WATCH: US star Gretchen Peters says farewell to UK touring

Her latest UK tour is also her last, a farewell tour which will bring her to Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion on May 21. It will be a chance for Gretchen to pay her respects to a country which gave her an audience probably 15 years before she found one back home in the States.

“It's really hard to overstate what the UK means to me,” she says. “At the point where I came for my first tour in the UK, my debut record was out (in the States) and it was languishing. And I just felt it in my bones. I knew I had been marketed in the States as a mainstream country artist and I knew that's not what I was and not what I wanted to be. I think there's just a reason for everything. I didn't know what I was going to do with my career but I came to the UK and suddenly everything that didn't work in the US worked in the UK. The things what went wrong in the States went right in the UK.

“I have pondered this so many times but I think one of the reasons is that I write songs which are very lyric forward. I think with my songs if you're not listening to the words, you're not getting it and I think the fact is that the British audiences got it straight away. Audiences in the UK responded to my work in a way that it took another 15 years in the US for me to find my audience and I will always be grateful.”

But as for that decision that this is the final tour, it's a decision which is unshakeable: “But definitely it's me! It's not you! And I hope I've made that clear. We made the decision, my husband Barry and I, in the last part of last year that we didn't want to do anymore full on multiple-city tours like I've been doing for the past 25 years. We were thinking about that when Covid happened and I think Covid hastened the process... though if ever Glastonbury came calling! We're not closing the door to special one-off concerts and festivals but I felt that it was time to bring to a close the big full-on tours.”

Mostly it is a quality of life decision: “I do think that was the impetus behind it. And it wasn't just the unpredictability of touring. It was also the fact that Covid has made the whole process a lot tougher and a lot more expensive. The cost of everything has gone up. There are a lot of financial considerations and then you have to add in the consideration that what if there was a flare-up of Covid. The cancellations would be so difficult.

“So those are some of the considerations but the main thing is that Barry and I had been doing this for a long time and physically it is hard. It is the old adage that they don't pay you for the two hours that you spend on the stage. They pay you for the other 22, and the other 22 had gotten increasingly hard over the years. We just wanted to slow down and I know you're not supposed to admit that as Americans. You're supposed to tough it out but actually I'm already seeing the benefits of making this decision on my creativity in a very positive way. I feel as if I am no longer on the treadmill of write a record, record a record, release a record, go on tour to promote the record and then do it all over again. I'm just not on that treadmill now. I find myself writing a song and thinking about it with just no agenda at all and that's really lovely. I think that's what I've been yearning for for a while now.”