Benjamin Clementine: Mercury Prize winner is the latest British performer the French have taken to their hearts

Clementine had already won a prestigious award in France, a Victoire De La Musique, for 'breakthrough live performer'

Francophone countries have a long tradition of championing more-unusual, underdog UK acts (AFP/Getty Images)

I fully expected Benjamin Clementine to win the Mercury Prize with At Least For Now, his bleak yet bewitching, beautiful debut album first released on the Barclay label in France at the tail end of last year. After all, he’d already won a prestigious award in France, a Victoire De La Musique, for “breakthrough live performer”, back in February.

You could say there was something in the air, but it was a lot more than that feeling in my shrinking bones. Sure, the atrocities in Paris and Bamako have dominated the news agenda over the last 10 days, and tweeting “Condolence”, one of the album’s salient tracks, as I did at the time, seemed to be the most-apposite response to the harrowing events. Indeed, Clementine rightly dedicated his win to the victims and survivors and vowed to spend his £20,000 prize money on pianos for the people of Edmonton, the London suburb he left to busk in Paris five years ago.

This decision proved the making of him, as, freed from the straightjacket of busking in an Anglo-Saxon context and country, he began absorbing a host of chanson, classical and operatic influences that have set him apart from the conveyor belt of British singer-songwriters, the 10 a penny, woe betide me artists currently dominating the Radio 2 playlist in the daytime.

Mind you, I’m being unfair to the BBC since Jo Whiley has twice hosted Clementine on her evening programme over the last six months. The vocalist might be a man of few words but he brought a taste of Radio NOVA, the pioneering, broad church – you could say catholique – Paris station, to the British airwaves. In between performances of “Cornerstone”, “Gone” and “Nemesis”, he picked songs by Charles Aznavour – “What Makes A Man” – Nina Simone – “Tomorrow Is My Turn” – and Jimi Hendrix – “Castles Made Of Sand” – that neatly encapsulate where he comes from.

Moving to Paris proved to be the making of Clementine (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

Of course, he’s far from being the first Anglo-Saxon musician to channel the chanson tradition of Aznavour, Gilbert Bécaud, Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens or Edith Piaf, all of whom have been brought up as convenient shorthand for his bare, declamatory style of singing and song-writing. In the late ‘60s, throughout the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, Jake Thackray, Scott Walker, David Bowie, Alex Harvey and Marc Almond dipped into the rich, Francophone repertoire and made it their own with English adaptations of “Au Suivant” – “Ne Me Quitte Pas” – “If You Go Away” – “Amsterdam” and “She”.

However, Clementine has taken a different approach, as I surmised when I saw him hold the audience spellbound at Brighton’s Theatre Royal back in the spring, even if his sublime, heart-rending take on Nick Drake’s “River Man” certainly helped pave the way. Rather than going for straight cover versions or translations, he seems to have absorbed the chanson DNA and has let it percolate through, before reemerging as a one-off who makes music as striking as his cheekbones are high. He neatly encapsulates our times of raw feelings and uncertainty and should continue to offer comfort and solace, as he has already realised.

Jo Whiley has twice hosted Clementine on her evening programme (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

“Music has been like having a relationship with somebody. You don’t think about the consequences of it. That’s how music is to me,” he has said, though, for now, he appears prepared to carry the weight of our troubled world on his shoulders. However, he is blissfully unaware of the long line of British artists who first made it in France. The Francophone countries – Belgium and Switzerland more than pull their weight alongside their bigger neighbour when it comes to music spending – have a long tradition of championing more-unusual, underdog UK acts, only for the rest of the world to catch up later on.

This goes all the way back to Soft Machine and Pink Floyd in the late ‘60s and continued with the Canterbury axis of Progressive Rock – the multi-national collective Gong, the very British Caravan, Hatfield and the North – as well as the influential pub rockers of Dr Feelgood and Eddie and the Hot Rods in the mid-’70s. When the Sex Pistols were booted off the EMI label and then A&M Records in 1977, French music entrepreneur Eddie Barclay offered the punk outcasts a licencing deal that kept them afloat until Richard Branson’s Virgin stepped in. This explains why so much of Julien Temple’s The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle is set in Paris and includes “L’Anarchie Pour Le U.K.” as well as that deranged cover of “My Way” shot at the Paris Olympia.

Not content with taking the Camus-loving Cure to their hearts, the French, Belgians and Swiss also adopted the post-punk groups And Also The Trees and The Chameleons, while Joy Division issued their highly-collectable “Atmosphere” single through the wonderfully-named French boutique imprint Sordide Sentimental in 1980. Even now, UK trip-hop also-rans Archive sell out venues across France and Scots singer-songwriter Amy Macdonald can do no wrong there and in Switzerland.

Vive la différence!