Tears In The Club: BenjiFlow Brings The Feeling Into The Room

Inside UNDR on Friday 4th September, there was no real barrier between BenjiFlow and the  people who had come to see him. The band played from the centre of the room, with the  crowd gathered around them in a circle, while NBK.MP3 set the tone before the live set  began. Benji moved freely between the microphone and the musicians, and at one point  picked up the guitar himself, making the performance feel less like a traditional show and  more like being invited into a room where musicians were simply playing. It was a fitting  image for an artist whose relationship with musicianship began long before he became BenjiFlow.

In our conversation, he remembered being around ten years old when his uncle  took him to a studio with Mary Mary, where he watched Warren Campbell move between  instruments. “He played like five instruments,” Benji recalled. “He played some drums, and  he went on keys, he went on guitar, and he went on the board. I was like 10 thinking, this is  what I want to do.” Years later, seeing Benji move from vocals to guitar in the middle of a  tightly packed room felt like watching that same lesson come full circle. The musician and  the performer were never separate. 

That sense of movement is at the heart of Tears In The Club, a song that begins with the  collision of a private emotion and a very public setting. Benji remembers being in a club  thinking about “the situation that I had just been out of”, when “the pain of having so many  memories of someone that you can’t have more of” suddenly caught up with him. He was  surrounded by people enjoying themselves, yet he was experiencing something entirely  different. “There were like 20 of us, and they were all being lit. I’m just there looking around,  and I’m, bro, this is pain.” That moment of being physically present while emotionally  somewhere else became the foundation of the track. At UNDR, that same tension felt almost  built into the room. The crowd moved around the live band; Benji performed from within the  circle rather than above it, and the song became something shared without losing the intimacy  of its origin. He does not ask listeners to arrive at one particular emotion either. “Something.  Anything. Because as long as you feel something.” For Benji, the feeling is the point. 

That openness is reflected in the way he thinks about his music more broadly. When we  spoke about his sound, he admitted that not being easily defined “has been tough,” particularly in an industry where there are clear places for artists who fit neatly into a  category. “The hybrid people, they’re a bit in the middle,” he said. Rather than seeing that as  a limitation, he has come to see it as something worth representing. “My responsibility is still  to represent the people like us that are here today that still love the mix and blend of genres  and still want to fly the flag for people.” His own creative reference points make that instinct  clear. In the studio, he thinks about whether the artists he considers greats would connect  with what he is making. “If D’Angelo was alive today, Bob Marley was alive today, Dennis  Brown was alive today, Fela [Kuti] was alive today, and I press play, would they like it?” For  Benji, making music is ultimately about meeting his own standard first, alongside what he  calls his “imaginary greats”. It is why the performance at UNDR felt so natural, with no need  to decide whether he should be the producer, musician or vocalist when he could inhabit all  of those roles at once. 

That fluidity is also what pushed him from behind the scenes into becoming an artist himself.  Benji had wanted to be a producer since primary school, but when he began taking his music to labels, he found that people would often hear him and immediately think about who they  could place him behind in the studio. His response was to make something that could speak  for itself. “The transition to an artist is gonna be just so I have an example that when I  produce, I have a song that you guys can look at. I don’t have to explain myself.” Watching  him play guitar, sing, and move through the musicians around him at UNDR made that  statement feel particularly significant. He was not presenting one version of himself to the  room. He was showing the full relationship between producer, musician, and artist that he  had been building since he was a child. 

By the end of the night, Tears In The Club felt bigger than the heartbreak that first inspired it.  Benji spoke about the people who had chosen to spend their Friday night with him,  recognizing that “the world is a bit tough for everyone right now” and that “everyone’s got a  situation”. “Economy’s tight. P’s are tight. Trains tickets, everything’s tight,” he said. That  awareness carried through the performance, where a room full of people could dance, listen,  remember, and feel something different without needing to explain why. The song was born  from a moment when Benji found himself emotional in the middle of a club, and at UNDR,  he recreated that contradiction for everyone in the room. As he told me before the performance, “If the tear comes, it comes.”