Phoebe Luckhurst

from Paris texting me,” he remembers. “I looked at the television and there it was. I thought it was a Hollywood movie. The streets that these things happened on, I know them all so well. When it hits home… It can happen in America, Africa, Australia, but when it hits the place you know… It certainly wakes you up.”

For now, he is based in London. “I appreciate my city very much. When I go to America and Europe and I tell ever yone I’m from L ondon, I’m proud.”

Clementine strikes me as a deep thinker, though his formal education is patchy. He was badly bullied, and school was a “nightmare”. “It haunts me,” he says, quietly. He met one of his bullies in Edmonton relatively recently. “He was just smiling,” he s ay s , astonished. “It was weird. You’re old men now, and he’s managed to move on. While you still see what he did to you when you were a kid.”

He tells me he discovered a piano in his history classroom, which was next door to the headmistress’s office. On the f o u r t h d ay o f p r a c t i s i n g h i s headmistress came out. “I got up, I was very sc ared,” he says, pausing for effec t. “She said, ‘ That was great, Benjamin’. I was very pleased! The next day I was so excited, opened the history classroom door, the piano was still there, sat down...” He pauses again, waiting for the crescendo. “The piano was locked.” He laughs uproariously.

As a child he hung out in music shops on Denmark Street to try to learn how to read music. “I got myself some books with my pocket money but I couldn’t read them. So I just kept on playing by ear.”

He still considers studying music formally. “But it would both help and not help, I think.” He pauses for a long time, then starts slowly. “Because my inability to read has led me to portals of new discovery. And I think if I do study — this might not be true — but if I do get that insight, then I might miss something.

“I know some theoretical aspects of piano,” he continues. “Theory concerning t h e k e y s . T h a t ’s n o t s t u d y i n g mu s i c . S t u d y i n g mu s i c involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you’ve got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart’s music the way he played it and how he intended it. You’ve got to make it perfect, and that’s not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.”

He adds, “technically, I’m rubbish”. Perhaps he is, though he might be teasing again. It’s always hard to tell.