"You gotta slap them. Pick them up. Shake them"

Saturday night: I’m watching CHRISTEENE haul herself around the stage, growling explicitly sexual lyrics, and simulating obscene acts on her backing dancers. Hard, aggressive disco music shakes the low ceiling, as the trio—CHRISTEENE and her two hairy, sweaty co-conspirators—thrash through a set that crashes against boundaries of taste and acceptability. One song, ‘Big Shot’ is a masterful befuddlement of gender roles. With bombast stolen from the most macho of hip hop, she goads and berates the “boyz”; they, meanwhile, ornament her with coloured fans, striking deeply feminine and oddly alluring poses. It’s thrilling, but also deeply, worryingly subversive.

Tuesday afternoon: CHRISTEENE is laughing as a dainty pot of jasmine pearl arrives in the tea and antiques shop where we’ve agreed to meet. “It’s just like my grandma’s! This is so fuckin’ crazy!” she giggles. A customer walks in, claps eyes on a transvestite with blue contacts, smeared makeup, threadbare clothing and a taped-on heel. They nervously handle some pricey relics, and shuffle out. “Is it time to pour the tea? Mine’s turned a nice pissy colour!”

As our conversation continues, CHRISTEENE observes, in her sassy (but low) Texan drawl, that “Britain is just as fucked up as America” and points to her very recent discovery of Mr Blobby as existence of this. “Who thought this would be good for children? I mean, he talks like a demon!” I mention that the bulbous, spotty character once released a chart-topping single (a copy of which I, shamefully, owned) and immediately she’s on to me, politely insisting that I provide a rendition. “Blobby, oh Mr Blobby, if only you could make us understand...” “Understand what?” she laughs. Night or day, it seems, there is no such thing as an ordinary time in the company of CHRISTEENE.

Then again, there’s little by way of firm ground when it comes to identifying exactly who CHRISTEENE is. Nominally, Christeene Vale is a genderqueer act, the alter ego of Paul Soileau and the second of his female creations. Over the past five years, CHRISTEENE and her boyz have produced an album and a series of music videos – titles such as ‘Fix my Dick’ and ‘Tears from my Pussy’ showing a pugilistic disregard for all that is tasteful and wholesome. It is, however, not quite that simple. Firstly, the “drag” label.

CHRISTEENE laughs: “Oh no! The ones who do come to see drag are the first ones to leave! Because they’ve been told it’s drag. ‘This is a drag queen, I understand’. No, no, no, no, no. That’s waaaaay to easy. Don’t fuckin’ play me that way!”

“I like them drag shows, don’t get me wrong. I like to see some good old fashioned trashy drag. Fun, campy drag. But that’s not what I’m meant to be doing.”

It is, she says, the liberating space of the “middle ground” that drives what she does – “that really beautiful place in the middle that I’ve always felt for ever and ever but I’ve had to fight through the bullshit of the structures that they’ve given us growing up." 

“I don’t feel one way or the other in the gender realm. I have a dick. I have long hair. I have nails. I wear heels. I have a little bit of everything, and I’m not claiming to be one or the other."

Secondly there’s the shock factor. I put it to CHRISTEENE that the show is specifically and gratuitously designed to shock and unsettle. On one level, she’s on board. The show is definitely “aggressive” – a real shock to the system for those who have only seen the online videos. These are, on the whole, a more tongue-in-cheek affair than sweatily squaring up with CHRISTEENE and the boys in a live show. 

“We serve you the puddin’ first!” is how she gleefully puts it. “It needs to be an assault. You know, when someone’s hysterical you gotta slap them. Pick them up. Shake them. And the audience needs to be woken up quick.” 

She slaps her hands excitedly. “I want these images to be other-wordly. These pandas pissing on this masked monster pulling shit out of her ass and screaming, and lights flashing at you and the smells...” This is, as it happens, a fairly good précis of the opening blitzkrieg of The CHRISTEENE Machine.

But willfully disturbing? She’s not convinced: “No, if somebody gets scared I want to cradle them.”

“I feel very sexy and settled when I do the show. It’s definitely designed to wake you up – to make you think some things you haven’t thought in a long time. Like: ‘those boys look sexy’. But they don’t look like the boys in the magazines you’re always getting shoved at you, right? All muscly and all boom boom."

Right. They are certainly not magazine beauties. She explains: "They are sexy because of what they are doing, and their energy coming at you, and their femininity coming at you and blowing you out the water. You know, we’re all animals, we’ve all got feminine and masculine and something in the middle going on up there, so I think the show taps into that for a lot of people. And they stay, and they don’t run.”

I absolutely believe it. In conversation, as on stage, CHRISTEENE is thoroughly engaging and, when she's on a roll (as above) a little bit mesmerising. But I’m still not sure who the person eating Dundee cake opposite me is. Where does CHRISTEENE stop and Paul Soileau start? “That’s a difficult question for me,” she says. “Everything I’ve been telling you is about that.”

In any practical sense, it is near-impossible to squeeze a cigarette paper between the two. “Internally, it’s all one with the other,” she explains. So it’s not a character, I ask? “No. It’s more of a possession.

“Things start out as a character when they knock on your door. But for me, they’re founded in a feeling – an emotion or a problem or a joy. This is the product of what I was feeling when I was in that storm. And when these creatures knock on your door... you have to kind of go on a date with them. And you go on a date with them, in whatever form they feel. And they you say, ‘Do you want to go on another date with them?’

“It’s just like any other relationship,” she says, as serious as she has been all afternoon. “You start to go on lots of little dates with them. Dress them up. Let them talk, not you. And if they turn out to be something you really want to invest your love in, just like any other lover you have... I just happen to have lovers in my mind.”

Whatever it is, it’s an intensely creative relationship. A stand-out moment from the show is, perhaps, illustrative. After the hammer and tongs opening, CHRISTEENE delivers a monologue which glows with imaginative heat, using an image of “the woods” as both a biographical and metaphorical site for personal and sexual exploration.

“That’s when we get you. And when I say get you, I mean that’s when the audience starts to listen. When we talk about the woods it’s so beautiful and we are all there, because we found an element from our childhood before it got fucked up. And we present to you this really dark and beautiful pageantry, to remind you that you have an imagination still too – that things can be beautiful, not only in the woods but in there. And then we take you there and we read to you, and we hit you hard... 

“And then we pull you right back out of it and shit you back into the world!”