For yours truly, walking into a Queen Bee concert is like entering a different universe: very little is immediately familiar, the people on stage exist somewhere outside conventional ideas of gender, the music has one foot in rock but constantly reaches towards influences that are much harder to pin down and even the theatrical side of the show follows has codes that are elusive to newbies like me. Before long, trying to make sense of it seems beside the point: it simply asks to be experienced on its own terms.
As a piece of post-modern pageantry, it works brilliantly and the musicianship is consistently outstanding, with special mention to the drummer Miyoko Yamaguchi who was equally at ease with jazz rhythms, disco beats and some odd time signatures while frontperson Avu-chan proves to be both an agile singer and a magnetic ringmaster, effortlessly commanding every eye in the Bataclan. Some songs inevitably connect more than others: without years spent immersed in Japanese popular culture, anime or Queen Bee's catalogue, there are references that I know I'm missing but it doesn't really matter. Around me, people are dancing, singing and smiling from start to finish.
I still don't quite know how to judge what I saw. I have no real frame of reference and very few useful comparisons. Maybe that's exactly how it should be. Queen Bee never tries to fit into familiar categories, so forcing it into them would miss the point. For ninety minutes, Bataclan became its world rather than ours. I didn't leave with all the answers but knowing I'd seen something unlike anything else.
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