The Fly waits in anticipation for Sebastien Tellier’s rumoured-to-be unpredictable live performance. There have been tales of song massacres, nudity, and aggression – but thankfully not tonight - a few other fucking weird things took place instead. Playing mostly songs from his last album ‘Sexuality’ Tellier enters the stage in Gérard Depardieu attire and his trademark black sunglasses just to add a bit of mystery to that hypnotizing hip thrusting. Exclaiming triumphantly ‘Eurovision!’ he serenades the crowd with France’s seductively brilliant Eurovision entry ‘Devine’, full of French allure and keyboard kitschness. Then things start to get a little cruder, but we can excuse this - he has made an album entirely about boffing so what can you expect. The Fly notice him do a quick wank-hand gesture at one point, he licks his finger and gently rubs the end of his mic stand with it, and then he get’s a little bit intimate with a wire. It feels like we are wittingly trapped in some kind of French 80’s brothel, where the women are replaced with instruments, watching him fall in love with everything he touches, trying to seduce it with his whisky drenched fingers, reaching his climax on the slick slices of synthesisers on ‘Sexual Sportswear’, Tellier begins to fellate the microphone, gently licking it‘s tip and rubbing its shaft. And then just before you start to think you can't take any more epic electronic guitar solo’s or dick cupping, the spotlight hits Tellier, sat at the piano, the unmistakable opening to ‘La Ritournelle’ begins and the once giggling crowd are hushed for 8 minutes of absolute perfection. So from then on it doesn’t even matter that he calls all British people stupid and requests young Asian boys to come to his dressing room after his set. He has written one of the most exquisite love songs of all time. Bizarre, beautiful and utterly bonkers, and you need to see it for yourself.
Harriet Gibsone
