Festival News: Christine and the Queens announced as 2023 Meltdown festival curator
The next curator of the award-winning festival Meltdown Festival is French phenomenon Christine and the Queens! The festival is the longest-running artist-curated festival in the world and has now taken the French artist on board to curate the 2023 edition of the festival taking place from the 9th until the 18th of June!
For his Meltdown, Christine and the Queen will transform the Southbank Centre and its venues into a ten-day celebration of music, arts and culture. On the line-up will be artists that have shaped his musical career and identity, in the past and the present, and they will be performing on the world-class stages of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. In addition to the ticketed shows, there will be two weekends of free outdoor gigs, performances and activities to celebrate Christine and the Queens’ unique discography and creative vision.
Yesterday he made his debut at the sold out Royal Festival Hall for a one-off special as his new and experimental persona Redcar. This is the first instalment in a series of new projects that are scheduled to be released in 2023. During yesterday’s sold out event Christine and the Queens performed his new album ‘Redcar les adorables etoiles’, an album filled with breakup songs and wistful melodies that was written and recorded in just two weeks. This grand exploration of music and the arts continues showing off his alluring and creative sounds, after all he’s already achieved.
On curating the festival, Christine and the Queens said: “What an honour to be picked by the fantastical teams of the Meltdown festival to be a curator this year! It’s a tough thing to be a curator. Art-wise, recently, my curating was erratic. Visceral. Something regressive, back to the music I listened to when I was a teenager. I will actually pick musicians that have some gut-wrenching quality, and I wish for all of us to stroll around in those ten days being rejuvenated by artistic gestures. I hope you’ll enjoy this glorious edition and again, long live poetry that burns and musicians crazy and brave enough to keep going - they are shaping the emotions of the future. Let’s thank them all!”
Christine and the Queens joins a historic cast of previous Meltdown curators, with Grace Jones curating the festival in 2022 and The Cure’s Robert Smith in 2018. Some of the other names that went before Christine and the Queens are David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and Nick Cave. The first names for Christine and the Queens’ Meltdown will be announced in Spring 2023.
Words by Laura Rosierse
