Benjamin’s difficult second album
Benjamin Clementine went overnight from homeless to famous – and his new album is a romance between two flies. Alice Vincent meets pop’s new poet
Benjamin Clementine has learned about love. This, perhaps, would not be a surprising revelation for the average man in his mid-twenties. But, considering the formerly homeless singer-songwriter won the 2015 Mercury Music Prize with a debut album steeped in solitude, it is a significant – and delightful – discovery.
Love crops up minutes after we meet, in a freshly gentrified pub in one of those Notting Hill streets where the houses align in a blanched-out rainbow. “Eventually,” he says, “I realised that I was travelling around as a bohemian merely because I wanted to be loved and to give love.”
Clementine is one of the few people who can genuinely identify as a “bohemian” and not inspire mirth. The 28-year-old famously found his beguiling voice while busking on the Paris subways. He slept there as a teenager after leaving his home in Edmonton, north London, and the tattered aspirations of his strictly religious Ghanaian parents that he would become a lawyer.
“I had gone to Paris with nothing,” he says. “I tried to make my life mean something, by way of playing music and writing things and living art, and then I came back to the UK and I’d been awarded a prize.”
For the past 18 months, Clementine has split his time between London and New York. He still performs sitting on a Parisian bentwood bar stool; 6ft 4in frame hunched over the piano, always barefoot and frequently bare-chested under a woollen overcoat. When he speaks, it is in a strangely staccato whisper. “[Love] is all that matters,” he smiles softly, looking down over cheekbones that spread like palette knives. “Realising that’s all I need is what’s made me happy, yeah.”
He taps the table with a long index finger as he elaborates, saying he has learned to nurture a love for himself, as well as for the “people you meet who you learn things from, and you learn to appreciate them and you learn to put your trust in them”. People such as Clementine’s manager, whom he speaks about as if he were a father; fellow musician Flo Morrissey, his girlfriend, whom he wishes he’d “met five years ago”; and his band, who have “put their lives on the line” for his artistry. “We’re all together in a lovely family,” he says. It sounds like the first one he’s truly felt part of.
If solitude filled At Least For Now, then love underpins his second album, I Tell a Fly, a concept album that builds a bizarre romance between two flies who travel between the chaos of geopolitical events – the refugee camps at Calais, the destruction of Aleppo and the migrant crisis. Like him, they come to understand “that love is all that matters, so they are already safe”.
When we meet, it is a few days before Sampha Sisay, another Londonraised boy with a soulful debut album inspired by isolation, wins this year’s Mercury. Nearly two years have passed since Clementine marked his own prize win by inviting his fellow nominees up on stage and paying tribute to the 89 people killed by
‘I said, “Watch closely, Trump will win”. He had somehow epitomised the American dream’
terrorists while watching a gig at Paris’s Bataclan Theatre a week earlier.
“The day after the Bataclan, I went to Paris and I was looking for my friends and I was reading poetry and I was really touched,” he says. “But from that day on, when news happened, my heart could no more cope with what was happening.” The frequency of horrific events happening in the news began to numb him to them.
However, something changed in June 2016, when Clementine was profoundly affected by the coverage of the police shooting of black motorist Philando Castile in front of his girlfriend and her daughter in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “I broke down and started crying. It showed that something was going on that I had to bring out of me,” he says. “My first album was only about myself. I thought, why not write something about other things in the vicinity?”
And there were plenty. Clementine was out of the country for Brexit – which he didn’t see coming, and holds himself partially accountable for because he didn’t vote – but was living in New York during the US election. “I said, ‘Watch closely, Trump will win’,” Clementine says. “He had become such a phenomenon. He had somehow epitomised the American dream.”
Clementine had previously imagined Trump’s victory for Damon Albarn, who in 2016, invited him to collaborate on Humanz, the first Gorillaz album since 2010, which imagined the soundtrack to that very dystopia. It was an unlikely fit: in the past, Clementine shared his disdain for electronic music, something he “totally despised”.
“Albarn sent me the music, and I was like, ‘What on Earth? This is not my world, what is happening?’” Clementine laughs. “I just wanted to meet him anyway, because I thought that it would be important for me.” His instinct was correct. In Studio 13, the playground of Albarn and engineer Stephen Sedgwick, Clementine, “found the sounds to make I Tell a Fly”.
Clementine’s new record takes the spiralling pianism of his debut and forces it through a mesh of baroque composition, unearthly electronics and thundering percussion. His kaleidoscopic vocals remain the most compelling and weird thread of it all, unravelling into lines such as “I do agree, a great deal of men are purely evil”. It is an extraordinary album
– and an acquired taste.
“I had to fight, of course,” he says, when I ask him what Virgin EMI Records, the major label that scooped him up nearly four years ago, thought of such an avant-garde follow up.
“There are only a few people that I’ve met in my career so far who are genuinely interested in art. And it scares me. “But,” he continues, as it becomes creepingly conscious that he may be overstepping a mark, “they had to get behind me. It is a huge success to have an album like this on a major label. Because I think it’s quite rare, and I’m glad I fought them.”
These days, Clementine spends his income on the best studios and touring musicians and brings up the expense of both often – as well as how he has earned it. He currently lives in west London, at a walking distance from Studio 13 and Grenfell Tower (“I woke up that morning and [saw] this building, smoke and everything coming out. I walked back to my place, and [felt] a little bit guilty, you know, in how some people have it really, really bad”), but the notion of home still eludes and fascinates him – his second album is as preoccupied with it as his debut.
“Home, home, home,” he says, rolling the word around, when I ask where he thinks his is. When we first spoke, three years ago, he told me he had “hardly any family relationships”. He still sees his mother in Edmonton “from time to time”, but shrugs when I ask if she’s proud of him.
Clementine concludes that home “begins in the heart”, but says he is toying with moving to either Russia or Switzerland to write his next record. He may have found both love and success, but it’s clear his wandering days aren’t over yet.