Playing proper shows in her post-pandemic homeland, making headlines for her politics and losing her privacy, the 20-year-old viral pop star is now learning to deal with real-life fame
Twelve thousand fans packed into a venue on a Saturday night, phones aloft, no masks in sight: it looks like a scene from another era, not October 2020. When Benee swaggers across the stage of Auckland’s Spark Arena, she may as well be the only pop star in the world: live
music recently resumed in her native
New Zealand. More concert-deprived, homebound fans watch enviously via livestream.
“Stuff like that, I choose not to overthink,” 20-year-old Stella Bennett says of the magnitude of the event, speaking over Zoom two weeks later. “I’m already a huge fretter.” (In her broad “Nu-Zild” accent, it sounds like “fritter”; Benee, meanwhile, is pronounced “Benny”.) Her national tour narrowly missed disruption from a localised lockdown that ended a few weeks earlier. “Everyone is just so amped to be back at gigs,” she says. “It had this weird kind of new gig energy. I thought people would be really drunk, and some of them were, but a lot of them were just so focused.”