Christine and the Queens to read CBeebies bedtime story
Christine and the Queens is to become the latest musician to participate in the CBeebies bedtime story series.
The French musician will be reading The Moon Keeper, which explores the story of a polar bear who has been tasked with looking after the moon. Rather than reading the tale from the CBeebies studio, Chris was filmed at the Royal Festival Hall in London and sat on a crescent moon for the performance, which airs on New Year’s Day.
Meanwhile, Kate Winslet will also be delivering a reading on December 19th, and Tom Hardy will be returning to the CBeebies studio for the second time after debuting last year. Richard E. Grant has also been announced to read a story over the festive period.
Additionally, Chris was recently announced as the curator of 2023’s Meltdown Festival in London. Previous artists to have held this position include The Cure frontman Robert Smith, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and David Byrne. Although the line-up for the event is yet to be revealed, Meltdown will run from June 9th-18th at the legendary Southbank Centre.
In a statement, he 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. Sometimes regressive, back to the music I listened to when I was a teenager. A life-savior, music. One song to soothe them all. We expect from art to still save us yet we endanger it so much, everywhere.
“Thinking it should sell and clatter like jewels. Thinking it should be the catchiest shit in less than ten seconds when truly the birth of an emotion takes years in some people. We want it to heal it all but we deprive it of it’s true strength, which is eternity, a cancellation of human time. Now it’s fast, quick, a lot, and never about eternity. Cause eternity is death, too. It’s a cycle of ashes and birth. Over and over again.”
Mark Ball, Artistic Director at the Southbank Centre, added: “Meltdown not only allows us to understand the passions of an artist, but uniquely to see them come to life as a fully-formed festival across the Southbank. And to get inside Chris’s imagination – an artist whose ideas and inspiration comes from his politics, his history and identity, his love of theatricality and of transgressive underground culture – will be an incredible musical treat for audiences.”
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