Ripoff69

Although he feels at home in every corner of Europe, what Ripoff represents is the pure Central European blues: sometimes heated with intense emotion, sometimes filled with a decent melancholy. His songs tell of both comforting solitude and torturous loneliness, of love and sorrow. Like his contemporaries, he became interested in playing the guitar with the Woodstock fever, and by the age of 15 he was obsessed with listening to records. "I got into the blues through the greats of the sixties, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix. From them I went on to the originals, through Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee to the figures I love so much, Robert Johnson.

And while the influence of Western icons like Dylan and Waits can be detected in his music, Ripoff has managed to incorporate this into his own music in a way that resonates with the Central European heart. Although his mother tongue is German, he is fluent in French and Hungarian, and his songs are consistently written in English. He says it's all down to the blues, because only the intonation and rhythm of the English language can really convey the essence of the blues. "I've always written lyric-centric songs, although most of the songs are born out of me strumming my guitar in my room and then coming up with a chord progression. And when I feel the music is working, I write lyrics. I think it's the interplay between words and sound that's the most important, that's the musical world I'm really interested in. For me, it's interesting when the lyrics and the music are in balance."