Clémentine March show transcript
R: Hello I’m Robyn Rocket and your listening to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom. I’m a space trumpeter and I put on gigs at Cafe OTO called Robyn’s Rocket , but in this monthly show I’m interviewing artists who inspire me and today I’m chatting to Clémentine march , right now you’re listening to Rocket #9 by the Sun Ra Arkestra then we’ll hear a track by Clémentine.
R I’m Robyn Rocket chatting to Clémentine March you’ve just heard one of her tracks called Elixir from her latest release. Clem, welcome to the show.
C : Hello! Thank you, I’m Clémentine March I‘m originally from France, I moved to the UK in 2015 and since then I’ve been quite active on the London music scene first as a bass player for many bands: Snapped Ankles, Alabaster DePlume, Rozi Plain, Bas Yan, Naima Bock, Dana Gavanski, Blue House; and then I started developing my own music. Prior to the pandemic I released my first album called Le Continent on a very nice small label called Lost Map Records and in 2021 another one , and I’m going to release a new EP on the same label, Lost Map. My music is mostly in English at the moment but it comes from a very French language place as well. I speak several languages, I have a strong Brazilian influence because I lived in South America, and my music is also very deeply influenced by Indie Rock from the 90s: Nirvana , Pavement, old Jimi Hendrix and Bjork and they were very important. I think my music mixes a little bit of all that stuff with a bit of jazz and the rest is, obviously, personal and linked to my life.
R : So, you grew up in France, you lived in Brazil and now you live in the UK, was music always important in your life?
C Yeah it’s a strange one because my parents weren’t artists , my dad works in the law sector and my mum was working for a very bureaucratic company. My dad was a massive jazz fan and classical music fan so I grew up with lots of very classical music like operas and Beethoven and Mozart, but also Miles Davis and the Beatles. Very young I had a fascination for the Beatles. My grandfather from my mum’s side was really lovely person but quite conservative; his thing was Bach and organ concertos. He wasn’t into pop music much but he loved the Beatles and so when I was something like 10 he gave me a cassette of the White Album. That was my first deep listening of anything, an incredible album. It would be my main influence to be honest. Everything I want to remake the White Album. You know, it’s not very original or niche as a influence cos it’s a massive band but I have to be honest here it was really my entry point to all the rest. I think I have this tropism of Englishness without knowing it, because I never imagined in my life I’d live in the Britain later.
Beck was also a massive influence on my, like the album Odelay. I think it was the first time I realized that, oh yeah, you can do some country and hard rock at the same time, and put a stupid beat behind, and, like, donkey sounds and then like saying bonkers stuff about whatsoever and, I was like, that’s cool, I want to do that. Actually I should do that more, I don’t do that enough
R: I’m Robyn Rocket and you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom a monthly show here on resonance FM each month I have a different guest and this month I’m chatting to Clementine March Thank you very much for tuning in and Clem thank you for joining us. We just heard a track by Beck. Clem, when you growing up in France and listening to a lot of songs sung in English did you have the understanding of what they meant?
C: No, I learnt later. It’s a very interesting question for me, the actual pleasure I would take with language and understanding came way later, way into my adult life whereas when I do that with Portuguese for example it’s way more direct for me for example when I’m listening to a Brazilian song I am really deciphering the meaning straight away.
And even today with the English language even today because I grew up not understanding or imagining the content and now I’m listening to an old Radiohead song I used to love in the 90s like say from Ok Computer and I’m like ‘wow it was talking about that all the way around’, or sometimes it problematic as well songs about people who bully or I’m gonna come back to get ya. Like Rolling Stones stuff I used to love like ‘Under my Thumb’ is hugely misogynistic. This I knew, actually.
And it’s hard sometimes because the music is still amazing and your like, mmm, I have this very contradictory feeling of liking something I should hate.
I think that’s a very good debate actually, because at the age of me too where there is more awareness about stuff that used to be acceptable which is not anymore. It’s like reading 19th century novel like Balzac or even Dickens and you’re reading some description and you’re like ‘argh!’ That’s cringey like at the same time the book is a masterpiece. How do I do it like the pleasure I’m still taking from reading that but also knowing it doesn’t work today?
I think about meaning… I may be very wrong and someone listening too that so I apologise in advance I have the feeling that British people - I’m not saying they don’t care about lyrics seriously because they do - but it’s not as obsessively important as it could be with American people or French people like commenting. Sometimes I read review on Pitchfork I’m often surprised at how detailed the content about lyrics is, whereas I never see that in the British press. So I have this feeling that lyrics are not always meant to be understood and the feeling you have yourself is as valid sometimes, I remember listening back recently to Kid A by Radiohead, the lyric writing by Radiohead is incredible it’s a very good one, but listening to the mix I was surprised there is this song where the guitar is so loud and your like, what they made that on purpose? So, you don’t understand anything what he is saying.
R: that was In limbo by Radiohead from the album, Kid A. Was the White Album the first ever album you owned?
C No I’d be lying if I said that , my first album as a kid was the soundtrack of a film that was very popular in the 80’s called the Big Blue or Le Grande Bleu, a French film about a diver in the Mediterranean sea he is obsessed with having the world record of reaching the most bottom (deepest) place in the sea
R: How were you discovering music?
C : Radio, I guess there was a radio in Paris specialising in rock called Oui! FM , Oui like ‘yes’. There were fantastic shows for kids like, ‘oh yeah this guy recorded that in the 70s lalala’, and then all the hits at the time REM , Nirvana. After Oui FM there was another station very important - still today - called Nova where Giles Peterson has a show as well as on the BBC called Worldwide
Nova was really important for everything urban music, hip hoe or more electronic music more like niche.
In France as well at the time they passed a law in 1994, I think, and you had to play 50% of French stuff and this developed tremendously French hip hop because the radio they were a bit annoyed because they thought Anglo-American music was more important but because it was the law they had to develop new stuff and the French hip hop got into that.
R: and what about instruments what instruments did you play as a kid?
C As a young kid I was studying violin the teachers were very strict and they said, ‘Errr music and you is no great uh!’
It took me a while to process the idea that it might be totally legitimate for me to make some music. But then around puberty when nirvana and all this kind of alternative scene arrived, I was like ‘I want to play guitar’ and my dad said, ‘oh yeah, that’s great but I think you would benefit from learning the classical bass as well’, and I was like ok let’s try and that turned out to be a good move classical guitar and Brazilian guitar are quite linked so it brought me to this path as well.
R: Were you in bands when you were growing up?
C No, actually I was watching with envy all my friends who had rock bands at high school like ‘ah no it’s not for me’ and I was playing my first electric guitar and I was really bad. I wasn’t giving myself the permission to be that but y’know no regrets because I’m doing it now and some of them, most of them, aren’t doing it anymore.
R: When you left school did you go to university?
C I did. I studied a law degree and then I studied film to become a film and video editor.
R: Was the music from the films and documentaries you were watching important to you?
C : Yes, a it’s a good point. I was really into music scores. From very classical Hollywood scores to Bernard Herrmann who worked for Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese; but also more recent stuff. I really enjoyed the scores Jonny Greenwood made for Paul Thomas Anderson, for example, I find them incredible, Jonny greenwood from Radiohead.
R: That was Shasta from Inherent Vice by Jonny Greenwood.
You said earlier about in your early 20s you went to Brazil. What led you to go to Brazil?
C: There is a album by Caetano Veloso, I was listening in the early 2000’s, he made for the American market. I was shooting a documentary in Argentina first and I fell in love first with Buenos Aires in Argentina and I still love that town. Of course those countries are massive, so the distance from Buenos Aires to Rio is like the distance of Paris to Warsaw so it’s massively far away but because you’re there the scale is not the seen as the same thing it was like the next country so I was like well since I’m here I should visit Brazil. Then I visited Rio and São Paulo. São Paulo is way less picturesque its even you could say slightly ugly, sorry I don’t want to be derogative, I love São Paulo, don’t get me wrong, it’s like going to Birmingham the first time you’re like err not sure but then you end up liking Birmingham because it has maybe something else to give you then being picturesque so that’s what São Paulo is all about. It’s a town a bit like London where lots of things are happening very cool stuff whereas Rio is a bit more conservative but also fascinating for the massive history it has and also the scene is interesting but not in the same way.
R Here is some Caetano Veloso.
I’m Robyn Rocket chatting to Clémentine March. So, Clem what kind of music were you listening to when you were in South America?
C: I was listening to lots of traditional Brazilian genre like samba in particular but also the pop scene at the time in Brazil which was quite interesting - pop in the large sense - and Brazilian hip hop which is quite good. It’s an immense country where lots of stuff is not getting exported so you need to be there to listen to them cos it’s a huge market like 200 million people or more now.
It’s very regionalist like in Central they don’t listen to the same thing in the North or South. In the South they maybe follow more international trends but in the north it’s called Nordestina. It’s lots of roots to lots of rhythms. It’s a country of lots of rhythms and lots of genres ,……Baião, samba, choro, forró, It’s so diverse and huge. David Byrne made incredible compilations about those things, he came first to those things in the 80s with his label, Luaka Bop. It’s fascinating to explore.
R: That was Fôrça Bruta by Jorge Benjor. Clem, what led you to think music might be something you could do , well, when you went back to France eventually what experiences did you have that inspired you?
C : I got introduced to Deerhoof , all my friends were massive fans and I remember seeing them countless times, especially in Paris 10 years ago, more then 10 years ago now, and that band, because they’re indie-famous but not like massive famous but they’ve been rolling their stuff for like two decades and they have this constant flow of playing and touring and they’re quite easy to find when their around in the UK. I find them really inspiring they must be 10 years older than me, I’m thinking, ok maybe I’d like to do that, there’s a future in that I mean it's lots of work but when you see them your like, ‘oh they’re doing really well’, they’re doing well in the sense that they still have creative juice.
R: That was a track by Deerhoof called ‘Running Thoughts’.
C: A friend of mine helped me, Guillaume, he’s a great guitarist and he said if you want to do it you just have one life so just do it.
I first played bass with this band called In Pursuit in Paris, and the reason why I played with them is I was telling a friend Ah I’m really frustrated to not play music oh you should play I’m playing drums in a really garage band and the guy is super cool and makes really great songs do you want to play the bass
and I was like ‘Wow Yea but I’d never played bass before’. He said, well, you need to practice a lot because in a 3 months’ time we’re going to record an EP. We’re recording on cassette. On cassette, unlike computer, you can’t make mistakes, so that was the first thing and then in the UK I met this lovely guy Raimund Wong who was illustrating and doing posters for friends and one day he invited me to a jam with his friend Mikey. I played bass for them and it was a very loose jam , but some of that music was included in an album by this band called Floating World Pictures.