The Vampire Lestat assessment – a mega-fun glam-rock musical … with bloodsucking | Tv & radio

It begins with drums, closely reverbed: da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA-CHA. Cheap, chugging electrical guitars kick in. A track performs, and though it’s an unique composition it’s a minimum of 60% Blockbuster by Sweet. What within the Tony Visconti is going on? This is supposed to be season three of Interview with the Vampire! Has it became a glam-rock musical?

Yes. Yes, it has. The present primarily based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books – a textual content it’s serially untrue to whereas remaining loyal to the supply materials’s essence, a camp melange of the sinister, sordid and the deeply, sincerely emotional – was beforehand set in a lush imaginative and prescient of the previous, beginning in New Orleans in 1910. There romanced the vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), a delicate pupil and wild, brittle grasp whose tumultuous relationship was remembered in a second timeline set in 2022 throughout an interview with Louis carried out by the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). At the shut of season two, Molloy revealed the titular ebook.

In this new collection, the previous theme music, an orchestral crescendo resolving menacingly right into a dissonant scream, has been changed by that hoofing glitter stomp. Velvet jackets and opera glasses are out; tight trousers and features of coke are in. Lestat has responded to the salacious biography by forming a glam band, and recorded an album that channels his rage. Now touring it across the US, we be part of him in 2025 as he storms by means of a bloodily chaotic stopover in Detroit. A flashforward has taken us to the close to future, the place an elite auctioneer sells memorabilia regarding the undertaking, together with an in depth audio diary, dedicated by Lestat to vinyl and forming the present’s voiceover. The auctioneer refers, tantalisingly, to “the events of the 2025 album and supporting tour, and the global catastrophes that sprung from [them]”.

This has not come from nowhere: Lestat changing into a rock singer occurs within the Rice books. But, because the critically panned 2002 film Queen of the Damned and Elton John’s swiftly forgotten 2006 Broadway musical Lestat each demonstrated, the a part of the oeuvre the place vampires mesh with widespread music is a difficult proposition.

Canon or not, the wholesale shift of tone in The Vampire Lestat, as signalled by the present altering its title, is a danger. Although Lestat selecting Seventies-style guitar music as his path to fame within the 2020s, and doing so efficiently, can maybe be justified by his immortal powers transcending time and style, it nonetheless threatens to show what was the sleekest, cruellest and maybe greatest TV vampire drama into a foul mashup of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Daisy Jones & the Six.

To be into it, it’s a must to go together with Reid’s uninhibited efficiency as a Jim Morrison-style lizard king, whereas forgiving the retro cheesiness of the songs – pitched someplace between Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople and the Dandy Warhols – and the narration’s refusal to acknowledge a restrict on how cringeworthy a rock frontman’s pronouncements may be. “I baptised them ‘The Beautiful Unwell’,” says Lestat of his fanbase, an identikit assortment of freaks and rejects. Of his fixed fraternising with ladies, whom the old-school pop stars he’s primarily based on might need known as groupies, he explains that his undead standing has given him “an immortal erection”. Reid’s chewy try at an aristocratic mid-Atlantic drawl provides an additional layer of spoofy irony.

Get previous all that and The Vampire Lestat is roaring enjoyable, from the person employed by the band’s administration to impersonate Lestat on nights out after gigs, thus giving him an alibi for any killing he does whereas on the town – the very best doppelganger they’ll discover is an Albanian gangster, additionally performed by Reid – to the scene the place Lestat practically has an overdose as a result of a fan’s blood is so wealthy in MDMA and LSD, which the tripping vampire bizarrely refers to as “the Torvill and Dean of hallucinogenics”.

More substantial are the straightforward however rewarding comparisons made between the well-known artist and the undead bloodsucker, every of them hiding alienation behind hedonism, every of them elevated above common society and generally craving to return to normality. Vampires draining the blood of mortals has at all times been an apparent metonym for informal intercourse, and the present capitalises on a vampire celeb taking that exploitation to a different degree. Lestat particularly is empty-hearted attributable to romantic disappointment, which heightens the loneliness of the platinum-selling singer.

The Vampire Lestat calls for to be taken significantly and works to earn your solemn respect, earlier than mercilessly mocking you with extra silliness for those who give it what it desires. Trusting it absolutely could be a mistake, however there’s one thing invigorating a couple of drama that by no means apologises and is aware of no disgrace. Let it in and give up.