WHEN NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Jesse Sludds was announced as the winner of RTÉ’s The Late Late Show’s Opening Act competition on Friday night, he was lost for words.

On Monday morning, he still can’t quite comprehend it.

“I still can’t comprehend how big this whole thing is right now, and how big it can get,” he told The Journal.

Sludds was one of five competition finalists who performed live on the show, all vying for the chance to open for country music star Shania Twain at Limerick’s Thomond Park in July, and also opening The Late Late Show Country Special in October.

The Wexford man, who performed Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, was the top pick for the country music judging panel and the music industry jury vote, and came in second in the public vote.

However, he was close to not applying for the competition at all. Sludds said on the show he didn’t feel he was country enough. 

“I still don’t feel country enough,” he laughed today. “It’s still surreal. Like to think that I actually, genuinely wasn’t going to go for it.”

A healthy amount of pushing from friends and family led to him going for it regardless of it not being his usual music genre.

Sludds with Late Late host Patrick Kielty after being announced as the winner. Andres POVEDA Andres POVEDA

“Everybody was telling me to go do it. So I was like, you know what? I’m just gonna do it – just to chance my arm, and ended up winning.”

The other contestants “were absolutely amazing”, and when he heard them during rehearsals, he began to feel he was in with less of a chance.

“I was absolutely gobsmacked. I didn’t even have anything prepared to say if I did win, if you couldn’t tell.”

Sludds’s age demographic isn’t exactly the main audience for RTÉ’s flagship talk show, and he confessed he didn’t realise exactly how many people would be watching his performance, or how wide it would reach.

Nearly everybody he knows has seen the show and the final of the competition, and the magnitude of his upcoming opening of Twain’s Limerick show – where he’ll be performing in front of tens of thousands of people – has yet to fully dawn on him.

He’s both excited and nervous at the prospect, he said.

Andres Poveda Andres Poveda

Coming from a musical family – he grew up with his father Bobby Sludds gigging, playing R&B, soul, and pop music mainly – he said going into the music industry was “kind of unescapable”.

“I get a lot of music inspiration from my dad. So I kind of get a little bit of [those genres] off him, and I get my country off my nanny, I get a little bit of rock and roll from my aunties.”

Growing up, he played the drums from before he gained consciousness, he said, and then as he went into school he picked up other instruments: the tin whistle, piano, guitar, and eventually started singing.

“I was born and bred into it,” he said. 

As for the future, he’s planning on working on his own music. “Within the next five years, I’d like to be after releasing a good couple of singles, a few albums, and doing a tour myself.”