Christine and the Queens, All Points East review: A tiny tour de force

Héloïse Letissier is on fire. Figuratively speaking – the French musician’s headline set at All Points East on Sunday is a writhing masterpiece, confirming her status as one of the most exciting popstars on the planet – but also, very nearly, literally. So abundant are the show’s pyrotechnics, all blazing flares, dense smoke and deafening explosions, that the air is thick with the smell of party poppers, and a small part of the stage seems to have caught alight. A group of burly men rush on with extinguishers, out of place among the lithe, androgynous dancers surrounding them. But Letissier – AKA Christine and the Queens, though she has cropped it to Chris for this latest phase – continues to sing, dance and contort, either oblivious or unconcerned. The show must go on.

The whiff of danger is in keeping with a somewhat apocalyptic evening. Just as Letissier was due to arrive on stage, a rainstorm erupted. Now, after a few songs from her excellent Eighties funk-inspired second album Chris, it has given way to a dramatic red sky. Whenever the singer steps out onto the walkway that stretches into the crowd, a forceful breeze causes her unbuttoned shirt to billow like a cape.

Letissier, for her part, is a potent performer, thrusting and flirting her way through a set full of sexual tension and premature climaxes – halfway through, a confetti canon showers the air with gold. During the gender-bending anthem “iT” from debut album Chaleur Humaine, she thrashes around on the floor, and then squares up to a female dancer in a display of lust and hostility.

When Letissier arrived on the scene with that record in 2014, her impenitent queerness felt daring and exciting. Five years on, though mainstream bands are increasingly packaging up tolerance into a profitable commodity (see Spice Girls’ latest tour merch), Letissier’s defiant otherness continues to run deeper than that. “Out of place, out of time, out of control,” she muses as the electro-pop strains of “Tilted” get underway, and a tattoo reading “we accept you” pokes out from the sleeve of a newly donned pink matador jacket. “But man it feels good to be out.”

Other people’s music is scattered through the set. Debut-album track “Paradis Perdus” interpolates Christophe’s 1973 song of the same name with Kanye West’s “Heartless”, and tonight she adds the riff of Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It” into the mix. Later, there’s a cover of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” (incidentally, Letissier’s slinky, supple dancing owes a debt to Janet’s brother Michael), followed by an a cappella rendition of David Bowie’s “Heroes”.

But it is with her own material that Letissier is a tiny tour de force. As she reaches the devastating “Doesn’t Matter”, the smell of burning still in the air, an enormous light hanger begins to tilt and sway above the stage. Any moment, the four horsemen will surely come galloping in. But what a way to go.