Camille, a sensitive young singer-songwriter renowned for her energetic live performances, is impossible to pin down into any existing music category. The young 'chanteuse', who insists she finds "stability in instability", is currently winning increasing popularity on the mainstream.

Camille, who had also developed a strong interest in bossa nova and American musicals, was already set on taking to the stage one day herself as a dancer, an actress or a singer. Yet she never once conceived of the idea of learning her profession in any kind of institution. For her, the arts were a personal world, to be explored in an instinctive, self-taught way. Camille went on to give her first public performance, singing at a wedding when she was just 16. "Un homme déserté", the song she performed at the wedding, was co-written with friends.

Camille gave a series of concerts at the Couvent des Récollets in Paris from 1 to 13 September 2011 to present her new album, which she released in October under the title “Ilo Veyou” (i.e. “I love you”!). The collection reveals some impressive vocal mastery from the singer, accompanied by acoustic instruments.Clément Ducol was involved in the arrangements and produced some of the tracks. Mixing pop, chanson and folk, Camille confidently navigates in a world stamped with her pared-down, shifting and enchanting style. The first single taken from the album was an unadorned, appealing song called “L’étourderie”.

Camille has form when it comes to turning situations on their head. After her second album, Le Fil, was released in 2005, winning her a huge fanbase in France and selling more than 500,000 copies, she followed it up with an album sung almost entirely in English – to the dismay of many Francophone listeners.

But it's on stage that Camille really comes into her own, and her shows are object lessons in how to break down the wall between audience and performer. When she played Koko and the Roundhouse three years ago, normally reticent London audiences were falling over themselves to interact with the singer and participate in her complex call-and-response games.

Camille concert is an extraordinary experience. Over two hours, the maverick singer writhes barefoot on the floor, dances like a galloping horse, howls like a wolf, sings audacious harmonies with a trio of backing vocalists and hits the kind of high notes that might only be audible to dogs.

Every sound created on stage is made physically by Camille and her sextet. Apart from her Greek chorus of backing singers, there are two percussionists (who dance, theatrically, around their kits) and one keyboard player (who jumps between a Moog synthesizer and a shabby, out-of-tune prepared piano). On Home Is Where It Hurts, the band create steampunk techno, a riot of jabbering piano, rhythmic humming and clattering percussion. On Ilo Veyou, their foot-stomps and yodelling vocals forge a junkyard R&B; Paris, a bittersweet hymn to Camille’s home, is transformed into a piece of bubble-gum doo-wop.

In an interview with The Guardian, she said: "My dream now would be to perform in the same theatre every night, right next to my place, and all the world would come to me." She laughs. "But what I have to do now is go around with my family, and sometimes I'm so tired. The fast, fassssst ways of travelling now make me more tired than going by foot, I think."
Still, she loves playing live and interacting with audiences. "I want people to be stimulated and aware, not passive. Some shows are just like watching a TV screen."

Sources:

http://www.rfimusic.com/artist/chanson/camille/biography.html
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/oct/16/camille-ilo-veyou-album
https://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/music/camille-review-a-parisian-phenomenon-at-the-barbican-a3672251.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_(singer)