Afrobeats singer Spyro has laid bare a childhood he says left him anxious, marked, and convinced he was already a failure.
In a sit-down with Rufai Oseni on Nevon HQ’s Black Box, uploaded on September 15, 2026, the “Who Is Your Guy?” star described growing up as a pastor’s son in Lagos and the damage he still carries.
“It was terrible for me growing up because my own father would always tell me as a child that he wasn’t sure I could be successful. He’d use some words on me that made me start seeing myself as a failure. There was nothing to build from because there was no positivity. I was like the black sheep of the family,” Spyro said.
He said the words followed him into school.
“I used to think of myself as a failure back then. I had this fear of the unknown and was always anxious. I’d go to school and ask myself, ‘Can I even graduate from here?’ From the things my dad used to say to me, I felt useless.”
He added that pastor’s children live under extra pressure “to conform to the kind of lifestyle their parents want them to live.”
The physical punishment, he said, was worse.
“My dad used to beat like he was trying to kill someone. I still have marks on my back from how he used to beat me. There are still very clear memories in my head that he acts like they never happened. Anytime I’m in his presence, I have this anger I can’t explain.”
Spyro said the public shaming cut just as deep.
“My dad would go tell outsiders that I’m a thief unprovoked… Once money or anything was missing in his church, he’d publicly claim I was the one behind it.”
When the missing item turned up, he said the apology was a carton of milk.
“What was milk supposed to do to the damage that had been done?”
The break, he said, came after he told his father that a primary school cleaner, Iya Romoke, had scratched and peeled his head with her nails.
“He called me a liar. He didn’t believe me but we went to confront her, and she denied knowing me. When we got home, my dad flogged me to stupor. I told him the truth and he beat me for telling him the truth. That broke me.”
He credited his mother with keeping him from hardening.
“That almost turned me into something else if not for the love from my mom and how she was able to constantly balance things.”
This is not the first time Spyro has spoken about that house. In earlier interviews he said his pastor father opposed his music career and that the daily force-feeding of religion made him hate the idea of God as a boy.
On Nevon HQ he said he has not fully healed.
“It’s a lot to unpack and I can’t even say I’ve healed from all that trauma, but I just came to terms with the fact that I have to heal for myself.”
He also said his father now acts as if those years never happened.
Spyro, born Oludipe Oluwasanmi David on October 1, 1990, grew up in Lagos, sang in church as a child, and later broke through with “Billing” and the Tiwa Savage remix of “Who Is Your Guy?”