THE QUIET ASCENT OF BENJAMIN CLEMENTINE
YOU JUST KNOW that Benjamin Clementine, an author, a poet, a songwriter and commanding singer about to tour Australia for the first time, would smell nice. And I don’t mean his association with the perfume Givenchy, which I only found out about after making my totally fact-free but not thought-free assessment.
There’s something about his style and grace, that stillness and elegance which has its most obvious sign in his deep, warm but just-distant speaking voice, that says here’s someone who cares about the small touches of interactions with others. A mark not of vanity but of decency.
“Well that’s subjective,” he murmurs. “You must be a fan of Mark Twain. I mean we are all trying to be decent at all times.”
While his songs – which won him The Mercury Prize, the UK’s most prestigious album award, for his 2015 debut album, Cornerstone – may ripple with emotion and at times a theatrical bent, his voice climbing up and down musical stairs with ease and earning comparisons with Nina Simone, and his acting offers a complexity of characterisation that attracted filmmakers like Steve McQueen (in Blitz, with Saoirse Ronan), Clementine is very measured in his speech, each sentence preceded by a long contemplative moment that contains both wariness of your intentions and deliberateness of thought, followed by a slow unfurling of his words.
His body language says something similar: turned a fraction away from the camera, slight curling of the shoulders inwards, his answers coming with a touch of side-eye as he evaluates, before occasionally turning towards you, as if acknowledging this question or this topic as suitable or not ill-intentioned.
I don’t know if there’s any connection here for the man born and raised in London, the child of two Ghanaians whose marriage did not last and a grandmother who raised him, but I could not leave untouched a staggering throwaway line I saw in a profile of him that said that while waiting to release his debut album – which he recorded initially in French; his two subsequent albums have been in English – he wrote his own dictionary. Say what now?
“Do you know [19th century American poet and journalist] Ambrose Bierce? He wrote his own dictionary, his own interpretation, with humour, of what words meant to him. Words he liked,” says Clementine. “I came across his book through my brother when I was nearly 14 and his life, Ambrose Beirce’s life, no one know who he is or what happened to him – he somehow disappeared from the face of America in the 1920s I suppose – but it was a very interesting life. It inspired me to write a lot of words that I like and my interpretation [of them]. I put that project to the side because I underestimated the amount of things I had to do to release that album and I haven’t really gone back to that. But it is as simple as writing your favourite words and giving meaning to them.”
Now it’s possibly apocryphal but there is a history of people who compile dictionaries either beginning as mad or becoming mad through the process. Even more than making your first album (unless you’re Lee Mavers of The La’s of course) can do. But Clementine seems pretty together for now, and has not given it up.
“I definitely haven’t given it up. I am spending more time writing because you get tired of just being in front of people, so you get more recluse, spending time alone, and I am writing way more than before.”
If anything, it seems as if music may be not just a secondary interest but one that interferes with his greatest love, poetry and prose – an interest which nonetheless is evident in the greater depth and quality, not to mention flamboyance in language use, of his lyrics. Does poetry matter more to him than music?
“Yes, it matters more to me than music,” he says simply. “We just go into the extent of over-indulgence with our singing. Speaking is what it’s all about: [poetry] speaks to art, it speaks to mind, it speaks to speech. Music just makes it more, apparently, pleasing. You can say anything in music and people might not understand what you’re saying but it will seep into their subconscious, or it will seep into their art and into their souls, and that’s just vibrations really. It’s not that complicated, it’s not that special.”
People understanding, or not, what you’re saying has some extra resonance for Clementine who moved to Paris in his late teens, having already left the family home a few years earlier amid family and mental health complications. He busked and lived on the streets for some years, eventually living in a hostel in Montmartre where his songwriting (and dictionary) began, the romance of it in print not really the truth of it in the flesh, not least because while his full name is Benjamin Sainte-Clementine, he spoke no French at that time.
Not that it made a huge difference in one way, given speaking was not something the self-described recluse was ever that interested in. Then even more so than now.
“Characteristically I tend not to talk to anyone. It’s not because I am not interested, it’s that, at that time at least, my mind wasn’t there. I actually didn’t know what was going to happen; I didn’t know why I was there; but I knew there was something there,” Clementine says. “I don’t know how to explain it. I suppose the soul smelt something that the eye couldn’t see, and I just kept going. There were times when I went to bed hungry but I also realised that eventually, when I started actually singing – the first three or four months were a capella – that music was my form of communication, but I didn’t want them to talk to me.
“You get the odd times when girls would wait for me to finish to talk to me and I would run away because I didn’t want anything to do with people. I didn’t know how to talk to people; I didn’t want to.”
And yet …
One of the most appealing aspects of Clementine’s songs, for me at least, is that they have a very European attitude to drama and to storytelling, more Brel and Brassens than Beatles or Beach Boys. While having become a vegetarian (giving up his much loved entrecote) and stopped smoking means his Parisian credentials are more questionable these days, his music invites drama, the lyrics invite life; melody exists but it is not the USP of any particular song.
“I think that’s a good description of how I also listen to music. People are mostly drawn in by the drummer and then in the end they try to figure out what the script is about. Then eventually they appreciate the script. French music definitely helped me in my approach to writing, Bressens and Leo Ferre [the poet and songwriter who was also an influence on Scott Walker], who I had the pleasure meeting his daughter a couple of years ago. The French seem to just be obsessed with poetry and the reason why the French have metaphors and figure of speeches for everything is they just love literature.
“French language is equivalent to most African languages. African languages tend to be very metaphoric. I just went to Kenya recently and I met a couple of people and they were telling me about the meaning of names, like for sunrise or sunset, but it was a sentence, the names were full sentences. That for me was beautiful. The French will have five sentences describing one thing [he chuckles] one feeling, and as a poet you’re going then to have to think about which one is appropriate because there are so many options. This is what I love about it.”
You know, maybe Givenchy were on to something here.
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Benjamin Clementine plays:
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, October 15
The Opera House, Wellington (New Zealand), October 17
Forum, Melbourne, October 20
Enmore Theatre, Sydney, October 21
Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, October 24
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