‘The script is Sinéad O’Connor – it’s the music’: Christeene on The Lion the Witch and The Cobra

Before I hit the record button in her home in New York, back in August, Christeene warned of two things. First, a dog the artist was nursing – Lemmy, belonging to one of her dancers, Silky – was unwell. Second, Mercury was in retrograde, so special attention was required to avoid technical glitches – which are rare anyway and surely wouldn’t happen.
We joked about both things: take care of the dog and take care of the recording. Lemmy promptly relieved themselves on the kitchen floor. Then, later, when I listened back to my recording, the audio included strange sonic flares that garbled our conversation, ghostly sounds dipping in and out.
“You have to put it all in!” Christeene says after I explain what happened when we speak again this month, by phone, while she’s making final preparations for her imminent Irish performance of The Lion the Witch and the Cobra, a live reimagining of Sinéad O’Connor’s debut album, The Lion and the Cobra.
The upcoming show, at the National Concert Hall, will be the final live staging of this project, which Christeene – a performance artist, musician and lauded avant-garde drag experimentalist – has also performed at the Barbican in London, the Bovard Auditorium at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and at City Winery in New York City. Now it comes to O’Connor’s hometown, where it will be staged for one night only, then end.
The performances of The Lion the Witch and the Cobra have incorporated multiple guests. In Dublin a remarkable line-up that includes two more groundbreaking artists, the Canadian musician and artist Peaches and the British performance and cabaret artist David Hoyle, will join Christeene and band.
“This project is a strong example of the importance of bringing things that are in your head to life,” Christeene says, “but also the importance of being patient and letting creative thoughts cook a while before you do pull them into being.”
Before the Barbican performance, in 2019, Christeene had been mulling over the show for “at least six years”. It had its creative genesis in her ideas about how O’Connor’s music could be interpreted and realised live in a new, very personal way.
“I developed my own feelings of how I thought she should be treated, which was with respect, and with awards and accolades, for a body of work that is massive and incredible, and for her courage to speak out and to be oneself. That was always with me. I felt one day in my little brain that I wanted to have an evening to celebrate that woman and bring about those awards, accolades, moments, remembrances of rough times and good times.”
This idea, Christeene says, “started small. I was imagining a tiny, sh*tty bar, some friends on instruments. But it just cooked and cooked … It’s magical the way it all happened.”
Christeene’s relationship with O’Connor’s music goes much further back than this project. Like many people, Christeene was struck early on by O’Connor’s integrity, ability, artistry and attitude. “If it’s said that, ‘Oh, she’s a difficult person, she’s a difficult woman,’ those are the ones a lot of people gravitate towards, because people feel, ‘Sure, what if she’s trouble? I’m trouble.’”
As diverse as their work is, there is an obvious through line between O’Connor, Christeene and Peaches. All are radical. All conjure live performances that can feel transcendental. All have heart. All display a capacity to cut through artifice, even when donning the armour of costume and make-up.
“The fact that [The Lion and the Cobra] came out when she was so young really caught me, because I was the same age,” Peaches says of her relationship with the record. She found the album “such a turning point”, given the way O’Connor was expressing herself “politically, aesthetically challenging beauty notions, and musically”.
Part of the potency of the show for Peaches – who is the subject of two recent documentaries, including The Teaches of Peaches – is the way it connects the album to the present day.
Christeene also sees the LP as an artwork that keeps responding to a moment, whenever and whatever that might be. “Every time it’s different,” she says of revisiting the album through this performance. “There’s no script. Well, the script is her; it’s the music. And it’s also what we’re going through in the world. The world has been different every time we’ve done it.”
[ Peaches: ‘F**k the Pain Away has resonated with people so deeply. It has continued to grow’Opens in new window ]
The significance of the show finally coming to, and closing in, Dublin is not lost on either artist. For Christeene, the risk and the vulnerability required to perform The Lion the Witch and the Cobra amount to something of a leap of faith. “It’s scary. I feel fear when I go into it … I just trust it. I drain my tank. I burn myself down. And then – phoenix from the flames – out of there.”
Peaches describes singing Troy, one of O’Connor’s finest songs, as “just pure somatic experience … I’m not even thinking about the words. It’s just the emotion of it, the ramping up of it, the fear, the sadness, the anger. It’s just so heartbreaking. To be able to sing that is such an experience every time.
“I get a little weirdly teary-eyed, chills, when I think about [performing it] one of the times in New York … At some point I felt like I wasn’t even singing. It’s such a powerful song. Talking musically, the structure, certain songs – Jackie, Troy – there is a chorus in terms of words, but they just keep ramping up: there’s just this tension, tension, tension, tension.”
The National Concert Hall has teamed up with the Irish queer club and event promoter Mother to present the show. Lisa Connell of Mother, who has seen it three times – once in London, twice in New York – characterises The Lion the Witch and the Cobra as “an homage, a love sonnet. The reason I love it so much is that it’s a celebration of Sinéad and that raw energy. But, also, you hear [the album] differently. It brings new context, new light. When you love an album like that across time, and when someone can introduce a newness to it, that’s really powerful.”
Christeene calls O’Connor’s album “a powerful, direct, raw expression of her and her creative force, because it’s her first [album], because of her age – she’s pregnant, she’s outspoken, she has the fire of youth, the courage of youth. That album is just punk as hell.
“When you dive deep and start to learn about the making of the album – thanks to her book [Rememberings, from 2021], and people who have explored it properly – you’re in a world of a bunch of men trying to tell her what to do in an industry trying to control her image, the album covers getting swapped for the United States.
“There’s so much pressure and masculine, patriarchal controlling hands pushing it around. And she was immediately pushing through that. What a way to kick through the door and burst through the world.”
“There’s just something magical that happens in rooms with these shows that hits people,” Christeene says. “And I am hit at the same level as the audience is being hit. It’s a collective sharing.”
“It’s not just music,” Peaches says. “It’s a fight, a revelation with every song.”
The Lion the Witch and the Cobra, presented in association with Mother as part of the Perspectives series, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Sunday, October 27th