A self-produced, and mostly self-played record, there are rapid changes in texture, from rich African choruses to solo piano sonatas from rousing Broadway tunes to spindly harpsichord sequences. With I Tell a Fly, Clementine has taken a big risk. But I said to myself, ‘What are you doing this for?’” “It will not sell a lot of copies like the last one – sorry! I could have done something closer to the first album.
He has a rock star’s sense of conviction, but he doesn’t think people will buy his new album. So I thought, I want to bring everyone on stage with me. The people in the Bataclan were there to share an experience. It was an extremely confident gesture, something that belonged to the Oscars, not the very British, downbeat award, whose winners often act like they do not want the award at all. And he called all the other nominees up on stage, to share the moment with him. He dedicated the award to Paris (the ceremony came one week after the Bataclan attack). When Clementine won the Mercury Prize, he did two memorable things. “I was the one who looked different, with everyone else wearing jeans”: Benjamin Clementine wears coat and rollneck by Joseph () trousers by Dries Van Noten () and sandals by Prada (). He’d hated synths before, being more of a Debussy man. Clementine says of Albarn, “He could play all day, and he always wants to play and he’s forever doing something with music, and he cannot stop.” He recorded his new album in Albarn’s studio and wanted him to produce it, but was content with the gifts he gave him – the Polaris and Rhodes Chroma synths you hear on several tracks. There’s an increasing amount of Jacques Brel in his dramatic delivery his sardonic expressions look like Grace Jones crossed with Skeletor.Īlbarn, a man who wrote a monkey opera, was a suitable foil for Clementine, whose forthcoming album, I Tell a Fly, is the story of two flies in love, set against a backdrop of contemporary geopolitics.
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When Clementine guested on Gorillaz’s Hallelujah Money in January this year, the full extent of his musical oddness stretched out. He was picked on for it – of course he was – but says, “I felt like it was my clothes that I was the one who looked different, with everyone wearing jeans.” (“That’s helped my style a little bit, as well.”) On non-uniform days at school, he would wear his uniform. Instead, his father would buy cheap suits at a local charity shop for the boys. He thought that would somehow set the police on us.”įever pitch: Clementine performing at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. I clearly remember my father cutting our jumpers and our sports clothes with scissors – because he didn’t want us to wear jogging bottoms and hoodies. I appreciate it in some ways, because I’ve been protected from certain things I might otherwise have done. “Believe you me,” he says, in his strangely old-fashioned way, “it’s still possible. It is hard to imagine any parents could hope to protect five children from popular culture in 21st century London. “No one put a gun to your head,” he says of his churchgoing, “but it was pretty much an everyday occurrence.” The church they attended was 20 seconds away from the family home the priest lived next door. He may have worked with Damon Albarn this year, but he wouldn’t have heard Parklife growing up in a strict Catholic household, where his Ghanaian parents banned their children from listening to popular music, wary of its “corrupting” influence.
It’s perhaps not the Paris years which contain the key to who and how he is, but the murkier waters of a suburban religious childhood. These days he treats his colourful biography with a certain embarrassment. They compared his tumbling musical poetry to that of Antony Hegarty and Nina Simone.
He got spotted, then signed, and arrived fully formed upon the world with a sound unlike anyone else. He lived in a hostel, 10 people to one room, hiding his keyboard under the bottom bunk. He slept rough on the streets of London and Paris he busked on the metro. I thought about all sorts of ways to stop people fooling me. When he left home at 17, he shot up now he’s six foot four, and in the local shop where he used to buy his bus pass, he loomed above the freezer cabinets. Literally: all through school, he was one of the smallest. After Clementine won the Mercury Prize in 2015 for his debut album At Least for Now, he came back to live in Edmonton, north London, where he was born, but quickly decided there was something pretentious about trying to be the prodigal son, when everything had changed and he’d grown so big.