Born on 1 June: Heloïse Adélaïde Letissier aka (among others) Christine and the Queens

Hailing from the Nantes region of France, she was born in 1988 and always takes the road less travelled.

It's almost impossible to truly keep up with Heloïse Adélaïde Letissier. A prolific artist in every sense, she seems to delight in leading us into a sonic labyrinth. Sometimes singing in French, sometimes in English, she switches up her styles, even referencing Pachelbel's canon ("Full Of Life") and changes identity—and, one might add, gender— with metronomic regularity. 

You likely know her best as Christine and The Queens, thanks to the worldwide success of her iconic track "Christine", which marked its tenth anniversary in 2024. Following the 2014 album "Chaleur humaine" and its beautifully introspective lyrics, often questioning gender and identity, things got a little more complex. On Mouloud Achour’s "Clique" show on Canal+, she commented about her writing: "I like writers with rough-edged lyrics. When you think of Alain Bashung, for example, his lyrics are like a poetic substance that you work with, chew over, and reflect on. But nowadays we live in societies of immediacy where anything that isn’t immediate is experienced as a provocation." Astutely observed!

The artist describes herself as having been "assigned" female at birth. Not content to simply play with gender codes on stage, she defines herself as pansexual (meaning attracted to any gender) and non-binary (in other words, neither man nor woman, but somewhere in between). In a way, this uncertainty is reflected in her many changes of stage name. After masculinising Christine into Chris in 2018 for a double album simply titled with that name, she brought us tracks such as "Damn, dis-moi" (with Dam Funk) and sometimes more obscure ones like "Goya! Soda"! In subsequent years, sometimes weathering pointless controversies, Chris first chose the name Rahim (with some criticising the Arabic resonance!), then very briefly Sam le pompier, a simple punctuation mark (in the manner of Prince’s unreadable Love Symbol?), and finally Redcar, which he describes as an absurd poetic choice. As you’ll have noticed, even following the artist means shifting from the feminine to the masculine pronoun...

After releasing the album "Hopecore", mainly in English and thoroughly electro under the name Rahim C Redcar, Chris dove into the world of nightlife with the same honesty and collection of emotional scars as ever. "I created 'Hopecore' with tears, blood and above all an unwavering faith in pure, raw expression of the soul," Chris told the French newspaper Le Monde at the time.

This Thursday 5 June, Chris will take part, along with other artists and DJs, in the open-air Spacer festival at the Virage space in Paris (France). One of the artist’s now very rare live appearances...

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo: © Music Belgium Photos)

Photo: Still performing as Christine & The Queens, Rahim Redcar on stage at Cirque Royal, Brussels (Belgium) on 12 September 2023