Blues/Americana artist Jesse Roper offers Hove gig on return to UK

“Europe is pie in the sky for North American artists! It’s a long way to go but the driving is not so bad once you get there, and last year on the last tour I was on, was the first time I'd been to Europe.”

Arriving at the end of October Jesse was on the road until December 10, taking in the UK and amongst other places the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Denmark: “It was amazing. I don't know where even to begin to put into words just how fantastic it was. Since I've started doing music it has become a bit more of a business and I've had lots of ups and downs, but this was just really simple. But another factor why I enjoyed it so much was that I just had a break-up of an 11-year relationship just a couple of months before. And it was so beautiful to say goodbye to North America and the constant reminders. When you've been with someone for so long it is just everywhere all around you but it was just amazing to come across to Europe and it was all so different and to be driving on the left-hand side of the road! I just felt a freedom that I had not felt for so long. It was really beautiful and the band that I was touring with were super nice guys, and by the end of the tour I felt like I was really part of the band. And here we were going through all these countries that I’d only heard of before. It was brilliant.”

In fact Jesse is still drinking out of the mug that he brought in Bruges: “I had a day off and my mum said that she had always wanted to go to Bruges. I saw that was a couple of hours away, and I thought ‘OK maybe I'll go to Bruges’ and it just blew my mind away that it was so old and so beautiful and so clean and so touristy and so absolutely everything.”

As for the music: “I just love all music. In every genre I can find something that I really dig but I grew up loving Jimi Hendrix and that was really important. But blues does not sell very good so I have branched out and I've starting writing everything under the sun but I've sort of it ended up in a bluesy Americana spot but I push into it everything that I can.

“For a little while there was a lot of heartbreak in what I was writing but now I have started writing lots of songs with little stories and that's what I'm getting a kick out of at the moment. I'm trying to keep it constantly changing so that I don't get stuck in a rut but the last couple of years with a difficult relationship that was something that was on my mind. But then with Covid I started writing about death. I wrote this song called As We Rise. It's about death and I'm speaking to death, and I do actually think it's one of the best songs I've ever written. And then there was another one when I was just having a tough day, a song called Ship At Sea. I saw a ship off the coast and I was just thinking that I wanted it to send me a life raft so it's a song about a guy on a desert island.”