Claudia Beni

Claudia Beni is a Croatian pop singer, born on 30 May 1986 in Opatija. She started young: as a girl she was already an experienced band singer with Teens, the group formerly known as Mići rokeri, and toured Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Montenegro with them. She was only 12 when she first stood on the stage of Dora, the Croatian selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, together with the group.

After the Teens had sold more than 30,000 copies of their three CDs and won a Porin in 2002, she left the group for a solo career. Her first album, Claudia, recorded when she was just 16, came out shortly before the summer of 2002 with twelve songs. "Tako hrabar da me ostaviš", awarded at the Split Festival in 2001, "Ili ona ili ja" from Zagrebfest 2001 and "Led" from HRF 2002 took her to the top of the Croatian charts. With Ivana Banfić she recorded "Hrvatice vas vole" for the national football team at the 2002 World Cup in Japan.

In 2003 she entered Dora with "Više nisam tvoja" and, to the surprise of many including herself, won. She represented Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2003 in Riga and finished 15th; the song also exists in English as "I Can't Be Your Lover". Her second album, Čista kao suza, followed on Menart, and in 2006 she returned to Dora with "Samo ti mi ostani", which did not reach the final.

In 2008 Claudia Beni stepped away from the music scene and, far from the public eye, worked as a hairdresser in her native Opatija. She came back in 2013 as the lead singer of the local band Koktelsi and sang with them until 2015. The playlist gathers her songs, from "Više nisam tvoja" and "Led" to "Čista kao suza" and "Krivo vrijeme, krivi grad".