The breakthrough success of Christine & The Queens this summer has hopefully increased the British public’s appetite for strange French people.
Petite Meller has been weirding out YouTube for a while now, with a succession of striking videos that see her giving a giraffe a cup of tea, crawling around a golf course and having milk poured over her in a tin bath.
Although she has largely avoided the charts to date, someone is clearly spending a lot of money on her. Her clip for the pounding piano pop of Baby Love was filmed in Nairobi and for her new one, The Flute, she went to Mongolia to play a reindeer herder in a ludicrously pointy hat. It’s a riot. With a blusher-heavy look that falls somewhere between Lady Gaga and Grayson Perry, visually she’s up for anything.
Who knows what oddness she’ll come up with at next week’s London concert. All that remains is for the wider public to realise that her songs are as catchy as anything currently in the charts, and we should have a fabulous new pop star on our hands.
Sept 8, ICA, SW1 (020 7930 3647, www.ica.org.uk)