‘This is going to get more dramatic than I anticipated,” Chris proclaims after his drummer showers him with roses midway through the show. But it’s hard to tell how much of the dialogue between songs is scripted in this two-hour rock opera dramatising Christine and the Queens’ latest album, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. Sometimes it’s filled with monologues about pride, or St Michael’s sword, at others tongue-in-cheek jabs at the audience for getting up to pee during the “ritual”.
That’s how Chris describes his headline show at Meltdown festival multiple times: a ritual. Much like the angels in Tony Kushner’s 1991 magnum opus Angels in America, on which the album is based, music is presented as a disruptive force – one with the power to terrify and transform. The play follows Prior Walter, a young man dying with Aids in late-80s New York as he’s visited by angels in a series of visions and prophetic dreams. The stage design tonight brings some of this imagery to the fore. Performing among Rodin-inspired sculptures, fragments of staircases and a line of wooden chairs arranged like a church pew, the band play feverishly, pushing the songs to their limit in lockstep as if the whole night is on the brink of collapse.
They run through the album in full, its three acts demarcated by outfit and the mood changes brought about by the force of Chris’s physicality. In the first act he rips across the stage in suit trousers and a single glove like Michael Jackson by way of ballet school, moving with the drums as though he is physically connected to the kit and elevating sprawling songs such as Track 10, which can fall slightly flat on record, into moments of transcendence. The second act starts suddenly with Chris in the middle of the crowd, weaving between the rows and taking audience members’ hands in his. In the final act he sings in gorgeous falsetto on his knees in a red baroque-era skirt, black blazer and white angel wings, which are shed one by one until he’s stripped back to his trousers, commanding the stage again for love-soaked synth-pop ballad Big Eye.
Gripping and at times utterly overwhelming, the performance is imbued with all the phantasmagoric drama of Kushner’s play and its unlikely happy ending. Abandoned by his partner and the world, Prior nevertheless fights to stay in it, asking the angels for “more life” in a battle cry of a final monologue – and receiving it. Speaking about its influence last month, Chris said, “Subconsciously I picked that play because I wanted to manifest that for myself.” Tonight, it was clear that he wants it for all of us.
