Album Review: I Tell A Fly, Benjamin Clementine

When your debut album is the surprise winner of the most prestigious music industry award in the UK, how do you follow it up? That was the question singer-songwriter Benjamin Clementine faced when At Least For Now won the Mercury Prize in 2015. The 28-year-old Londoner has answered it, tongue firmly in cheek presumably, with I Tell A Fly – an avant garde concept album about two romantically entangled flies, set against a backdrop of a world in turmoil (specifically referencing Syria and the refugee crisis). Commercialism be damned! His record company must love him…

In one sense, you have to admire his chutzpah. Clementine was “discovered” when he was living rough on the streets of Paris and busking on the Metro for a crust. An album as wildly experimental as this could quite easily put him right back there. The suspicion is that he simply doesn’t care.

So kudos and full marks for artistic ambition and integrity, but it would have been nice if these songs were a little more consistent and easy on the ear. This is a surreal musical journey that segues from minimalist piano to vaudevillian camp to overdone pomp rock with several stops in between. Clementine delivers his vocals with overdone theatrical relish, often changing accent as he sings. This occasionally becomes annoying.

Lyrically and thematically, the record loosely follows the journey of two flies as they flit from border to border across the Middle East and Europe (“The wanderings are never ceasing,” he sings on the album’s centrepiece ‘Phantom of Allepoville’). They visit the overcrowded refugee camps outside Calais in the cabaret-style ‘God Save The Jungle’, and tangle with a French fascist on the streets of the French capital in ‘Paris Cor Blimey’. Featuring harpsichord and deathly drums, ‘Awkward Fish’ takes their journey to Clementine’s native South London, while the singer returns to the subject of mass immigration in ‘By The Ports Of Europe’.

Clementine undoubtedly has serious talent and isn’t afraid to take risks. However, sounding like the soundtrack of some deranged Off-Off-Broadway musical, this effort never really gels. On the off-chance I’m missing the point, I won’t knock I Tell A Fly, but I’d be telling a lie if I said I’ll ever listen to it again.

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