Benjamin Clementine - The Barefoot Troubadour Who Speaks His Mind - Music - The Guardian

8/6/2016
Benjamin Clementine: the barefoot troubadour who speaks his mind | Music | The Guardian
Benjamin Clementine: the barefoot

troubadour who speaks his mind
The young Brit has g one from busking in Paris to being the most shared artist on Spotify. Now
back in London, he doesn't want his backstory to overshadow his music. And with a voice that's
been compared to Nina Simone's, there's little chance of that
Tim Lewis
Saturday 9 August 2014 15.30BST
'm due to meet Benjamin Clementine at the covered market in Edmonton Green,
north London, but I bump into him as we both leave the train station. He's hard to
miss: a rangy 6ft 3in, cheekbones like violent slashes, hair up and backcombed
into a Frank Gehry-esque swoop. It turns out that the 25-year-old singer-songwriter
doesn't do small talk; he is either forcefully opinionated or dauntingly silent. As we
skirt a roundabout, he is urgently explaining all that is beautiful and problematic
about the scruy, clearly deprived neighbourhood where he was raised.
"Why are there not cabs in Edmonton?" Clementine asks, his voice low and
rumbling, scarcely distinguishable from the trac. "Why are there cabs in central
London but not here? And if they're going to be here, they should be cheaper. And
travelcards, they're expensive. If you live in central London, that's probably ne for
you, but in places like Edmonton, where you're almost out of sight of London,
you've got to pay more and more to get into central London. How does that work?"
We're in the market now; a hungover Monday morning where business is slow
everywhere but Lidl and Iceland. One day Clementine wants to buy a piano "no,
two or three pianos" and put them in the concourse for anyone to play. It would
give Edmontonians, as he calls them, an opportunity that he only belatedly had.
"Put pianos everywhere!" he says triumphantly.
Clementine has a reputation that exceeds his output, just two EPs, seven tracks
really. He rst appeared last October, playing a song, Cornerstone, on Later... with
Jools Holland. The skittish host introduced him as having been found busking on the
Paris metro and that made sense: his singing was raw, his breathing so erratic that
he looked like he might pass out. But his power and presence were unmistakable as
he sat barefoot and alone at a grand piano. People searched for a shorthand to
describe what he sounded like and a consensus was soon arrived at: "If Nina Simone
had been a man." Backstage, Paul McCartney, a fellow guest, made him promise he'd
keep at it; the following week, Clementine was the most shared artist on Spotify.
Not long after he was picked up by a major label, Virgin EMI.
Come an d see Ben jamin Clementin e at Obser ver Ideas

Biographical details then trickled out. Clementine was the youngest of ve, born to
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/09/benjamin-clementine-barefoot-troubadour-singer-songwriter-interview
1/6
8/6/2016
parents of Ghanaian descent. He left school at 16, had a bust-up with his family and
ended up in Camden, eectively homeless. Aged 18, he relocated to the Place de
Clichy, sleeping on the streets. before living in a hostel. Down and out in London
and Paris: a sequel. Out of desperation, after a revelatory visit to Sacr Coeur, he
tossed his grey Kangol cap on the ground and started singing a cappella.
Growing up, Clementine had little exposure to music and it was this naivety that
now made his singing so confusing to classify. In his teens he had caught Anthony
and the Johnsons performing Hope There's Someoneon television; then on the
radio he'd heard the avant-garde French composer Erik Satie. Unconsciously, he had
married the spirit of these two inuences with poetic lyrics to produce his own
material, both original and epic.
This morning in Edmonton, Clementine is keen to downplay the fairytale. He
appears concerned, almost, that the biographical stories are so rich that they will
end up overshadowing the music. "This isn't something we should talk about," he
says. "Because it happens every day, people are homeless every day. It's all about, 'He
got into a train, this guy discovered him and he signed a record deal.' It's nonsense.
That never happened, zero. I was on the train, I did play, but I also played in bars, in
the streets, at birthday parties for people who discovered me on the train."
Clementine tries to pick apart other elements of the creation myth. He's pretty sure
it was Anthony and the Johnsons he watched in his living room with his parents,
but concedes it might have been Boy George. "People want a beautiful story," he
sighs. "Hopefully my life story is still beautiful but that metro stu doesn't make it
much more pitiful."
So what is that story then? "I fell in love with the piano when I was six," Clementine
remembers. "I saw a girl in my class who had a toy piano. I asked if I could play and
she said no, so I waited till she went for lunch and I took it home. I played, I heard
sounds, I just liked it, I didn't understand why. Next day, obviously, I brought it
back, after a bit of trouble with my parents. I got into detention but that was one of
the best days of my life."
Clementine admits he was mischievous as a child but his rebellion was rarely
conventional. He would bunk o school but spend all day at the library, picking
books at random o the shelves. He found himself particularly drawn to poetry,
especially William Blake, TS Eliot and Carol Ann Duy. His older brother Joseph told
him to read the dictionary, and Clementine sought out rare and archaic words,
attempting to incorporate them into his vocabulary. His fondness for dictionaries
endures, to the extent that he has decided as a side-project to write his own in 26
volumes. Words, he insists, are merely "someone's interpretation", and his version
will be what they mean to him.
I ask Clementine for an example of an entry in his personal dictionary. He looks at
me warily, like I might steal the idea: "I think you're pushing it now."
Clementine was always slow to make friends and one senses that he retains a
wariness. "I didn't like anyone particularly at my school," he says. "It's my own fault;
I didn't really open up to anyone. The thing is: I was quite slow when I was younger.
2/6
8/6/2016
I might have been smart, I don't know, but I was slow talking to people. And as you
can see, I don't talk very loud."
He's right; Clementine practically whispers, in marked contrast to his vocals on
stage. "The minute I stop singing, I'm back to being shy. I'm soft-spoken because I
never really talked to people. I didn't learn to do it."
Clementine is evasive about the exact familial disagreement that ended with him
living in exile in Paris for ve years. He has said that his parents were strict, very
religious, that they wanted him to become a lawyer, but this morning he is only
interested in clarifying one point. "I didn't leave Edmonton," he says. "I left my
family. I had to leave because of my issues with my family. But that's as far as we get
with family."
Clementine returned to live in London in the new year, just as his career started to
take o, and he is now looking for a place back in Edmonton. He won't say if he has
reconciled with his family, who all still live in the area. "Don't want to go into it but
I've learned to treat everyone the same way," he says. "If you walked up to me and
asked for a penny and then my brother my blood brother came up asked me for a
penny, I'd give it to you if you asked rst. It's as simple as that."
Here's the contradiction with Clementine: while he is clearly reserved and private,
his lyrics are invariably autobiographical, unabashedly personal. This is particularly
evident on his stunning new EP, Glorious You, released later this month. He started
writing songs in Paris and quickly realised, from the poets he admired, that they
were pointless if they didn't say something about his particular experiences. "I don't
think I'm a singer, I think I'm an expressionist," he explains. "But it takes time to
put it in people's minds that this guy is not singing, 'Baby, I want to have you.' This
guy is actually thinking about what he's saying. This guy has something to say."
One of his frustrations since returning to Britain is how little ambition there is in
most song lyrics. "Having a spell in France, they put a lot of detail into the lyrics, it's
very important because everyone is listening to what they are saying. It's like a play.
But I'm quite fortunate because, with me, it's not a play. It's real."
Nowhere is this honesty clearer than on a new track, Adios, a farewell to his
childish ways. Clementine talks with little sensationalism about his time sleeping
rough: he always found food relatively easy to come by, he insists, and once he
started making money from busking he moved into a hostel near Pigalle, where he
lived for almost two years. But, as he sings on Adios, the main realisation he came
to in Paris is that he couldn't hold everyone else responsible for the problems he
faced.
"We always blame other people when things go wrong. For example, family to
friends, you think they'll stay by your side and you realise they never do. But that's
life. You go to the shop and you try to ask for a job and they say no, and then you
blame society. You keep on blaming. You don't stop blaming people. That's a sign of
weakness, I've learned."
There is certainly much about Clementine that is impressively self-made. Without
3/6
8/6/2016
lessons, he taught himself to play piano, guitar, drums and, despite not reading
music, he is responsible for the strings arrangement on Glorious You. His vocals are
equally untutored: to make money in Paris he would sing "ridiculous cheesy covers"
with a band; the problem was that, however hard he tried, the songs would never
sound remotely close to the originals. "When I die, I want them to play The Lark
Ascending by Vaughan Williams," he says. "If someone asks me what's my real
ambition, I'm an expressionist right, and I want my voice to sound like that violin
playing The Lark Ascending."
This statement gives a hint of Clementine's self-belief. He already has the material
for an album but his label "people who think strategically about these things" has
advised him to hold back. Beyond that, there is his dictionary, and he'd like to
record classical music and release a collection of poetry. He also has grander
schemes for the regeneration of his little corner of north London alluded to in
another new song, Edmonton. And in October he will be a star turn at the Observer
Ideas festival at the Barbican (for more details of the event see box, left). What will
he do with his 20-minute slot? "I will show up," he says enigmatically. "I will show
up and give them my all. Give them what I have, and if they accept it, they accept it.
And if they don't, they don't."
Very little about Clementine is predictable; so far, all of it is worth watching.
Benjamin Clementine's Glorious You EP is released 25 August on Virgin/EMI. He headlines
London's Emmanuel Centre on 29 October and will perform at Observer Ideas at the
Barbican in London on 12 October
More interviews
Topics
Pop and rock
Save for later Article saved

Reuse this content
4/6
8/6/2016
5/6
8/6/2016
6/6

Benjamin Clementine - The Barefoot Troubadour Who Speaks His Mind - Music - The Guardian

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Benjamin Clementine - The Barefoot Troubadour Who Speaks His Mind - Music - The Guardian

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

8/6/2016

Benjamin Clementine: the barefoot

Come an d see Ben jamin Clementin e at Obser ver Ideas

Save for later Article saved

You might also like