[5][6][7] Clementine's compositions are musically incisive and attuned to the issues of life but also poetic, mixing revolt with love and melancholy, sophisticated lyricism with slang and shouts, and rhyming verse with prose monologues.

[9][10] The family acquired a piano when Clementine was 11, and Benjamin played it when he could, but his father, who had hoped his son would study law, forbade him to spend time with musical instruments.

He relocated to Paris at age 19,[12] where he spent a number of years busking and playing in bars and hotels in Place de Clichy while sleeping on the streets.

[14][16] He eventually came to the attention of the French press, who described him as "la révélation anglaise des Francos" ("the English revelation of the "Francofolies" festival").

[2] He was then invited to the Rencontres Trans Musicales of Rennes in France in December 2012 where he performed for the first time on a large stage, and played four nights consecutively.

[18][19][20][21][22][23] As a result, the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2013 booked Clementine to play, but he failed to attend, lacking funds to purchase a train ticket and having difficulties getting to Rotterdam, eventually trying to walk the 45km barefoot.

In March 2015, whilst performing in the middle of a concert in Paris, he cut a finger open and started to bleed, but kept on playing until an audience member threw tissues on the stage.

[2] The London Evening Standard's David Smyth, reviewing a gig at the South Bank Centre, said that Clementine's performance reminded him of Nina Simone, particularly as he had covered her hit "Ain't Got No, I Got Life" in a radically different style.

[32] Clementine announced further tours, both solo and supporting Cat Power at the Brighton Dome, including an appearance at the O2 Academy in Brixton[33] and at the Rencontres Trans Musicales festival in Rennes, France, where he worked on a special show and performed four nights.

[34]Clementine initially wanted to record his debut album, At Least for Now, straight after his first EP, Cornerstone, but due to contractual dealings with the music industry and his label it was strategically held back for almost two years.

David Simpson from The Guardian gave the album 3 stars out of 5, describing the debut as "fascinating but flawed", explaining that it "benefits from the bravery and adventurousness Clementine honed while tackling audiences aboard Parisian trains."

"[38] Phil Mongredien, also reviewing for The Guardian, gave the album 4 stars out of 5, writing that "for the most part these piano-led songs sound unique, the lonely despair of Cornerstone and the arresting lyricism of Condolence signalling an exciting new talent.

"[39] Accompanied by a video shot by photographer Craig McDean and filmmaker Masha Vasyukova published earlier than its official release on 30 June 2017, Clementine composed Phantom of Aleppoville after being affected by the writing of pioneering British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.

Seeing in Winicott's writing a mirror of his own childhood experiences, Clementine chose the title – the "little city of Aleppo" – to symbolise a place where children encounter such bullying.

At Least for Now stretched itself across a series of piano ballads with unorthodox structures; I Tell a Fly brings a sense of theatricality and power by using whirling, interwoven instruments throughout the uncompromising release.

On I Tell a Fly, Clementine uses his personal history as a prism through which to view the world around him (and attempt to make sense of both), musically exploring unknown territories while maintaining a lifeblood that could not be mistaken for the work of anyone other than him.

[47] Writing for The Quietus, Calum Bradbury-Sparvell described Clementine's voice as having the "expressive but exact enunciation of a stage actor, which allows his lyrics to spill and scatter out of sync with his hands in a way which warrants the endless Nina Simone comparisons."

He went on to write: "Yet as an atypical singer-songwriter with a strong sense of grandeur, an impressively broad tenor range and more than a dash of dark humour, he also resembles Rufus Wainwright".

[48] Clementine is a multi-instrumentalist and cites a broad range of musical influences: Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Leonard Cohen, Leo Ferré, Nina Simone, Jake Thackray, Jimi Hendrix, Serge Gainsbourg, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Lucio Dalla, Giacomo Puccini, Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Callas, Georges Brassens and Frédéric Chopin.

[51] Clementine states he has mainly been influenced by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath as well as writers such as William Blake, Carol Ann Duffy, James Baldwin, the philosopher John Locke and C. S. Lewis.

Writing for The Quietus, Calum Bradbury-Sparvell described the song in the context of Clementine's debut album as "a melodramatic beginning which harks back to the alienation he felt from family and friends on the eve of his emigration to the City of Light," going on to write: "For a Gallic darling, Clementine certainly gazes wistfully across La Manche a lot and one senses that, despite the obvious French influences, there is more of the spurned Londoner in him than the flâneur.