Music review: Benjamin Clementine
Opening his Back to Basics tour in Adelaide, alone at the piano, British singer songwriter Benjamin Clementine is every bit as intriguing and gifted as his recordings indicate .
If, last Thursday night, you were at the Entertainment Centre getting a blast from Hans Zimmer, or enjoying Paul Lewis playing Mozart at the Town Hall, then you missed out on an extraordinary performance at the Dunstan Playhouse.
Benjamin Clementine’s legend precedes him: Born in the UK, the youngest of five children to parents of Ghanaian heritage. Taught himself piano listening to French Impressionists on BBC radio. Down and Out in London and Paris from his mid-teens. Busking and living rough until, having become a fixture in the Parisian music subculture, he is noticed by an agent and, at 24, his career is launched on all cylinders. Festival de Cannes, recording contracts, Montreux Festivals, appearances on Jools Holland, praise from Paul McCartney.
Eclectic is an understatement. Mr Clementine contains multitudes. He is not derivative, or a mimic in either voice or piano, but rather echoes and resonates sounds, styles, and performances into an amalgam that is his alone. It is musical alchemy at its most appealing.
He has recorded three albums. At Least For Now debuted in 2015, winning the coveted Mercury Music prize in the same year. I Tell a Fly followed in 2017 and, five years on, And I Have Been released in 2022. Outside music, he’s also turned in roles in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen franchise. It has been a discontinuous narrative, however, interrupted by contract tangles, record release delays, and ongoing complications in his private life – including a divorce from his wife, Flo Morrissey, the mother of his three children.
Back to Basics seems almost existentially true, and Clementine’s return to touring has a fragility about it that counterpoints the extraordinary emotional heft and vigour of his performances.
The Dunstan stage is all in white, as is the waiting grand piano. Clementine enters in his signature style. Barefoot, in a black trench coat (he has a promotion contract with Burberry). With his tangled mane of hair, and dark glasses, he is a formidable figure. He also has a reticence and other-worldliness that is not affectation. Rather like Thelonious Monk, it is his way of commanding space and steering the complicated tempo of his invention.
Pausing with his head lowered, he moves his right hand horizontally above the keyboard like a wand, while his left hand gradually begins a flurry of notes – then joined by the descending chords from the right. And begins: “I swear that you have seen me / Yes you have seen me / Don’t tell it otherwise.”
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It is ‘Condolence’ from the first album. His rich voice with that Nina Simone vibrato so often noted of his singing. The song is intensely personal – confessional and vulnerable. “I’m sending my condolence to fear / I’m sending my condolence to insecurities”. This is old territory for him.
“I had done it all before / And I won.”
“Out of absolutely nothing, I , Benjamin was born / So that when I become someone one day / I will always remember that I came from nothing.”
Back to basics indeed. And the emotional extravagance is matched – and therefore contextualised stylistically – with his soaring, emphatic, operatic delivery.
‘Cornerstone’ is next, the rolling piano reminiscent of Michael Nyman, punctuated by his clipped lyrics rising to the plaintive, almost strained “I’ve been lonely, alone in a box of stone”, which then segues to “This is the place I now belong / It’s my home, home, home”, repeated in a chant that merges “home” with “hope” as the piano moves between roiling R’n’B and Keith Jarrett repetitions. It is vocally and musically audacious, but also direct and immediate.
Sunglasses now off, Clementine’s piano intro for ‘London’ is as melodically irresistible as a Jimmy Webb ballad. He is now in full vocal stride, launching effortlessly into the soaring chorus – “London, London, London, is calling/ What are you waiting for ? What are you searching for?”
Also from the At Least For Now debut album, is ‘Adios’. From the impatient piano opening to the swaggering, interrogative vocal, Clementine is reminding us that Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris. It is a brilliant use of the chanson idiom – as another comparison, Scott Walker, also so astutely demonstrated. But not even he has the startling vocal temerity of Clementine’s line, “That decision is mine / Cause that vision is mine.”
And, highlight of many highlights, ‘Adios’ breaks mid-song with Clementine, in his shy, barely-audible speaking voice, telling us that he is (sort of) visited by angels:
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“Anyways they come to me, they sing so beautifully,” he says. “If I can recall their melodies, it goes – excuse me to take your time – but its goes something, something like this.”
He then embarks on a falsetto aria like something out of Lakme descending into his velvet (I am informed) spinto tenor range before returning to the rest of the song.
Understandably, the audience went nuts. This encourages Clementine to engage directly with the crowd. Moving to a new untitled song, he again waves his hand-wand over the keyboard and begins to talk about his fear of separation – before beginning a prose monologue sung in recitative that Sondheim would be proud of.
It is a lengthy and vivid account of his own separation from his children. It is only his side of the story and our position on it is unclear but it leads into one his concert singalongs, with the line: “Nothing is final / Everything gonna be fine”. The audience obliges tentatively until we discover we have to sing twenty repetitions, turning the lines into a mantra sung with increasing gusto and conviction until he lets us off at number 23.
After an electrifying rendition of ‘Nemesis; concluding with a thunderous piano finale and sustained operatic note to match, Clementine leaves the stage leaving us wondering if he’s had enough.
On return he delivers a terrific version of ‘Atonement’ – the only song from his most recent 2022 album, And I Have Been. It is followed by another dexterously sung prose monologue ‘Nicholas Nepolitana’ [sic] – also, so far unrecorded, and on the theme of marital breakdown.
The warmth of the response and maybe the intimacy of the Dunstan theatre encourages the singer to have more chat with the audience. He had already – noting a procession of walk-outs – improvised a tune along the lines of “Go to the bathroom / If you / Want to/ Use the loo” much to our surprise and general amusement given the heavy themes of much of the repertoire.
Clementine notes he’s never spent 24 hours on a plane before and, having long ago read Bruce Chatwin’s Timelines, he wanted to go to Alice Springs. The audience schools him on the spelling and pronunciation of Uluru. He concludes the 90-minute set with a lovely reading of ‘Jupiter’ (also the name of his son) mashed up with ‘Young Winston Churchill’ (again from the first album). Clementine of the multitudes, is singing the Song of Himself:
“Ben is an alien with extra ability / Pushed time to next century.”
“Ben is an alien passing by / Wishing everybody be / Back home in Jupiter, things are getting harder / Wishing every ease.”
And adds with genial whimsy: “… even in Adelaide.”
Alien or not, Ben is welcome any time. And he definitely has extra ability, with his set barely touching the range of his virtuosic repertoire. He evokes many, but he is one of a kind.
Benjamin Clementine performed at Dunstan Theatre on October 15.
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