Benjamin Clementine will perform in Australia for the first time this October, with the Mercury Prize-winning British artist announcing dates in Adelaide, Sydney and Perth as part of his Back to Basics tour.
It is a remarkably belated Australian debut for an artist who has spent more than a decade building a reputation around performances that sit somewhere between concert, theatre and poetry recital. Voice and piano remain at the centre, but Clementine has never seemed particularly concerned with the conventional boundaries of the singer-songwriter.
Born in London to parents of Ghanaian descent, Clementine’s route into music took an unusual turn when he moved to Paris. It was there, performing on streets, in bars and through the city’s Métro stations, that he began developing the voice and performance style that would eventually take him far beyond the French capital.
Debut album At Least for Now won the 2015 Mercury Prize, introducing Clementine as an artist whose piano-led compositions, dramatic vocals and literary songwriting sounded distinctly removed from much of the British music surrounding him at the time.
Comparisons inevitably followed. His voice has been placed alongside Nina Simone, the darker theatrical edges of his songwriting have prompted references to Nick Cave, while the economy of his piano playing has drawn parallels with French composer Erik Satie. Yet Clementine has gradually constructed a musical language peculiar enough to make those reference points feel increasingly secondary.
He followed At Least for Now with I Tell a Fly in 2017 and And I Have Been in 2022, continuing to stretch his music through classical composition, avant-garde pop, poetry and increasingly ambitious arrangements.
France formally recognised his contribution to the arts in 2019, when Clementine was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.
The Back to Basics tour suggests something of a return to the foundations of that career. Clementine’s performances can be startlingly sparse, allowing silence to carry almost as much weight as his piano or voice. Songs can move from whispered passages into rhythmic bursts and near-operatic peaks, with Clementine frequently treating the stage as a theatrical space rather than simply somewhere to reproduce his records.
His Australian debut also arrives alongside new single ‘Pizza Mind’, which finds Clementine turning a deliberately absurd phrase into a pointed piece of social commentary.
Playing on “peace of mind”, the song uses the idea of “pizza mind” to examine the desire for wisdom, fulfilment and originality without undertaking the work required to achieve any of them. Ovens, dough, crusts, heat and flavour become part of a surreal vocabulary for addressing passivity, armchair expertise and the reluctance to make difficult choices.
It sounds whimsical enough on paper, but that tension between absurdity and seriousness has long occupied Clementine’s writing. Humour, philosophy and unease coexist, with apparently playful ideas often carrying considerably sharper edges underneath.
More than ten years after At Least for Now turned Clementine from a musician playing the Paris Métro into a Mercury Prize winner, Australian audiences will finally get the opportunity to experience the performer behind those records.
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