The overexcited waitress has given us away. When Temilade Openiyi scooches into a corner booth at a central London restaurant – half an hour late, hood up, a small entourage trailing behind – we have about five minutes of good chat before her cover is blown. “Are you Tems?!” the waitress interrupts, wide-eyed. Openiyi pauses, unsure whether to acknowledge or deflect. Eventually, she finishes stirring her tea and looks up. “Yes, hi.” The waitress squeals and disappears. Moments later, she returns breathless to announce that she has told the manager that Tems – or “Tems!” as she shrieks – is here and that we will receive exemplary service. The perks of being famous, eh?
Nigeria’s highest-charting female musician might be wary of creating a scene, but it seems that fanfare can’t help but follow her around. The whole exchange makes me curious. Is it awkward? Cringe? Exciting? “It happens a lot,” Tems says, perusing the menu, “but I usually escape before anyone has a chance to say anything.”
In the space of eight years, Tems has metamorphosed from one-to-watch to global megastar. If her first EP, 2020’s For Broken Ears, served as a tight, banger-after-banger introduction to Tems’s infectious blend of R&B and Afrobeats, then her follow-up, 2024’s Born in the Wild, succeeded in cementing a fan base that included both seasoned Afrobeats listeners and suburban Middle England mothers listening to “Love Me JeJe” on the drive to work. There have been Grammys – two of them – performances at Wembley with Coldplay, a Glastonbury set and blockbuster collaborations with everyone from Beyoncé to Drake to Justin Bieber – her feature on Dave’s “Raindance” earned her her first UK number one. In the midst of it all, the 31-year-old also became the first Nigerian artist to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 with Future’s “Wait For U”, pushing her voice further mainstream. In 2025, she launched The Leading Vibe, a mentorship initiative supporting young African women in music; this summer, she will lead its inaugural edition outside of Africa, in London. Not bad for someone once known in school simply as “the annoying girl that just always sings”.
“She has this incredible way of being so fully herself,” says Jorja Smith of her friend, who she calls “Superstar Tems”. Next month, the pair will co-headline at London’s All Points East festival. “I’m completely in awe of her,” Smith says. “The confidence, the sexiness, the energy, the light… I loved her writing, her melodies and the way she builds songs, from the first moment I heard her. I still can’t quite believe we’re doing All Points East together – it’s going to be such a special day.”London is one of Tems’s favourite places to perform – not least because it is the place she has called home for five years. Born in Lagos to a Nigerian mother and British Nigerian father, Tems moved to the UK as a baby with her parents and older brother, before returning to Nigeria with her mother following her parents’ divorce when she was five. Although she lives in London now, she remembers nothing of her early childhood here. “I only remember Nigeria,” she tells me. Her brother, Tunji, fills in the British blanks for her, but life in Lagos was a time of playing on swings and watching her brother kick a ball with his friends. Growing up, she was “mad quiet” – so quiet, in fact, that she did not speak until she was three years old. She started writing songs at about the age of nine and sang constantly around the house, much to her family’s irritation. “They could lock me up in a room and force me to do homework,” she says, “but they could not stop me from singing.”
Since our first meeting weeks ago, Tems has performed at the Saint Lucia Jazz & Arts Festival, taken some time to reset and been off grid working on top-secret new music. “Who told you that?” she says, laughing, when I ask her how the studio is treating her. “That’s the thing,” she says coyly, “I’m always writing music, even when I’m not in the studio.” For Tems, songwriting seems to happen whether she has planned for it or not (“I feel something and then I sing it”) and she is always, consciously or otherwise, working towards a project. What that project looks like remains unclear as of right now, but the music is making her “feel good”. “I don’t really think I’m a singles kind of artist,” she says. “I feel like I’m more of a project kind of person… But yeah,” she concedes, “I’ve been writing some songs.”
For a while, though, music was simply a hobby. She reluctantly studied economics in Johannesburg before working in marketing. In 2018, she finally quit her job and released her debut single, “Mr Rebel”, though nobody around her really understood the decision. “People were side-eyeing me a lot,” she says, fixing her long tousled waves. “I was just like, ‘Well I really love this and I know I can do it, and I don’t know why I love it so much, but this is where I’m meant to be.’” Around this time she met her now manager, Wale Davies, an artist himself, who was a connective tissue within Lagos’s fizzing music scene. In October 2020, everything changed. Wizkid – Africa’s bestselling artist of all time – asked her to hop on “Essence”, a song that would become one of the first truly global Afrobeats hits, invite a remix from Justin Bieber and introduce Tems’s smoky, elastic voice to the world.
The voice – that silky alto that slips easily between genres and moods – is what seems to draw people in first, famous fans included. How does it feel to have a roster of A-listers lining up to collaborate with her? “I would really like to ask them,” she says, laughing. “I want to ask, ‘Yo, what happened? What’s the story? What made you think of me?’” Last year, Bieber flew Tems to the south of France to work on music while he was recording SWAG. Anyone who’s anyone in the Bieberverse was there – Mk.gee, Dijon, Hailey – and the sessions evolved into their latest collaboration, “I Think You’re Special”. Later, when Bieber headlined Coachella in April 2026, he invited Tems on stage to perform with him. “Justin is a sweetheart,” she says. “He’s so cute. He is a great person.”
But Tems doesn’t “really like to think too much about accomplishments”, she tells me. “I try not to [be] like, ‘Oh, I really need to get this Grammy’ or ‘I need to get this chart position.’ That’s a lot of pressure. I know so many amazing artists who I feel should have got Grammys. Are they any less amazing because they didn’t get an award? I know when I feel really, really good about a song,” she leans in, hands on chest. “Even if nobody listens to this song, ever, I will enjoy this song for myself.”
Maybe that hard-won self-belief is exactly what keeps her so grounded. Tems is happiest in the small rituals of her own making: massages, cooking “nice little meals”, watching football (she is a devoted Manchester United fan and also owns a stake in San Diego FC), then winding down in her west London flat to soft jazz playlists or Frank Ocean deep cuts. “I love my house,” she says. “It is my favourite place in the world.” She blends her own loose-leaf tea, makes her own perfume – one amber-y, oud-y scent clung to my wrist hours after she gave me a spritz.
Fashion, naturally, forms a large part of that world too. Although her style begins with practicality – “I choose comfort a lot” – crystal-encrusted gowns and form-fitting corsets have become signatures for the red carpet and on stage. Her wardrobe reflects an affinity for boundary-pushing talent: from Dilara Findikoglu and demi-couturier Ellie Misner to the dramatic silhouettes of Spanish designer Luis de Javier and British Ghanaian stalwart Ozwald Boateng. Together, with the help of her stylist, Dunsin Wright, she has forged a fashion identity that is both head-turning and unmistakably her own. There’s always room for razzle dazzle too. “They say Yoruba women like bling,” she tells me, “so I always have to have something that shines.”
There is also, obviously, a music nerd lurking beneath the superstar exterior. Tems lights up when discussing Frank Ocean, one of her dream collaborators alongside Sade. She has been obsessed with Ocean since his SoundCloud days, downloading every song she could find onto an iPod her uncle gave her and marvelling at his lyrical genius. You can hear traces of that influence – soulful and often conversational melodies – in her own writing, though her own practice is not formulaic. “In the moment, I don’t know what’s going to be a banger,” she says. “I just detach myself.” Perhaps that detachment is what allows her to move through each surreal new chapter but, for now, she has little interest in pausing long enough to overthink it. “Maybe at some point, when I’m, like, 50, I can contemplate the pressures,” she says. But for now, there is work to do. “I’m like, ‘OK, what’s next?’”
Main look: Draped silk dress, Dior. Hair: Issac Poleon. Make-up: Kayla Perez. Nails: Imarni. Tailor: Nafisa Tosh. Production: Tiagi. Digital artwork: CROSS POST LTD
Original article appeared on British Vogue
GLAMOUR Recommends
Tems’ Leading Vibe Initiative announces South Africa edition for emerging women in music
How to get Tems’s glossy red carpet lip combo from the 2025 GQ MOTY Awards
Tems leaves fans in awe with mesmerising performance in South Africa
Tems’ new podcast ‘Leading Radio Vibe’ is empowering women to find their voice
