Trip to the zoo could be a resort highlight for Beth

When hitting the road, there's one thing blues star Beth Hart enjoys above all else.
Blues musician Beth HartBlues musician Beth Hart
Blues musician Beth Hart

And she’ll be able to get her fix when she plays Blackpool Opera House next month.

“Scotty and I like to go shopping or we love to go to the zoo and we love to go to museums,” she said of days off and time out when touring.

“So, we’ve always done that together, I just adore that.

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“Sometimes I get a massage but really I am the happiest when I get to go to the zoo or when I get to go to the museum.

“It’s just so wonderfully inspirational, so beautiful.”

The American singer-songwriter and Grammy-nominated artist has already sold out the Royal Albert Hall, and will head to the resort as part of a 14-date UK tour.

“The audiences are really great in the UK and I really enjoyed that,” Beth said of her previous outings in the UK.

“So I really love it over there, I love Europe period.

“Europe has been so wonderful to me and it’s so, oh my, all the architecture and all the history and just to the way people think and live is so different.

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“I love being an American, I love being from here [the US] and it’s a beautiful country but we’ve got so much to learn.”

Hart has played with guitar greats such as Slash, Jeff Beck and Joe Bonamassa, in a career which launched in 1993 when after a $50 bet with a friend to enter a TV talent show – which she won.

This also started a downward spiral into depression, spending the $100,000 prize within six months.

There’s also been battles with drugs and bipolar disorder.

But it was a chance meeting with blues star Bonamassa that changed her trajectory, resulting in an invitation to sing on the Kevin Shirley-produced soul-rock covers album that became 2011’s Don’t Explain, forming a springboard for her own release Bang Bang Boom Boom in 2012 – when she admits she was actually happy.

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In October 2016, Beth released her current studio album Fire On The Floor to critical acclaim.

Her last UK tour was a solo show. This time Beth returns with her full band.

“I enjoy very much playing with my band,” she said. “Those solo shows are something I started doing, and to be honest, at the beginning it was just terrifying but then I ended up liking it more than any other way I played live.

“Maybe I just feel like the most like I am being myself when I don’t have any showbiz going on at all, when it’s just me sitting at the instrument, like I did as a little girl, and there is no dancing around or any that kind of stuff.

“It’s just me sitting there, I guess, being myself as much as I could ever be when it comes to singing and playing.”

* Beth Hart, Opera House, Blackpool, Thursday, April 26, call 01253 625252 to book.