Tiwa Savage, Up Close at Maida Vale

Hit play and the room shrinks. You can hear it chairs easing, a small ripple of voices that know each other by first name, the kind of intimacy you don’t stage-manage. No fog, no spectacle. Just Tiwa Savage, a tight circle of family and friends, and songs she didn’t write to impress anyone outside that circle first.

“This One is Personal” isn’t branding. It’s a boundary she crossed out loud. Two years of writing through a dark patch, not around it. She said it straight to DJ Target: when heartbreak hit, she went looking for the kind of record she used to lean on Brandy-level confessionals but inside Afrobeats there wasn’t a reference she could point to and say, that’s mine. So she made it. Not a mood board. A shelter.

Angel Dust carries like a private conversation overheard by a mic with good timing. Phrasing pulls low, then rises with a rough edge she doesn’t sand down. No melisma for show. The grit stays. Holding It Down doesn’t try to be bigger than the room; it fills it, the way late-night honesty carries across a kitchen table and knocks at your chest before the tea’s even cooled. 10% arrives with a steadiness that reads like resolve rather than triumph no lifted chin, just tightened grip. And On The Low presses the groove inward until you feel the space between her and the drum like a thought she hasn’t decided to say yet.

Between the takes, Target pulls threads and she doesn’t dodge. Genre? Call it what you need to call it. “Being called an Afrobeats artist, there’s no problem with it.” She makes the point without drama Beyoncé moved from R&B to Country and did it clean; borders only hold if you haven’t walked past them. The title isn’t a trap. It’s a signpost, useful for anyone who isn’t already inside.

Other artists pad this stretch with posture. She talks like a working musician who got through something and doesn’t plan on mythologising it. “Maybe I really am done, maybe it’s just me and my son,” she says, half-joking, half-spent, then quotes him teasing back what happens when he gets married? The laugh in the room lands soft, but what lingers is the possibility that she meant the first part more than the second. These songs are still warm. She’s still carrying them.

This is where the project lives: not in novelty, not in a chase for a slot, but in pressure-tested writing that trusts closeness. You can hear the choices. The way she sits on a note just long enough to let the lyric carry its own weight. The refusal to over-decorate a line that’s already heavy. The patience to let silence do a sliver of work, then step back in without a flourish. It’s the craft you develop when you stop asking a song to rescue you and start using it to describe the room you’re actually in.

There’s a cultural argument buzzing in the background what Afrobeats is or isn’t, who it’s for, how it travels but she doesn’t waste energy on that. She’s already moved. The doctorate in music is a headline elsewhere; here it reads like context for discipline, not a trophy. The advice for young artists isn’t packaged as a slogan; it’s implicit in the build. Write the thing you couldn’t find when you needed it. Stay close to your centre when the market asks you to drift. Don’t bluff vulnerability you’re still living through. If you have to, step away until you can say it without lying.

Maida Vale has history layered in the air, but this night on tape, on screen feels deliberately small, almost defiant in its scale. The intimacy isn’t a budget constraint; it’s the point. The camera catches faces that know when to give space and when to lean forward. The band plays like accompaniment, not armour. You get the sense this whole set could travel with nothing but a keyboard, a snare, and her voice, and it would still do the job.

For a certain kind of listener, this is the record they were waiting on but didn’t know how to ask for. Afrobeats can celebrate with the best of them; it also has room for the late-night confessional, for the unspectacular truth that hurts clean. “I didn’t want to not create something like that for women like me,” she says, and the phrase sits there, simple and exact. The older you get, the more you recognise the power in refusing to add decoration where a sentence already cuts.

Industry will clock the rollout: BBC Radio 1Xtra, Target in the chair, the Maida Vale stamp, BBC Sounds in the headphones, 1Xtra’s YouTube on loop, iPlayer for the afters. That’s infrastructure doing its job. But the spine of this moment doesn’t live in the platforms. It lives in the way the songs refuse to blink. In the decision to show up without a costume. In the small, stubborn insistence that pain can be written clearly enough to give someone else a foothold when the floor goes out.

There’s no heroic swell at the end of the set. No triumphant key change. She finishes like she began controlled, present, unsentimental. The last note slides off and the room doesn’t clap right away. That beat of held air says more than any closer. It’s the sound of people recognising that a story just ended on purpose, and that not everything gets tied up for the ride home.

Maybe she calls the project personal because it is. Maybe she calls it that to warn you. Either way, it fits. When the tape stops, the feeling that stays is simple: Tiwa Savage didn’t ask for belief. She brought receipts.