Camille

For someone who is in the middle of a swathe of interviews in light of both her upcoming European tour and her new album 'Music Hole', Camille (aka Camille Dalmais) has a rather strong sense of whimsy. The phone conversation generally steers towards Camille's music, her influences and the industry as a whole, but we also get sidetracked by her love of language more than once.

Camille seems to take particular pleasure in sound, occasionally pausing to revel in a brief babble of vowels as she discusses her music. At one point, upon polite request, I am even privy to a brief primer in French pronunciation. As I discover, the trick to pronouncing words like 'septembre' (as in P‰le Septembre, the song from her previous album and considerable commercial and critical success, 'Le Fil') is to avoid over-pronouncing the 'r' sounds. Camille sweetly assures me that I've actually got it down pat.

She has a dry sense of humour too, as evidenced by the bilingual musician's talk about her recent goings-on. When asked if she's getting enough sleep in the midst of rehearsals, publicity and preparation for the tour, she pauses for a moment.

"Hmm... that's my problem. I feel I don't. I need to take care of that. I'm not on cocaine, you know. I need to sleep." She laughs wryly, before I steer the conversation towards her tour and what is likely to follow. She reveals that after returning to France, she wants to visit Australia at the start of next year.

"I really want to come, but I want to have the time to come," she explains. "It's such a long trip - I don't want to come down for three days and then come back. I think everybody in the band feels the same. We want to experience the country."

I, of course, reply enthusiastically. Camille jokingly mentions that she'd need accommodation and asks if I can fit the band in my flat.

"Can you welcome us all in between tour dates?" I can tell by her voice that she's grinning on the other end of the line. I'm also pondering how my housemate would feel about a young French pop chanteuse staying over. I'm fairly sure he was one of the many voters who helped Camille's single Ta Douleur reach number 26 on Triple J's Hottest 100 songs of 2006 - a considerable feat for a song which Camille sings in French.

Of course, being fluent in both French and English, the shift from the former to the latter on 'Music Hole' had less to do with trying to reach a wider audience and more to do with Camille's own cultural identity. "I was very happy that Australia reacted well to my last album, though it was in French," she tells me. "But I feel the fact that I'm singing in English is more related to my culture, which is French of course, but also European, and I speak English and relate to Anglo-Saxon culture too. It was time for me to explore, and see how I could write songs in English. It corresponds to a more open part of myself, too, because it's outside of France, and outside of where I was born."

With a shift in language comes a shift in sound, too, particularly for a musician whose work frequently layers her own voice over itself. As it turns out, the sonic qualities of the English language were another large influence in the new direction of Camille's music. "The language is more open, there are more vowels than in French. There are big vowels and you can spend time on them." She takes a moment to make one of those slightly haphazard vowel sounds for a few seconds, playing with her own voice much in the same way as she does in her music.

This fascination with the quirks of the human voice has characterised Camille's work across three studio albums now. It's also largely self-taught: Camille studied political science rather than music or arts, and it has only been recently that she has undertaken much in the way of studies in music.

When asked why she switched to focusing on music and left political science behind, the line goes quiet for a moment. "It's just that what I was studying..." she begins slowly, before trailing off.

"I was going to say it was shit," she admits with a laugh. "It wasn't shit. But it didn't cross my mind to go to an art school. Perhaps because they're not that open-minded in France. And writing is so personal, I didn't feel anyone could really teach me what I wanted to say. I don't think you need to know everything to become an artist, you just need to express yourself."

Brian O'Neill

'Music Hole' is out now through EMI.