Nigerian music star Flavour, whose real name is Chinedu Okoli, has revisited a crucial turning point in his early career, revealing that witnessing P-Square perform shifted his mindset and pushed him to redefine his artistic journey.
In an interview on the In My Opinion podcast, Flavour narrated a moment that stayed with him for years.
He was performing at a venue when the atmosphere abruptly changed following the arrival of Peter and Paul Okoye, known collectively as P-Square.
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The event manager quickly asked Flavour to step aside, handing over the stage to the acclaimed duo.
“I was playing and immediately P-Square came in, the manager said ‘Hello, get off that thing!’ I switched off and passed the microphone, went somewhere and sat down,” he said.
Flavour recalled how Paul’s voice and the performance of their hit track Temptation instantly ignited the crowd. “Girls were saying ‘wow wow wow’ and Paul of P-Square took the microphone with his voice and just sang ‘This na temptation’, everywhere scattered,” he recalled.
In that moment, Flavour realised that although he could sing and play instruments, he hadn’t yet found his unique sound. “So I was like ‘na the same music these people dey do, me dey here with una, una shout like this for me’. I was so cold, I was just watching, they did their thing,” he said.
The experience left him asking hard questions about his career direction. “Then it started to occur to me that these guys, the difference is they create their own music, they make a sound and go to the studio and record and that’s how it’s done, and you are just a music man,” he admitted.
That realisation became the spark that led him to develop his own musical identity. “So, how do I switch from music man to an artist? That was the difficult part of it, and I thought it was going to be easy because I could play, I could sing…but now to create your own sound, where are you going to start from?”
This key moment eventually set Flavour on the path to stardom, leading to major hits like Ada Ada, and positioning him as one of the most recognisable names in Nigerian music.
