The Music Of Benjamin Clementine

If you seek to inject some dose of eccentricity into a bland day at home or at work, the hour has come to be steered into the world of Benjamin Clementine, the British singer and poet of Ghanaian decent, and if you believe in re-incarnation, this could be Nina Simone returned to the world in the form and likeness of a man.

The 28 year old self-taught musician's debut album, 'At Least For Now', won 2015 Mercury music prize and he has since garnered a cult following when word began to spread of his performances, which he gave often barefooted and of his music which is at once oratorical, broody, wistful and amusing, giving the critics a hard time in their attempt to subsume his music into any genre. Rather than sing, he most times appears to be yammering but in a lyrical manner.

Hear him whinge in Cornerstone:

Cause I’ve been lonely, alone in a box of my own

They claimed to love me And be near me,

 but they’re all lying I've been lonely, alone in a box of stone

 

He made his T.V debut on the show, "Later... With Jools Holland" in October 2013 after years of vagabonding in Paris and singing on its streets for he had left home at 16 after falling out with his parents who had proposed that he studied law.

He draws his influences from french musicians and poets such as William Blake, T.S Eliot and Carol Ann Duffy and also from his years of homelessness and despair. His second album 'I Tell A Fly' will be out on 15th September via Virgin/EMI.