The Contradictions of Chris

JW: I’ve read you are a bit of a loner. I imagine it’s a bit of a luxury for you now, to have moments of solitude.
C: Yes it is more of a luxury than before, definitely. I used to be so familiar with being totally lonely. Now, when I’m back to my good old solitude I’m like, “Oh, the old friend is back again,” but sometimes I’m a bit more scared of that friend than before. If I’m super honest, loneliness for me is the moment when I create. I’m writing on my own, I’m co-producing my stuff on my own, I’m writing a lot of diaries, I have mood boards like crazy. It has to start with a point of extreme loneliness with me crafting something out of nothing on my own. I’ve tried to create with other people in the room and I didn’t know how to do it. My resolution for this year actually is to embrace a bit more togetherness in the creation, to see if I can actually write a song with someone else from the start in a room. I think it should be interesting.

JW: And you continue to challenge yourself and push yourself.
C: I think it’s important, yeah. When I started the whole thing of Christine and the Queens and writing the first song, it was kind of to wake me up [Laughs] and if you always do what you know, then you just fall asleep again. I like the element of fear when you do something new.   

JW: It gets the blood pumping. Talking of blood pumping… I’m a fellow bookworm, I lived in the library. I did more reading about things that doing them. There’s so much sexuality coursing through your music. Do you think that your sexuality was originally stirred by books or by images or was it music?
C: I think books were a huge part of it actually, because I was reading avidly and I was exposed to more mature, erotic literature quite young. My parents are teachers and books emancipated them. The house was full of lots of different books and I read – I don’t know how to say it in English – Marquis de Sade. So I was like, “That’s interesting.” I think I read it at maybe eleven. I wanted to assimilate lots of different information, so I took that book and I was like, “Apparently it’s scandalous,” and I started to read it and I was like, “Oh that is scandalous actually!” Also really young I was exposed to Polar Fantasy books, which are about the wildness. They are beautifully written so I think I was exposed to a different kind of eroticism quite young. Then later on I read a great queer erotic book called Tipping The Velvet.

JW: So this idea of togetherness. When did you first find a tribe?
C: Well, my whole project was born out of me meeting the tribe first. Christine and the Queens is basically me meeting drag queens and being helped by them. So they were not my tribe, per se but they nurtured me and it was my first introduction to how a tribe could save you. Before I was relying on myself all the time and it really got me to a low point, so I was like, “Actually I need help!” They came up to me and they were like, “We should help you.” We can actually help each other. So this was my introduction to the concept of a tribe that could save you. I also think of my family also because we are very few people, my Mum and my Dad and my brother, this really nuclear solid place of love. I think the strongest discovery I made later on in life is how to build a tribe around things you love doing, around things you want to defend. It kind of happened around the second record, because you know you have a tribe when people stick together when it’s hard. It’s a trope, but I really lived it this year, because I realised that I have a tribe and I feel stronger with them. The end of the tour was a disaster because we were just so loathe to stop it. We can’t help but to see each other all the time, we just create excuses to have dinners all the time. This family was created on stage and so creation is at the centre of it.

JW: So if we’re gonna talk about creative collaboration. Who do you like to get sexy with and make work with?
C: Well, you know it’s so new for me. The first real collaboration I actually achieved recently was working with Charlie XCX and it was a really joyful, effortless, great collaboration and it was actually a revelation to me because before that I never really collaborated with another artist. I worked once with Perfume Genius, and I love him, but it was different because I wrote a whole song and he sang it with me, but with Charlie we wrote together, we created together. It was such a huge step for me. I’m seeing a shrink you know. How Parisian of me. Really early in the morning.

JW: That’s another form of creative collaboration. [Both laugh]
C: Exactly! Sometimes she’s like, “Tell me about your dreams.” I’m like, “Oh. Are we doing that? Okay.” [Both laugh] Then I have a coffee in a Parisian brasserie and I just work. The only thing I’m missing now is cigarette. Really Parisian.

JW: Did you never smoke or did you quit?
C: No, no, I never smoked.

JW: Oh my God, I wish I never did. I’m terrible. I’m the only Londoner who still smokes. I’m alone.
C: You’re alone in that. Yes. I see what you mean. Come to Paris!

JW: Oui Oui! Your image has become iconic. Do you enjoy the photoshoots and the dressing up?
C: Yeah I really love it actually. It’s really playful and if I’m really honest with you, I love the performance of fashion. I love how it involves reinvention, playfulness, versatility. It’s like pure theatre and also through theatre and performance sometimes you get something really true because you have to let someone capture you. There is a sense of surrendering. I like that because it speaks to me on like a particular level and also because I love dancing. I love all the aesthetics of posing.

JW: Do you remember your first gig?
C: It was basically one month after I wrote my first track. So it was quite sudden. I brought my laptop and I had these crazy accessories that were very Cabaret Noir, Berlin. I was putting these mad hats on my head like, “I’m a teapot!” French people were like, “What the fuck is happening?!” Because I was feeling myself, I was a huge fan of Andy Kaufman, weird theatrical performances and at the beginning my project was really about that character, like Edward Scissorhands. Arriving on stage I was like, “I’m weird! Let’s be freaky together!” the audience were like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” So this is how it started. They just clapped in the end, which is weird.

JW: I think the rest of the world has started to wake up to the transformative powers of being a bit freaky, the power of drag. In these ten years since you started performing aspects of queer culture have become mainstream staples and celebrated in such a more open way. Recently the media tried to create a feud between you and Taylor Swift because of comments you made to a magazine about queer autonomy. Do you think that as your fame continues to rise, you feel like you are having to become more guarded or more wary?
C: I didn’t comment on that situation because as it happened I thought “Oh, there it goes.” The old trope of women being pitting against each other. This was not even a conversation aimed at someone specific. When I said, “Queer cannot be sold,” I really truly do believe it. It’s not even a diss. It’s just a reality [Laughs] because I do believe that queer itself is a deconstruction of capitalism, so it cannot be digested. So then I was like, “Oh, really original. To make it about two women hating each other when it’s actually not the case because I do believe in sisterhood.” I don’t want to stop saying those things though. When I started I remember it was actually tougher to talk about those issues, especially in France. I started explaining for hours to journalists what queer was about, how I could define myself as queer, how sexuality is not a defiant constraint. Now it has become more fashionable, but you can sense still that it is a curiosity. It is not a conversation, do you see what I mean? I noticed it, and I thought, this is another way to diffuse what is at it’s core dangerous, in the best way. I will always remember that queer is dangerous and talk about that because it saved me at a point in my life, and I can’t really relate to everything that is now labelled as queer. I’m like, “Well, is it?” [Both laugh] But I don’t want to be like the bitter queer artist either, so it’s hard to know when to stop talking about that. I mean it’s cool if it’s fashionable, but it will never not be dangerous to me.

JW: Last question. The world is a scary place right now, what is your personal action plan? [Both laugh]
C: That’s a good question. Do I have a personal action plan, though? Actually togetherness could be the solution. I’m gonna be super cheesy about it but in my particular case I’m surrounded by people who are taking action in such inspiring ways and I kind of have to level up to them. I can’t really disappoint them. My brother is an activist, he’s actively engaging with the green party in France so he’s doing the hard work out in the field. That’s a really tiring thing to do, to believe, now. So I can’t let him down. And I have other people, some friends of mine who are actively working for trans rights, who are actively helping refugees. So I’m surrounded by people I admire and I’m like, “Oh. I have to do that too,” because I can’t be just sitting and saying, “Good. Good for you.” I think my personal action plan is to surround myself with people I can truly admire, because it’s infectious. I think the more you are around those people, the more you have to be awakened and the more you have to take action. If I’m on my own I can just sink into the wormhole of writing music and just watching movies, which is not a good action plan. You can be a hint of something if you make meaningful art, but I believe it is also a time where we should take action. Putting a tree in my video clip is not doing anything to save anything at that point. [Both laugh] I should go and plant some, I guess.