after releasing a record aged 11, had refused a novelty second-album deal to perfect her original songwriting. She cut her teeth in punk girl group Spit & Snot, dabbled as flautist for Exodus, and helmed punk terrors Tappi Tíkarrass, which translates as “Cork the Bitch’s Arsehole”. In 1983, aged 17, she co-founded the supergroup KUKL, who shunned outside labels, major chords, Anglicised lyrics and 4/4 beats as if they carried the same contagious disease. When they scored their first major TV appearance, Björk – seven months pregnant with her first child – shaved her eyebrows and wore a Madonna-style half-shirt, emphasising her bump. Upon its airing in Iceland, Björk has claimed, a 90-year-old viewer had a heart attack on her settee.
If anarchic energy was in the national character – a symptom of the previous six centuries’ oppressive Danish rule – anarchic joy defined the local indie scene. The Sugarcubes broke out with Birthday, a pop delicacy so ineffable it was hard to believe their claim the band was all an out-of control joke. (Then again, Iceland is the sort of country where a good satire is never far from fruition: former Reykjavík mayor Jon Gnarr, a friend of Björk’s, began life as a political comedian. His most successful gag was standing for office; the anti- copyright Pirate Party are leading polls on the post-Panama Papers general election.) Either way, Björk’s novel way with words had the ring of genius – as unique and unpindownable as Joni Mitchell, Morrissey or Rakim, with a philosophy all her own. After a few international tours, The Sugarcubes split; half the band had poetry to be getting on with.
In the summer of 1990, Björk embarked on a cycling journey around the churches of Iceland, improvising songs on the organs. Along the way, she became seduced by electronic pioneers like 808 State and LFO. By the time she moved to England, in 1992, she was proudly declaring live rock bands “just crap” and assembling a new, multinational outfit to record her first album. “The whole Britpop thing, the whole Oasis thing, the whole guitar thing,” she told the BBC in 1997, “is a sort of British ‘scared of losing Britishness’ and ‘the immigrants taking over’ [mindset]. They’re trying to hold the Victorian flag alive, but it’s just dead.”
Despite the supernova success of her first proper solo albums, Debut andPost, Björk remained a source of puzzlement to many, particularly men. Journalists were prone to casting her as a gifted sprite, rather than a single mother who’d dropped into the world’s leading music scene, triangulated its hive of working-class futurists into hybrid avant-garde pop and sold three million copies of her debut album. In Inside Björk, a BBCdocumentary, Sean Penn rhapsodises over her “woman-baby face” and “uncorruptedness”; Beck adds, “I think of her voice as not quite human,” which is understandable – nothing about Björk conforms to masculine ideas of authenticity. But it’s more rewarding to invert it, I think. To say Björk sounds so alive with humanity, the rest of us must’ve been doing it wrong.
In September 1996, an obsessive fan who disapproved of Björk’s engagement to Goldie, mailed her a letter bomb, before filming his suicide to the soundtrack of I Remember When. (Scotland Yard intercepted the package at a post office.) Björk retreated from London to Spain, where, after recording Homogenic, her worldview shifted. “I got interested in the idea that instead of the exciting people being the loud, flamboyant ones, maybe it’s the people who don’t say anything for a week and then whisper three words,” she told the New York Times in 2001. The following year, she bought a home in New York with her new husband, the artist Matthew Barney.
Björk’s relationship with Barney, as well as the birth of their daughter, Isadora, shone through in 2001’s Vespertine, a cocoon of introvert micro beats and lullaby ambience. Originally called Domestika, the shy, self-produced record swapped studios for laptops, stages for bedrooms; instead of making the first move, the songs peeled back icy layers to reveal a warm, fuzzy centre. It crystallised the concept emergent in Homogenic, where her contrasting sonics – sub-bass thumps against elegant strings, glockenspiel taps over trembling synth warps – represented a wider, utopian bid to harmonise nature and technology.
In Iceland, there’s no shortage of belief in a digital tomorrow, partly due to the country’s late industrialisation. Björk suggests that, because of this, Iceland could leapfrog the industrial phase and press on with digital entrepreneurship. “The self importance of the first world can sometimes be a bit patronising to us second and third world countries,” she tells me. “They think any interest in living a harmonious way with nature is naive and idiotic. Their route through the industrial age is not the only one. There is another narrative possible which is more hopeful.”
In 2004, Björk followed the beat-intensive Vespertine with Medulla, an album of “heart, blood and meat” recorded with choirs, beatboxers and other vocal contortionists. It was, she said at the time, a return to primitivism in the uneasy era of George Bush, 9/11 and rapidly advancing technology. She updated the themes with follow-up Volta, her most explicitly political album, which led to her being banned from China after a show where she turned “Declare Independence” into a rallying cry for Tibet. But it was the animist anthem The Modern Things, a digital ballad from Postthat places human-made tools within the wilderness, that best illuminated her radical new philosophy going forward: “All the modern things, like cars and such, have always existed/ They’ve just been waiting in a mountain, for the right moment, listening to the irritating noises of dinosaurs and people/ Dabbling outside.”
“Western civilisation countries have this expression ‘going back to nature’, which I’ve never understood. I’m rather keen on going forwards to nature”
Although she’d never bought into the Kid A model of tech-paranoid alienation, the app album Biophilia announced a deeper phase of scientific enchantment for Björk. She rejoiced in the magical aliveness of chemistry, musicology and the planets, all rendered with pixels on touch-screens. She struck up a friendship with the radical ecological philosopher Timothy Morton, who argues that nature – instead of existing “over there” with the forests and fields – is a master network in which humans are totally intertwined, along with our tools and technologies. Björk concurs: “Western civilisation countries have this expression ‘going back to nature’, which I’ve never understood. I’m rather keen on going forwards to nature!”
This new clarity freed her to intertwine technology and science more explicitly with her art. “Part of Biophilia, for me, was being confident enough as a woman not to have to make a singer-songwriter album about my relationships,” she says, looking forlornly at her coffee. “I could go on about science and about education; it’s a subject matter a guy could totally get away with covering. And I was, like, I wanna be able to do that. Not always be the sort of person with a heart on my sleeve.” She sighs. “It just happened to be in a time in my life that I had this kinda, quite dramatic divorce happening to me. Suddenly I was just – swoosh – pulled back.”
Vulnicura was, if you like, the stock market crash of Björk’s kingdom. She had stayed loyal to art, gambled in love, made a home in the floes of sorrow and cores of joy. Early on, she had the fireburst glow of an exploding star; on Vulnicura, she became a black hole. It’s said that when a solipsist dies, the world dies with them. As solipsists occupy their inner universes, Björk inhabited family: intently, with devotion and faith, its own kind of immortality. When her marriage ended, the world died with it.
Björk released the album last January, and the world kept spinning, as if it were perfectly normal for music like that to exist. Journalists congregated, hypnotised by the splashy divorce narrative and Björk’s “open-chested” sincerity. In a devastating interview with Pitchfork, Björk explained, through tears, how her divorce had forced her into a feminist reawakening. “When I did this album – it all just collapsed,” she explained. “I didn’t have anything. It was the most painful thing I ever experienced in my life.” Billboardpublished a story headlined, “Björk’s New Album Has a 10-Minute Diss Track About Matthew Barney.” Slate argued Björk’s empowered, anguished expressionism was unfair to men. All over, Vulnicura prompted naked discussion, exultant praise and zealous think pieces; in December, it placed well on year-end lists. It was a strange, multiplex outpouring for such a personal album, and one turbocharged in our opinion-busy social-media era.
Like most people, I tend to celebrate great music by listening to it repeatedly. Vulnicura, which I played three times (and a fourth for this piece), presented a new problem: its sorrow was invasive. When theStonemilker chorus swoops in – “I have/ Em-oooooooo- tional needs…” – lots of things happen without my permission. My breath shortens, my stomach jumps, something tells me I’m about to vomit. A small patch of tissue, somewhere in my brain’s right hemisphere, tingles and tightens with pleasure. Then I’m paralysed, then my temples burn, then I’m crying. After that, I usually feel serene and happy. In the end, the songs were such a rollercoaster I stopped listening to them.
“VR seems like a stage where there can be direct connection between the musician and the listener. Also, weirdly, a stage for a woman outside the patriarchy”
Needless to say, I wasn’t over the moon about experiencing Stonemilker in hyper-immersive virtual reality while sitting in an old tax office with some English bloke called Andrew. Nonetheless, here at Somerset House was Andrew, explaining the thinking behind the project’s virtual landscapes; Timothy Morton’s Hyperobject theory, a development of the idea that all things are connected and equal, had somehow informed the VR navigation. It might sound a bit much, but close listeners are already attuned to the record’s astrophysical romanticism: atoms dance, souls are fine-tuned “to the universal wavelength” and, on Quicksand, “choreographed oxygen embroiders the air”. With its forensic account of heartbreak, the LP ought to play like melodrama, and in a way it does. But it’s melodramatic realism, with a canvas enormous enough to reflect the pan-sensory rupture of a heartbreak.
As Björk intrigued the MTV generation with her videos in the 90s, she aims, with VR, to pursue a credo of soulful innovation in tech. What singles out the Notget experience is its refusal to treat the new form like immersive cinema. Stonemilker, which you can watch at home with a special headset, is brilliant – an intimate treat, immeasurably richer and prettier than video. You’re on an Icelandic beach with Björk, watching her dance around, demanding your “emotional respect”. The moment you enter the world ofNotget – which, unlike Stonemilker and Black Lake, is interactive, meaning you can walk around in it – a new form emerges. Instead of watching Björk perform, the two of you share a space, and that space represents a compartment of her mind. If the Stonemilker video is, as one exhibition-goer said, “like FaceTiming Björk”, Notget teleports you into her dreams.
Björk’s dreams are, on a grand scale, unaffected by the setbacks in her personal life, she assures me. She is planning a new, career-spanning scorebook, meticulously designed over the past six years. A full VulnicuraVR album is on track, constantly readjusting to revolutions in the tech. And at home, she is in a healing state. Last week, her grandfather, with his memories of pure, pre-power line Iceland, passed away. “He was literally brought up in a hut made out of rocks and grass that was, like, medieval,” she marvels. “So that’s just a picture of that coordinate I’ve always got. You have nature in one hand, technology in the other, and”—she claps her hands—“they can work together.” Today, she covets her “matriarch energy” despite immersion in “pretty macho” tech circles. “I definitely am still in that matriarch world, especially socially,” she says. “And it’s interesting, with VR coming up now, that it is gonna be more equal. There are just as many girls in the studio of facial capture” where Notget is being finalised—“as there were guys. VR seems like a stage where there can be this direct connection between the musician and the listener. Also, weirdly, a stage for a woman outside the patriarchy. At least for now.”
As her music career enters its 40th year, the singer, composer, electronic producer, visual avant-gardist, DJ and pop star finds herself in an artistic field of her own. “One of my favourite things is that feeling of going into the unknown,” she reflects, suddenly animated. “Be a little trooper, put on my rucksack, and march into some unknown terrain.” She dons an imaginary backpack. “You make a lot of mistakes, then you find the little bits that shine. But what’s really interesting is being my age and finding that my biggest terrain, now, is actually just to have a voice.
“There are not that many women to look up to. There’s Louise Bourgeois, or Joni Mitchell,” she continues, a distant smile darting across her lips. “There’s not that many who say something different when they’re 40 or 50, and when they’re 60 it’s something else, and when they’re 70 it’s something completely different. So it’s a territory that’s really unmapped. And it’s kind of scary, but it’s also very exciting. And it is surprising, the energy from the patriarchy, feeling the pressure of the difference between men and women. That when you hit a certain age, you’re meant to just go home and be quiet. It’s a rebellion to continue to do what you do.”
Christine and the Queens: 'I just want to shatter everything'
She has stormed the 2016 charts and ruled the festival season. Héloïse Letissier, aka Christine and the Queens, talks pop, pansexuality - and the power of the alter ego - by Laura Snapes for The Observer (4/9/16)
In a noisy brasserie in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, Héloïse Letissier leans in and wonders whether to ask for menus or await the server. “I have no charisma, so people never come over to me,” she says. As an experiment she recently walked home through the neighbourhood with her “chakras open”, attempting to engage strangers. “I thought I should try to be awake and make loads of eye contact,” she says, splaying her fingers either side of her eyes. “It worked!”
Maybe it was the chakras, but if your country’s biggest pop star was eyeballing you in the street, you’d probably smile back. Letissier, 28, is Christine and the Queens, the alter ego that transformed her from a depressed hermit into (whatever she says) a one-woman charisma machine. She broke through in France two years ago with debut album Chaleur Humaine (human warmth) – intimate, groove-heavy synth-pop that suggests Björk producing peak Michael Jackson. This March a semi-translated version scored stellar reviews in the UK. And since then, her live performances have won thousands of fans.
At Glastonbury in June, undeterred by a downpour and post-Brexit misery, Letissier flexed her muscles at the sky, and challenged the weather: “You want to fight, rain?” She won the battle, seamlessly intertwining excerpts from crowdpleasers Pump Up the Jam and Uptown Funk with her original material, while performing her own slippery choreography (a kind of avant-garde mash-up of pop, hip-hop and contemporary dance) with her four-strong troupe of male dancers. She accidentally dropped the mic after her last song but she could have done it on purpose – critics crowned her the act of the festival.
“I'm so at ease on stage that the rest doesn't taste of anything. I'm always searching for intensity now”
Towards the end of Letissier’s shows she extracts two stems from a bunch of flowers, introducing the first as Beyoncé, the second Rihanna. (“I wish I could eat Rihanna!” she told Glastonbury.) At Latitude the following month, overcome by a mid-set ovation, she got carried away and bit into the large orange lily doubling as RiRi. “I will actually speak to Rihanna later,” she announced after spitting it out. “This was a terrible idea to eat a flower onstage.”) She then extracts a broken twig, representing herself. “But you know what’s good, guys? I get to be in the same bouquet! There’s no way to be perfect with me – just be yourself, come as you are.”
This could all be a bit faux-modest, but Letissier pulls it off because she’s such a brilliant performer, and so different to pop’s reigning warlords. She adopted the Christine persona after a lifesaving encounter with some drag queens, and her bilingual lyrics confront the shame she’s felt as a young queer woman. In an age of gender-fluidity and social-media-induced anxiety, she feels like the pop star we’ve been waiting for: Tilted, a song about embracing awkwardness, stealthily ascended to Radio 1’s A list, and the album spent weeks in the top five.
Back from requesting the menu, Letissier explains how being Christine onstage has overhauled her existence. She has noticed herself walking differently, though says she anguishes over social interactions – not that you’d notice. In a loose shirt and big round glasses, she’s funny and focused, all clownish gestures and quick intelligence. There’s just one problem. “It made my life a bit more difficult because I’m so at ease on stage that the rest doesn’t taste of anything. I’m always searching for intensity now because it was like that on tour.” To fill the gap, she’s “trying to fall in love! Not succeeding! And then writing great songs”.
The day after we meet, she is due to leave for another intensity hit in Oslo, before wrapping two-years of Chaleur Humaine gigs in the UK in November. Her tourshould have ended ages ago, and Letissier recently turned down dates in Japan to stop her schedule from snowballing out of control. “The clock is ticking inside,” she says, grabbing her chest. “It feels cheesy to say, it makes me feel like a diva – I need to make it really genuine and honest, and somehow I feel like I would stop being like that on stage.”
Music seized Letissier early. At four, she pounded on the dinner table and demanded piano and ballet lessons. “I think it says something about discipline, and I always liked discipline.” She raises her fork and pulls an impish face. “I love saying that, it’s so creepy. I love trying to match a really hard expectation.”
Her parents weren’t stagey, and educated themselves out of working-class families – her father is an English professor, and her mother teaches French and Latin. She recently bought a place nearby, and invited them up from Nantes, her hometown. “They were shrinking,” she says, hugging herself, “looking around like, ‘You can’t afford that’, and I was like, ‘Yes, I can!’” Literature was the only thing they pushed on her. Jane Eyre ruined high school. “I was basically searching for Rochester. Writing letters, wanting connections through the mind. The dudes were searching for boobs, nice girls.” She wails. “I was like, no! Let’s be connected to death!”
“The worst thing that could happen to me – if I don't write I am going to choke, like a fish”
Her father introduced her at 13 to the author Sarah Waters – she thinks for the strong female characters, although it proved handy when her first girlfriend arrived three years later. “My introduction to gay sex was with Sarah Waters. I knew what was done thanks to her. Like, ‘Oh! The whole fist?’”
Letissier’s sexuality was never an issue for her parents, although she says she battled some internalised shame. She can trace her queerness back to the age of four while watching Michael Jackson’s Captain EO at EuroDisney. “I remember being excited for the first time, sexually excited. At some point he’s dancing, and he’s opening his jacket, and there is a rainbow shining out of his chest, and I was like, oh!” She laughs. “I know, it’s so queer! My whole life is queer.”
In her teens, convinced she needed plastic surgery, she obsessed over a video of his face morphing. She lacquered on makeup to look like Marie Antoinette, so her father gave her Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble, which describes gender as a performance. She listened to her parents’ Klaus Nomi records and wrote gory novels. Her classmates weren’t always kind.
Rather than go to a traditional state university as most French kids do, she enrolled in an intensive two-year course that prepares students to attend an elite École normale supérieure, and in 2008 started theatre studies in Lyon, hoping to be a director. Freaked out by the lack of structure, she defected to a nearby university, which proved worse – incredibly, only boys were allowed to direct. “When I asked for explanations, they were like, ‘Because it’s like that,’” she recalls tartly. Letissier rebelled, and staged a play without permission. In February 2010, the faculty heard she was planning a repeat, and expelled her.
It was her first encounter with misogyny. She barricaded herself in her flat, stopped eating, and wrote plays about her anger, personified as a furious spectre named Christine who let her period blood run freely. Meanwhile, her latest girlfriend started transitioning, and dumped her. “It was not a good relationship, quite a destructive one,” Letissier says tentatively. “She – he – was not really loving me. Because we broke up then, it was like I was a reminder of something he used to be and he didn’t want to be any more? You get to feel like you’re – not a waste, but you’re someone in the past.”
Rejection left her “blank”, unable to read or write. “The worst thing that could happen to me. I think I can miss a leg but if I don’t write, I am going to choke, like a fish.” She watched Tarzan on repeat in the dark. “At some point I thought: I have to get out, otherwise I’m going to lie down here … Then London came quite naturally.”
Letissier’s next chapter is already entering pop mythology. In 2010 she took herself to London. In Soho, she stumbled into gay club Madame Jojo’s (since shut down) and watched a shambolic drag act. The three queens adopted this agonised waif, teaching her that theatre could be anything at all; to bend rules, rather then fulfil them. They encouraged her to adopt a persona and write songs, and dismissed her self-pity. “It killed the drama, actually. They’re like, ‘So, you got dumped … and?’ I was escaping the Jane Eyre: ‘There is no Rochester!’”
Christine was properly born, named in tribute to her drag mentors. Letissier once said she might not be alive without Christine. She grits her teeth. “I don’t like to talk about it because it becomes immediately what I don’t like being – drama-queeny – but suicide for me is a real question all the time. I’m interested in this concept of choosing at some point to end things. I was really considering suicide for real. I’m way too much of a coward to do it, even if I wanted to. But it was purely unbearable, and I had nothing to sustain me, so Christine was me having a new writing technique, and so then a new way to be.”
A French journalist painted her as a hysteric after she mentioned suicide. “This is why I was like, let’s not think about me as a female singer. Let’s think about me as a voice, because I was trying to escape rules.”
Letissier moved to Paris and got two tattoos: “One of us” on her left wrist, “We accept you” on the right, from Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, about deformed carnival performers. She started writing on GarageBand and posting Cocteau-ish videos to YouTube, wearing suits and antlers. Her first three songs were iT, Be Freaky and Kiss My Crass, the latter a celebration of smelliness as defiance. Her flatmates convinced her to enter culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles’ talent contest. Two months later she made the final. “She was so far ahead of everybody that we thought it would be silly to give her the prize because she obviously didn’t need it,” says founding editor JD Beauvallet.
French/Finnish duo the Dø saw Letissier at the finalists’ gig, and offered her an opening slot. When her computer kept crashing, she talked freely to the audience. Hecklers yelled “get naked!”, and Letissier shouted that she was naked already. “For the first time in my life, I didn’t try to make people want me,” she says. She brought scissors onstage, “in case I wanted to emasculate anyone!” she trills. “So I was playing with them, looking at dudes, and you can tell the dudes are fearing for the penis. It was not punk, because I am not punk, but I think French people were, like, chanson française – ready for a Lolita singing songs, and there I was with my scissors.”
Her reputation spread, until every French label wanted to sign her – and turn her into a French Lady Gaga. She crosses her eyes. “These other dudes were like, ‘We see this Lana Del Rey potential’.” She gesticulates at her boyish body. “I was like, ‘Where do you see that?!’” Eventually, in 2012, she signed with Because (Metronomy, Charlotte Gainsbourg), who didn’t want to change anything. Letissier sidelined the antlers, recognising mainstream pop’s potential as a Trojan horse for weirdness. There was the odd misfire: Tilted was originally called Cripple, the chorus, “I actually enjoy being a cripple.” She didn’t realise the implications until she played Brighton in May 2013, “and there was a huge embarrassed silence. I thought it was really ambiguous! But it’s not.”
In February 2014 she was nominated as breakthrough live act at Les Victoires de la Musique (France’s Grammys), and invited to perform. Under a spotlight, she danced like a minimalist Michael Jackson and threw glitter from her gold suit pocket. In rehearsals, the 70-year-old producer had yelled in her face, “Do you think people are going to be interested in that?” But it made her an instant sensation. “I’m kind of resistant to being told no, not being wanted,” she says, grinning. “It fills me with energy. When I’m headlining, sometimes I feel less comfortable than when I’m not expected, because people love me already, and what am I going to do with that – disappoint them?”
Chaleur Humaine was released in France that June. On playful opener iT, she declares, “I’m a man now.” Half-Ladies was dedicated to women who don’t fit feminine ideals, and Safe and Holy celebrates dance as “a way to shut down intrusive gazes, a way to reclaim my body as my own”. Letissier accepts that most people listen to the tunes rather than her progressive lyrics about queerness – she identifies as pansexual, falling in love with personalities rather than genders. She finds the general attention “flattering, in a way. But it’s interesting, I don’t know if I did that unconsciously to be sure that I could be introduced, because I’m always thinking in terms of a whole career: if people get to know me first, then let’s dig the dirt for the second record.”
Surprised by how melancholic Chaleur Humaine turned out, Letissier wants to bring her live energy into a sweaty, carnal second album. “I feel like I’m more a grownup now, with a horny perspective on life that’s shaped my songs differently,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “A huge taboo now is still a woman’s desire. We are forgotten – it’s like we are supposed to sustain other people’s desire because we are desirable objects. What if we desire ourselves? So I feel like what could be shocking is not even me being naked, but me wanting to fuck someone and talking about it really simply – ‘I just want to fuck your bones.’”
She thinks the simplicity will also help her lack of a “coherent” self. “I’m kind of trapped in my contradictions with my sexual desires. Because I’m experimenting so much with gender-bending and listening to everything that happens to me in terms of genderless energies, I have a hard time finding partners that can match me. They still want me in the end to be a girl or a queer woman, and I don’t want that. I want to shatter everything and experiment because I want gaps, uncertainty – I’m really attracted to that.”
Christine’s suits were originally conceived to deflect the male gaze. Now Letissier is comfortable to be seen as a sexual object. Her attitude is: “If I’m going to be commented upon for my physique, let’s show them something new to comment upon.” She points out her gym across the road, where she’s working towards resembling 90s Madonna, her body ideal. “I’m fully becoming what I want to become, thanks to Christine, so I’m going to head towards the macho and the tougher side. When I’m doing photoshoots, I still have this stupid idea that I want to be pretty, and I don’t want to think about it any more.”
Letissier criticised French Elle after they photoshopped her February 2015 cover beyond recognition, yet she still wants to feature in women’s magazines. “I should not desert those spaces because I hate them – I should try to bend them because I can.”
It could be her mission statement: one of her dancers previously quit a major pop tour after being asked to wear heels “because he was not a ‘faggot’”, she quotes. His homophobia attracted her, “to see, naively, if the lines could move a bit. And I think they can.”
She’s doing the same for France’s image of pop stardom. After November’s terrorist attacks on the Bataclan in Paris, she ran a pop-up radio station, interviewing diverse artists to widen the definition of French identity as opportunist politicians promoted exclusion. She’s been retweeting France’s nascent Black Lives Matter movement following 24-year-old Adama Traore’s death in police custody in July. In the UK, we crave smart, political musicians, but in France, Letissier says, “it’s not really well seen when an artist takes a position, because we are supposed to be like clueless singing puppets”.
This sounds strange, given that France makes intellectuals into celebrities. “But France is really different now, I think. Because of the terrorist attacks, we are not in reflection, we are in reaction, and I think maybe it’s the same for [post-Brexit Britain]. It’s all short-term thought about being elected, and it’s terrible because politics is not a place where you can think about what togetherness means any more. And I have a responsibility like any citizen – more so, because I have more reach.”
Letissier worries that questioning her identity promotes this individualism. But her lyrics are the antithesis of narcissistic pop, and she wants to be contagious, not admired. She concedes a little. “Lyrics of really huge pop bangers right now make me think about advertising – sentences that could thrill you but are empty in the end. And for that, I don’t really feel like I do belong in the pop realm.” Kendrick Lamar is more her bag. “I didn’t grow up in Compton, I don’t know what he’s really talking about, but because it’s personal – money and love – it strikes universal terms. This is being inclusive. If an old lady can sing my song that comes from a queer young girl’s perspective, this is, for me, pop music at its best. You get to have many realities going on at the same time.”
The brasserie has emptied, and Letissier is late for a blood test – she confesses she’s a hypochondriac. Caffeine is her only vice, and she bailed on a recent date to smoke her first joint “because I’m an introvert,” she shrugs. “I want to try to write under a substance to see if, like people say, it’s better or not. I don’t really believe it’s better because I think for me, writing is so much being in that state already.”
It transpires there is a limit to how far she’s willing to push boundaries. “But then again, losing control – I’m not a fan of that.”
To be reborn in a womb of dirt that once was a grave of death. When I was a tiny child I saw my mother do a performance piece where she wore a skin suit just like the ones in the video. It really disturbed me, to have others see my mother 'naked.'
We've moved from complete and total censorship to a world where you can commodify your body if you resemble a certain ideal. Some people have a choice in this, others do not.
We found toy versions of some of the most oppressive, exclusive, phallic equipment there is (a drone and a steady cam) and decided to see what we could make with them.
Let's unchain ourselves from our Instagram, our carefully curated images and self-commodification, trendy record labels, and fancy cameras.
Courtney Barnett - ‘When I go into a house I have to look in all the cupboards’
The singer, 28, on her compulsive tendencies, impatience, celery stick diet and wild-ride relationship - for The Guardian (6/8/16)
Music is a strange business with no solid lines. You never really know what anything means, or what level of selling out is really selling out. I’ve never worked with major labels, but the idea is that you don’t sacrifice too much. You make and release music in a way that suits your morals.
Coming out to myself was a bit of a process. I was dating a girl in high school and I was like: “I’m not gay, I’m just happy to be in love with this girl.” I don’t know if that was denial. I was just figuring out what I was feeling. Coming out to others was a bit of a non-event. They’d worked it out.
When you’re Australian, you’re forever being told it’s a pipe dream to have any sort of career in music or the arts. That whole breaking-it-overseas idea seems so hard, so it’s great to have success anywhere.
I take bits of lots of different people. I’m a big Patti Smith fan, but also Neil Young,Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell. Some people say I’m inspired by Liz Phair, which might be totally spot on. But I’ve not had the chance to listen to her music yet so it’s an incorrect comparison.
I’d like to see Australia become more open-minded. Our government is so backwards on things like marriage equality, and equality in general. White Australia is young, I guess, compared to everywhere else. But that’s not an excuse for treating people terribly sometimes.
My biggest downfall is not having patience. I can be pretty lazy. For example, I’m not a great cook, I just eat whatever is available. I would happily live off celery sticks and hummus forever.
Everything feels extravagant to me. As a kid my grandma told me I was lucky to have things other people don’t. In the early days of touring, four of us used to share a bed, so having my own room now feels extravagant. I don’t buy much stuff – I bought a car once but I’ve even sold that.
I’ve got my dad’s short temper and my mum’s compulsive tendencies. I check doors are locked five times. When I go into a house I have to look in all the rooms and cupboards. It’s getting worse with age.
My girlfriend [Jen Cloher] has probably saved my life in moments. Our relationship has been a wild ride. We began dating before I started touring – before stuff got crazy.
I can recite every scene in Grease. I’ve watched that and Pulp Fiction more than any other film. My favourite character is Rizzo – I didn’t really like her as a kid, but now I think she’s really cool.
I’m not always totally comfortable writing about myself. But I suppose that’s the point – it’s part of what I do. There’s a lot of joy and a lot of frustration in being a musician. Just having an opinion is a form of being political. It’s my thoughts and my life, what I see and how I see it. All of that is political.
I feel like I live in a constant state of being scared. I’ve been trying to learn how to meditate and calm down, but I’m not very good.
