Yemi Alade: My best performance started with boos

Johnny singer Yemi Alade has had a very good year since the release of that single that has now made her a household name in music.

However the BET and MTV award nominee has had some scary moments in her career, which she shared in an exclusive interview with TheCable.

“One scary part for me, which sometimes happens even up till now, is having to perform or entertain a crowd that you know nothing about,” she said.

“You don’t know if you are going to be looking at you and you’d just have to leave the stage just like that.”

She narrated her experience of a performance she did in an African country that started off horribly and turned around to be the best performance of her career so far.

“My best performance started with boos. This was late last year when I performed in Tanzania. I was late arriving for the concert, which wasn’t my fault. We took almost half the entire day to fly there.

“Then I got there at 1 am when they had been waiting since 11pm. So I got there and the crowd was just booing me heavily and they don’t speak English so they didn’t understand my explanation.

“I just started performing and next thing they started singing along to all my songs. It was hard at first because it was a stadium of over 50,000 people booing me because I was late. That was one the scariest moments for me but turned out to be the best till date.

“The thing is that they don’t really speak English, mostly Swahili. I don’t know any Swahili but they could sing all my songs, which was really breath-taking for me.

“I’ve been to other countries around there since then but I definitely can’t wait to go back.”

Yemi Alade sings fluently in French as well as English, hence she is a Nigerian singer with a growing international profile in both Anglophone and Francophone countries.

Luckily for her, she says she is now getting over her fear of crowd reaction: “It has always been scary for me to relate and I had to overcome that fear and realise that they are all just human beings who just want to have a good time.”