Camille performs 'Au
Port' on Later with Jools Holland
As Nicolas Sarkozy’s state visit to Britain began another French export was
launching her latest cross-Channel charm offensive on London. Admittedly the
avant-pop chanteuse Camille Dalmais arrived with less pomp than her
President, popping across on Eurostar. But in France she is almost as famous
as Sarko and Carla Bruni combined, having sold nearly half a million albums,
won awards and featured on the Ratatouille soundtrack.
Dalmais, who records and performs as Camille, even received a letter of
congratulation from Jacques Chirac, the former President, when her second
album, Le Fil, won France’s equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize in
2005. She remains unimpressed by his right-wing successor, even though she
and Sarkozy seem to be on a joint mission to boost the global profile of
female singer-songwriters.
“He’s not De Gaulle,” Dalmais pouts, Frenchly. “He’s not as clever. I think he
must be a very bad singer. I don’t like his voice.
“He’s playing this game of being in the tabloids. Intellectual magazines
respond to it too, which is really strange, really freaky. I think it’s bad,
not very critical. Too populist, I would say.”
I meet the 30-year-old Dalmais at the glitzy new Eurostar terminal in St
Pancras, where she is awaiting her train home to Paris. Casually dressed and
sporting rectangular glasses, her style is more off-duty actress than
high-maintenance diva, more gamine than grande dame.
Given the singer’s eccentric and sometimes extreme music, which features an
entire menagerie of animal noises, belches, squawks, hoots and trills, I am
half-expecting a strained encounter with a pretentious prima donna. In fact,
Dalmais is instantly engaging, down to earth and impressively fluent in
English. She is quick to laugh too, defying the post-Piaf stereotype of the
Parisian chanteuse as depressive diva.
“Everybody’s tragic. Life is tragic,” Dalmais insists, but her grin tells a
different story. “That’s why we need to lighten up. I think every situation
can be playful. An interview can be playful, being onstage can be playful,
cooking can be playful. And I like to be playful.”
Camille’s third album, the punningly titled Music Hole, is
certainly a playful affair. It is also a dazzling sonic patchwork of
21st-century chanson, avant-folk minimalism, propulsive rhythms and
chest-slapping body percussion. This is the kind of record that sniffy
critics dismiss as arty, contrived and whimsical – which it is, but in a
good way.
Accessible and mellifluous, yet boldly experimental, it adds several exotic
new flavours to those on the singer’s breakthrough, Le Fil.
“I think pop music has to be experimental, otherwise there is no use for it,”
Dalmais argues. “The work of an artist is to make something popular that is
not popular. You want to be heard, but at the same time you want to take
risks. The Beatles were pop icons, but they were very experimental.”
Global in scope but very French in execution, Music Hole was co-written
by an Englishman. Matthew Kerr, who records under the typographically
mangled alias MaJiKer, is Dalmais’ main musical partner. They met six years
ago on a summer music course in Dartington, Devon. He has since moved to
Paris to work with her and, while Dalmais refuses to be drawn on her private
life, at one point she seems to hint that Kerr is her partner in both
senses. It all makes Camille a contemporary poster girl for the Entente
Cordiale that Sarkozy seems so keen to revive. She is a heartwarming example
of Anglo-French collaboration, I suggest. “Yes, like Concorde,” she agrees.
“Like the Channel Tunnel. I’m the Eurostar!”
She was brought up in Paris by academic parents, and music and performance
loom large in the family. Her sister is a successful theatre producer, while
her brother plays keyboards for the singer-song-writer Sebastien Tellier,
France’s leftfield Eurovision ‘08 candidate.
Between albums, Dalmais has dabbled in acting, and been a guest vocalist with
the Paris-based retro-covers band Nouvelle Vague. But a solo career was
always her main goal. And it was even when she was studying at the
prestigious Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, known as Sciences Po, the
alma mater of numerous Alist politicians including Chirac and Ségolène
Royale. It was during her final summer there that she recorded her debut
album, Le Sac des Filles.
So running for Sarkozy’s job was never an ambition? “No. You can write that,”
she nods. “If it’s going to sell more albums, please do.”
Music Hole is packed with rhythm, passion and offbeat humour. The first
single, Gospel with No Lord, is a jauntily percussive humanist hymn
to “pagan” family values. Another stand-out, Money Note,
features Dalmais trying to out-scream the vaulting range of Céline Dion,
Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton and Mariah Carey.
“It’s a comedy song, but it’s actually true,” she laughs. “Mariah goes very
high but one day I want to reach the highest note on the piano. I’m not
competing on the expression level, because everybody’s unique, but you can
compete on more technical things. For me it’s more of a game, a challenge.”
Another album highlight, Cats and Dogs, is a droll warning against the
perils of anthropomorphising domestic pets. Dalmais yowls and miaows the
backing vocal with comic gusto, yet her underlying message is a sad
reflection on human loneliness. Needless to say, she has no pets at home.
“We are so egocentric, we think we are the centre of the world,” she argues.
“We can’t have animals without thinking they are human. They are different,
they are part of nature. They can eat us, you know?”
Also on Music Hole is a baroque, octave-leaping piano ballad called Katie’s
Tea, which sounds like a brazen homage to Kate Bush in the
imitation-as-flattery mould. Not so, Dalmais insists. “I love Kate Bush, but
it’s not a homage,” she says. “It’s not conscious, maybe its subconscious.
I’m always amazed to learn that she does not do many live shows, because she
is so theatrical.”
But Björk’s name features in Camille reviews much more than Bush’s. It comes
as no surprise that Music Hole was mixed in Reykjavik by the
Icelandic diva’s regular collaborator Valgeir Sigurðsson. Dalmais frequently
uses layered human voices and organic rhythms similar to those on Björk’s
2004 album Medulla.
“I love her as an artist because she’s got her own aesthetic,” Dalmais says.
“She is more than a musician, she has a whole world around her. She doesn’t
do that many backing vocals like I do, but she uses her voice in lots of
different ways – from the angel to the beast, from the child to the old
lady.
“She’s experimental and pop at the same time, maybe that’s why people compare
me to her. But otherwise I think our voices are very different.”
Her mother taught English, and Dalmais has always written bilingual songs. But Music
Hole contains more English lyrics that its two predecessors combined,
suggesting a possible aiming for an international market.
“Of course, I want to be a global superstar,” the singer says with a sarcastic
shrug. In fact, she claims that her record label was wary of her drift
towards English, given the level of cultural protectionism in France, where
50/50 radio quotas help to sustain the commercial profile of Francophone
music.
“Three-quarters of my sales are in France,” she says. “And people in France
are quite touchy when French people sing in English, because they take it
the way you just said – ‘Oh, she is going for commercial music’. It’s like
Anglo-Saxon people are still seen as cultural invaders.”
Dalmais has an ambivalent relationship with French pop music. She grew up loving
the lyrical cheek and musical diversity of Serge Gainsbourg and the gritty
southern passion of Claude Nougaro. But she glumly admits that much modern
Gallic music remains “too Frenchy French, just telling a story, with no
groove or physicality. Our strength is more to conceptualise, to
intellectualise, to play on words. We are not a very rhythmical country.”
The singer has similar love-hate feelings towards Paris, the city of her
birth. “Paris is one of these cities, like New York, which is getting so
expensive that underground life is not as flourishing as it was before,” she
says. “There are still things going on but it needs to be shaken up a
little. For sure there is a challenge in Paris, to stay there and shake
things up.”
Is that Camille’s secret mission? To revive French pop? “Hmmm,” smiles the
enigmatic Eurostar, slinking off towards passport control. “I will try my
best.”
— Music Hole is released on Arpil 7 by EMI. Camille plays
Koko, London NW1, on May 14 (0844 8472258)
Voilà les filles: the new queens of French pop
Carla Bruni For her most recent album the well-read Mme Sarkozy set
poems by Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson and Yeats to gentle strummings.
Emily Loizeau The pianist and singer-songwriter’s sumptuous, musical
theatre-inspired songs have been a surprise YouTube smash.
Émilie Simon Singer and multi-instrumentalist, scored the
soundtrack to March of the Penguins.
Soko A spit for fellow actress Marion Cotillard, Stéphanie Sokolinski
makes pretty, spiky, acoustic pop. One demo has already gone to No 1 in
Belgium.
Charlotte Gainsbourg Archetype of Gallic cool, she had Jarvis Cocker,
Neil Hannon and Air on board for her latest project.
Yael Naim Paris-born, raised in Israel, recently became the first
Israeli artist to have a US Top Ten hit.
