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7 (Un)Easy Steps to Loving Yourself: Glam Rock and The Vampire Lestat
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The Vampire Lestat
7 (Un)Easy Steps to Loving Yourself: Glam Rock and The Vampire Lestat
What’s so great about being a rock star? It doesn’t take an interview to tell your story.
By Emmet Asher-Perrin
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Published on July 30, 2026
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
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Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
“Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you.” —David Bowie, July 3, 1973
Track 1
While I watched The Vampire Lestat, I thought a lot about David Bowie, the artifice of personhood, and the construction of self.
Sounds dry like that. Let me try again?
If you know a little bit about the history of glam rock, then you know that David Bowie created Ziggy Stardust as a cypher through which to achieve stardom and amalgamate all of the influences that had taken up residence in his brain—and it worked so well that Bowie had to kill him to survive him. If you were watching The Vampire Lestat, then you know that the eponymous band Lestat de Lioncourt imbued with his name was a project of self-actualization that allowed its subject time away from himself while portraying a version of himself in order to better comprehend himself.
Being a rock star is funny that way. So is being a person.
Imaghe: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Actors portray roles, one at a time, and even the ones who are always “playing themselves” are not actually themselves: They have lines, they are given actions, they are telling you a story written by someone else. The public might confuse an actor with a role they play, but that is an act of projection and misunderstanding—the same can be said about the parasocial effect of believing that you understand a public figure through their interviews. A clip of video is not an entire person; a hundred clips of video still isn’t, particularly when those clips are ultimately an act of product promotion. Even an earnest or highly personal advertisement is still an ad.
But being a rock star (or pop star or hip hop star) is a different animal all together. The cleverest people who have attempted it either choose to be a segment of a whole—The Beatles, Destiny’s Child, BTS—or they create a persona to embody on stage—Prince, Cher, Lil Nas X. That persona’s function is twofold: It allows for some separation between what exists on stage and off of it, and allows complete freedom in the performance. Stefani Germanotta doesn’t have to worry about whether she feels confident or powerful or weird on a day to day basis because Lady Gaga does, and that’s who hits the stage to growl out “Abracadabra.”
Lestat de Lioncourt creates The Vampire Lestat band in part as a response to the release of Daniel Molloy’s Interview With the Vampire, a book chronicling interviews with Lestat’s former lover and partner Louis de Pointe du Lac. Lestat had no say over what conspired in those sessions, no knowledge of the book even until after its release, and he believes his character has been assassinated. Ergo, the band is, in some ways, an attempt to tell his side of the story and get some of his own back. And yet… it is hardly that simple.
To start, most folks aren’t convinced that the vampire Lestat is a real person.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Interview With the Vampire as a whole is a show about how perception and storytelling are, quite literally, everything. They determine our realities, our hard held truths, our understanding of the world around us. Doctor Who once said that all people are ultimately stories in the end, and there are many authors of fiction who will tell you the same. It’s often meant to be a heartening thought, a helpful abstraction on a subject too broad for the human mind to easily grasp. What Interview With the Vampire knows is that stories have no innate moral alignment and, most importantly, cannot tell you the truth—they can only tell you a version of it.
Lestat chose to tell his story through an audio medium (both the music and the albums at auction). Lestat created the band as a means to that storytelling. But, when all is said and done, it’s also clear that Lestat became “The Vampire Lestat” in order to figure out who the hell he was and, perhaps, how he might come to love that person.
Rock music as a path to self knowledge. The subgenre of glam has always been particularly good at that one.
Track 2
It should come as no surprise that a lot of rock stars change their names. Elton John. Siouxsie Sioux. Freddie Mercury. The ones that do often want less separation from stage and life—the name is another form of self-actualization, a statement of intent. Interestingly, David Bowie both gave himself a brand new musician name and a slew of characters to occupy on stage. In the hands of another performer, that might have provided layers on layers of protection, mask upon mask to hide behind so that the core personality underneath might remain undisturbed.
Reportedly, that isn’t how it worked out.
The name Bowie was chosen because he couldn’t use his surname Jones given the popularity of The Monkees—Davy Jones had already taken up that space. Bowie was selected off the American pioneer and the famous fighting knife named after him, likely appealing to a young man who was known to be a bit of a brawler as a kid. But the first stage persona, grafted from Bowie’s love of theater, mimery, science fiction, and proto-punk, was Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien from another world who meant to show humanity the road to outrageousness, erotic freedom, and gender fuckery. The album, a loose concept piece that chronicled Ziggy’s stardom and eventual destruction, was titled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
So, the Fall is built in, you might say, on a textual and metatextual level. And The Vampire Lestat opened every week with a song called “All Fall Down,” but I’m sure that’s not important. (Bang bang!)
Track 3
I try not to assert the connections between these things because I know it’s not meant to be a one-to-one, and nothing about the show is ever that on the nose. Lestat’s band has a lot more in common with ‘80s rock acts aesthetically—in fact, his personal style skews closer to glam off stage rather than on, which speaks to Lestat’s comfort with gender nonconformity as a personal choice rather than a purely performative one. The music itself is pulling from a lot of cues across rock history, but the book the season is based off of took place in the 1980s, and the hallmarks are rightly there in plain sight.
Having said that: Lestat’s tour is complicated by the arrival of his mother Gabriella, who pretends not to be his mother as their relationship is… concerning. She wants Lestat to continue in this vein in order to bring about the Great Conversion, knowing his music is speaking to vampires across the world. She slowly proceeds to gain more and more control over him and the tour, until she winds up being the person managing the band as they record their album and plan the “final concert.”
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
David Bowie was married to Angela Bowie while he toured as Ziggy, a relationship that was reportedly loveless and tumultuous. Known for being quite the personality within the entourage, a woman who had no issue with gossip or the extravagance of rock stardom, Angela was frequently derided and demonized as a bad influence on Bowie’s life. Savvier fans are aware that we can never truly known what transpired between them, despite Angela’s two autobiographies; in the pseudo biopic Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes made the character based upon her (Mandy Slade, flawlessly embodied by Toni Colette) entirely sympathetic.
Bowie did write a song for Angie, though, called “The Prettiest Star.” For a love song, its lyrics are remarkably distant, more about the recollection of feeling than an active desire for someone:
Staying back in your memoryAre the movies in the pastHow you moved is all it takesTo sing a song of when I lovedThe prettiest star
The song in Lestat’s anthology that most directly seems to call out his mother is “When I Call Out Your Name,” and it is, shall we say, similarly disenchanted:
Two-Hundred yearsOh, what are we doin’?Why are we here?Is it for nothin’?Don’t be cavalierIt is obsession, a deep lovers spell?I’m thinkin’ of you now
While it’s true that we’re missing out on Gabriella’s telling of this story, it is also true that Lestat’s relationship with his mother has never been a healthy one. This is highlighted in how she views Lestat’s music: It’s a means to an end for her, a handy tool presented in the right moment, and one that she clearly finds ludicrously self-indulgent.
In fairness, she may be right about that. But to that point—they’re vampires. Self-indulgence is hardly the worst of what they get up to. My guess is that the rock star personage isn’t Gabriella’s personal preference for self-indulgence because it’s far too revealing to be so needy. Because being a rock star is to be needy, though that’s not often a part to the discussion; rock music exists in a space of agreement between performer and audience. They must go over the top and the audience must want that from them. (If they didn’t, how do you even begin to explain KISS.) What’s easy to miss in that equation is that the audience is getting their own form of permission, too.
When The Vampire Lestat season was announced, I was riveted by the concept of bringing a story set in the 1980s to the 2020s. My excitement only heightened when the show’s creative team acknowledged that this was a ridiculous undertaking on Lestat’s part, in an era where rock gods are no longer a cultural force that shapes our zeitgeist. Why then, I wondered, would he do it? And the answer turned out to be heartbreaking for how transparent it was: The modern world is made for distance and fakery and isolation, and Lestat de Lioncourt wanted to create something real. Something intimate and tangible, even if it was embarrassing. And he wanted to share that with as many people as would listen.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust has a crowd-pleaser on it called “Hang On to Yourself.” It contains instructions to the audience:
You’re the Blessed, we’re the Spiders From MarsWell, come on, come onWe’ve really got a good thing goingWell, come on, come onIf you think we’re gonna make it, you better hang on to yourself
Connection offered, connection returned: Both are needed for the rock star to exist. This is a group ritual. Lestat says so himself, when questioned about “Long Face”: “An agreement between myself and the audience, permission disguised as anthem.” He doesn’t specify who gets the permission because it’s everyone. Not his best song for the task (he later agrees that it sucks, in fact), but everyone needs a solid, breezy opener—“Hang On to Yourself” often served as the opener for Ziggy’s concerts, if you need further proof of that.
And there’s not much difference between telling your audience to “come on,” “hang on to yourself” and “Yeah yeah we’re comin’,” when all is said and done.
Track 4
Here’s another connection I can’t unsee: Louis goes to slaughter the Fang Gang coven led by Bruce, and does so to the tune of T. Rex’s “Jewel” in what’s probably my favorite song cue of the entire season. T. Rex was a proto-act for the glam scene, a duo made famous by the ethereal vocals of Marc Bolan. Bowie was a devoted fan of the band, and even went on tour with them briefly in the late ‘60s, working as a mime.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Using “Jewel” as a cue for an on-screen murder spree is wonderfully idiosyncratic, yet also the clearest indication that we’re still likely viewing this segment from Lestat’s narrative vantage point. Why do I think that? Well, there’s the fact that the lyrics of the song absolutely feel like the way Lestat would frame the love of his life mid-massacre:
Well I’ve got a little baby with jewels upon her lipHer hair’s like a river, it’s fast and slowly dripsHow, howHow, how
There’s also the fact that Ziggy Stardust has a track called “Lady Stardust.” That’s right, the sexually flexible vampirealien rock god sings of a lady fit to share the name. That lady is a man, and the track achingly romantic to the point of longing.
That song is about Marc Bolan, by the way:
Femme fatales emerged from shadows to watch this creature fairBoys stood upon their chairs to make their point of viewI smiled sadly for a love I could not obeyLady Stardust sang his songs of darkness and dismay
That’s also probably nothing, though. Even if it does get more poignant the longer I think about it.
Track 5
What’s enjoyable about this pseudo-thesis is that it ultimately bears out in the opposite direction of its source: David Bowie used Ziggy Stardust in order to create his own stardom from whole cloth—he effectively willed his fame into being, then got so caught up in his own myth-making that he spent the rest of the ‘70s trying to figure out a way down from that ledge he’d charged up onto.
Yet where Bowie lost himself, Lestat finds himself.
It makes sense when considering the method and purpose of their constructions: Ziggy Stardust is an outsized avatar made to mesmerize the crowd and withstand societal scrutiny. The Vampire Lestat is a memoir to the man Lestat de Lioncourt has been, begging the question of whether he wants to continue being that man at all. In both instances, the artifice of rock performance provides a freedom that real life smothers.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
You know what else is funny? After pulling himself off that ledge, David Bowie went on to a highly successful stadium tour career that spanned the majority of the ‘80s. And while it brought him massive success and even broader fame and appeal, he felt so artistically unsatisfied by the end of the decade that he effectively scraped the whole persona. What did he do next, while trying to re-find himself?
He, uh… formed a band. It was called Tin Machine. Almost no one ever brings this up in discussions of his discography. The recent Moonage Daydream documentary never acknowledges its existence. But you don’t get Bowie’s ‘90s industrial rock renaissance without it.
Lestat is in a similar position—he’s not a child playing with his pals in a garage. He’s an immortal being trying to figure out what the next chapter is, and whether there’s any satisfaction to be found in being the vampire Lestat. The epiphany of the season comes after he’s had his head cut off, and is forced to face a recounting of his life at the long, dark table of the soul. But the work in getting there? That already happened on stage.
And I’d argue that the reason Lestat took to that stage (aside from being a needy diva) is that he’s too clever for the alternative. We watch what happens when he gives Daniel Molloy access for the same kind of interviews that Louis was giving—he trolls the man so mercilessly that the guy happily beheads him a few weeks later.
Track 6
Here’s another thing I can’t help but notice: Lestat’s choice to figure himself out through music worked, where Louis’ avenue sort of didn’t.
There are many reasons for this that may have nothing to do with music. Lestat has been himself for longer, which means that the project of understanding (and also projecting) the self has been going for longer. Lestat also has types of privilege that Louis has never been afforded, making it easier to experiment. And, arguably, Lestat is far more honest with himself about who he believes he is—not because he is less afraid or ashamed of it, but because he already knows he doesn’t come out of the telling cleanly. No one does.
But the artform is relevant here too, as is the perception of it. Louis handed his story to a journalist in the hopes that their conversations might shake loose what he’d accidentally forgotten or chosen to block out. What Louis failed to realize (and to his credit, most people do) is that journalism is art. The fact that it might be the art of rendering what has occurred into a digestible narrative makes no difference. Daniel Molloy is an artist, and Louis, in the throes of betrayal and pain, effectively gave that artist free rein in how he chose to render a vampire’s life.
Image: AMC+
Shockingly, he wasn’t all that happy with the end result.
We know that this project only half worked because of how easily Louis is taken in by Regina. Nothing is healed yet for that man because he went looking for closure through the wrong artform, one that he didn’t even view as artistic. He treated Daniel like a detective, someone uniquely poised to sniff out lies and uncover what was real. He wasn’t wrong about Daniel’s abilities, only about a writer’s goals in bringing them to bear.
Lestat chooses music for a reason. Music allows for a fluidity of expression that appeals to him, movement between metaphors and styles and rhythm, but it also offers him the chance to simply… riff.
Of every tool in a musician’s arsenal, riffing is undoubtedly the most powerful. It requires that you make mistakes in realtime in order to find your desired result. That you try something out and see how it lands, in your body and outside of it. The more completely you give over to it, the better you’ll get, to the point where the mistakes become unnoticeable because they are simply a part to the process. You don’t have to know where you’re going when you start, but you will eventually arrive where you’re supposed to be.
Louis’ need for accuracy prevents him from being able to find what he’s looking for in all this. In fact, you could argue that his foray into photography is the very same search, with the same lackluster results. Louis can’t be a truly great photographer because he’s taking pictures of what is there, rather than what he feels when he observes it. What he does in his interviews with Daniel is essentially the very first stage of talk therapy—trying to name the events and acknowledge that they affected him. He’s trying, but he’s not there yet.
Louis has two moments of true self-discovery in this season: One of them is when Claudia’s ghost finally gets to say her piece and disabuse him of the notion that he’s forgiven for his part in her suffering. The second? When Lestat sings “Brutal Love” to him and only him, regardless of Gabriella’s presence in the room. It’s a bare bones song, not trying as hard lyrically as most of the others. It’s a song that wails because the confession is in the sound just as much (more?) as the words.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Connection offered. Connection returned.
Louis’ jaw clenches as he attempts to school his face into neutrality. He doesn’t want to show that it means just as much to hear the song as it does for Lestat to perform it. Yet by the end of that night, the two of them are planning to run away together and find domestic bliss in the desert.
Track 7
Sometimes I will rant at my partner, friends, family, and I feel bad for taking up so much airtime. I love to talk, but it isn’t because I enjoy the sound of my own voice, or because I don’t care about what anyone else has to say. It was years before I realized that the talking was the processing: I can’t think if I can’t speak. Shout. Sing.
When Lestat is finally done with the long table as he lays dying with his head in a bowling bag, the table instead becomes a stage again, and he begins to riff. He thinks through the judgements he’s heard and comes to the realization that he thinks he’s done okay, overall. He was needy and he put himself out there before the masses and he offered up pieces of himself in exchange for an evening of blissful spectacle. It was the right call. Hell, he might even like himself a little. And he’s rewarded with a visit from the specter of Paul, Louis’ brother, who finally assures Lestat of the one thing he needs to know: Louis can’t say it, but he loves him.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
The music worked where the narrative failed. Lestat constructed the self… and it only took a single rock’n’roll tour and one album to do it.
It’s not an ending. David Bowie played countless characters and worked through endless genres of sound up until his death ten years ago. Queen lost Freddie and they still play. Elton John broadened his repertoire into musicals and far beyond. Iggy Pop outlived all his contemporaries and never lost an ounce of gravitas or bothered to put his shirt back on. Brian Eno left Roxy Music and went on to one of the most interesting careers in music and art the world has ever had the pleasure to observe. Just because the story reaches an easy stopping point doesn’t mean anything else does.
But for this chapter, The Vampire Lestat let the music articulate where he couldn’t. Which is exactly what it’s meant to do.[end-mark]
The post 7 (Un)Easy Steps to Loving Yourself: Glam Rock and <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> appeared first on Reactor.
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