The struggle is real

UK protest singer and socialist activist Grace Petrie has been championed by Billy Bragg, toured to support Jeremy Corbyn's election campaign and she's touring Ireland in June.

Grace Petrie. Photo via Grace Petrie

There’s a song on Grace Petrie’s latest album called Galway, and it’s about a gig with less-than-ideal attendance she once had in a renowned venue in the City of the Tribes.

A cappella, she tells the tale of being persuaded by the promoter to wait an extra hour in case of walk-ups and ending up playing a gig to an audience of about five.

It is, she tells me over the phone, the true story of her first ever gig in Galway.

“We’d only sold about five tickets and five people had shown up,” she says with a rueful little chuckle. “The gig was advertised at eight, and the guys at the venue said, ‘let’s just wait until nine,’ and I was saying, ‘I really don’t think anyone else is coming.’ There’s no dressing room there, so I just sat down with the people who had shown up and waited and then went, ‘ok, I guess I’d better get up and sing some songs.’ Bless the small audience that were there, though. They were heroic and really made me feel like it hadn’t been a waste of time.”

True to Petrie’s unerring songwriting knack for wringing a pithy truth or moral lesson out of just about any situation, Galway peaks with the lovely line, “It’s not the size of the crowd that’s in the gig, but the gig that’s in the crowd.”

Now, she says candidly, she’s worried that the latest tour of Irish venues is going to break even Galway’s minute attendance record.

“We need all the help we can get in Cork,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think we’re selling tickets. Cork might well end up getting a song written about it too, if it doesn’t buck up soon.”

This is quite refreshing in itself, a far cry from the glossy PR sheen on so many interviews with touring musicians who have been coached to place a thin veneer over the fact that they are trying to make ends meet, trying to sell gig tickets and promote album sales. But then, Petrie is nothing if not outspoken. It’s kind of her trademark.

Being a protest singer

Petrie has just released Connectivity, an album she says is her second studio album, but this is only because it’s the second album she’s released that was actually recorded in a studio. But it doesn’t touch the edges of the work she’s released, all without the backing of a record label.

“It depends how you count them,” she acknowledges. “Connectivity is my ninth record, but it’s only really my second studio album, because the others were home recordings and very low production quality endeavours.”

The Leicester-born musician really has been on the scene for well over a decade, having recorded her first scorching protest song, Farewell to Welfare, written, she says, “in a fit of outrage” following the election of a Tory government in the UK in 2010. The second verse includes the lines:

And we've got a recession to beat
Let's put more money into the monarchy and a millionaire in Downing Street
And someone's got to foot the bill
Let's start with the disabled and the mentally ill

“To see ordinary people, and some of the poorest and most vulnerable people, be made to pay for the mistakes of totally unregulated capitalism, that was a very large impact on me becoming what you might call a protest singer,” Petrie says.

“I wrote Farewell To Welfare in a fit of outrage, I suppose, and dashed it off and didn’t think much more about it. But when I started gigging it, people would come up to me and say, ‘you’re a protest singer.’ I was in my early twenties and it was a very politically fertile time: there was the Occupy movement and anti-austerity movements. The more I spent time with those people and played at rallies and things, the more people would come up to me and ask me if I’d heard about an issue or a scandal or something that I should be writing a song about.”

What followed is a familiar story; having generated a following herself, with the support of folk icons like Billy Bragg and Peggy Seeger, mainstream success in the form of radio play and record deals eluded her, despite her developing a cult following.

In 2018, she crowdfunded £18,000 for her album Queer as Folk. “Everything else I had just sort of done out of my own pocket,” she says.

“There’s never been a record label or anything like that. It’s all been pretty much DIY.” Is that a conscious choice? “These days it is, but if you’d asked me when I was teenager, the only thing I wanted in the world was a record deal. I didn’t really know when I was younger that there was an alternative way of doing things that doesn’t need anyone’s permission, or any sanctioning from the people with power and money.”

Now, though, she wouldn’t change a thing about that DIY approach.

“What I’ve lacked over the years in terms of economic stability, I’ve made up for in always having complete control over everything I’ve ever recorded, and that’s really important. In previous decades I just wouldn’t have had access to that. So it wasn’t a political choice initially, but it definitely is now, and if I had my time over again I’d do it again.”

Petrie’s protest songs are rooted in her socialism, which, she says, was itself a part of her upbringing, the daughter of a mother who was a social worker and a father who was a probation officer.

“They did bring us up with a particular ideological code,” she says. “They never said ‘vote for this party,’ but the messages of their parenting were very left-wing in nature, very much about no-one being left behind. They instilled a very anti-racist ideology and my mum was a massive feminist role model.”

“They went to great lengths to impress upon me that it was going to be absolutely fine if I turned out to be gay, and I think it was pretty clear that it was likely I’d turn out to be gay.”

Queer as Folk

Petrie says a lot of her consciousness of social injustice, a lot of her tendency to naturally align herself with the oppressed comes from being gay, and from early experiences of her own.

“Being gay, it certainly took me a very, very long time to work out why the world reacted to me in the strange and quite negative way that it did, to work out that people had a negative reaction to a butch girl, and my experience of being that woman is in a world that is patriarchal and homophobic at its root.”

English folk music is littered with tragic long-haired maidens - think Linda Thompson, Kirsty MacColl, Sandy Denny - and Grace is certainly not amongst their number.

Does she think that part of why mainstream success has evaded her is how she presents herself, how far she is from the tropes and norms of female folk singer? Is the world of folk a welcoming place in which to be gay?

“It hasn’t been in Britain in my experience, really,” she says with a sigh. “At the risk of sounding too bitter, I just think that I have come up against a lot of negative reactions on the basis of not being what the folk scene wants or expects a woman to look like, and certainly not being the kind of woman who appeals to men, basically.”

“No-one’s abused me or called me any names, it’s just little things. I’m very familiar with the feeling of going out on stage at a folk club and knowing that some people will just kind of dislike me on sight, and they won’t even know they’re doing it. The number of times I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘I really didn’t think I was going to like that and then I did.’ That’s a funny thing to admit, in a way.”

It’s not that she doesn’t have the musical skill, vocal style and songwriting clout to excel in that world.

To hear her at her most folky - she doesn’t sing traditional songs - listen to Petrie’s rendition of Richard Thompson’s classic Beeswing, recorded for 2018’s Queer As Folk, here:

But it’s her own songwriting that really commands attention, her knack of writing songs that at once sit firmly within the folk canon and yet are thoroughly modern and peppered with references to mundanities like Tinder and IKEA.

Of folk and punk and being radical

Like Billy Bragg, though, who has championed Petrie for years, she feels an equal affinity to the world of punk. And as many have already argued, she says the two genres, worlds apart in how they present themselves, have more in common than many people recognise.

“I was very lucky, coming up, doing gigs with people like Peggy Seeger and Roy Bailey early on in my career,” she says. “I take my cues from them, and from the idea that folk music must be radical.”

“Folk was created as a means to communicate messages of injustice to the powerful people of the day; it was the music of working people. By that formula, I do consider myself folk music, but I can also see that a lot of what I do might be more at home in the punk world as well. I feel like I sit in both camps, and It’s really interesting to me how many punk fans would also get a lot out of folk music and vice versa. I think they’re not such different worlds as they might seem on the surface in terms of their ethos.”

Grace Petrie. Photo via Grace Petrie

Stand-up

This summer, Petrie will be trying something new: shedding her guitar and taking to the stage at the Edinburgh Festival for an hour of stand-up that she’s reluctant to call comedy until she sees if audiences will laugh.

“Call me at the end of August and ask me then if it’s comedy,” she says.

She’s toured with comedians Josie Long and Robin Ince in the past, and says comedy’s space for political satire, and comedians’ methods of working the room, have inspired her stage performance.

“I was always really impressed by their ability to put forward an idea that people wouldn’t warm to and then bring them on board with humour. I think humour is a powerful thing and has always been a weapon in my arsenal, because I’m singing these political songs and if people can’t warm to me, the political messages can’t go in. If I can make people really sad or make them laugh before hitting them with both barrels of protest, they’ll be opened up to me.”

It’s been 12 years since Petrie’s break-through protest song, but she’s no less fired up by her political convictions today. When I ask her what’s changed, and what she’s most concerned with at the moment, she mentions the UK’s Covid response, anti-immigration rhetoric, “abject greed and corruption,” a move towards jingoistic narratives in rapid response.

“The English government just continue to descend to just unfathomable depths of immorality, to be honest.”

It’s a bleak picture she paints, one of a world where gains in civil rights and indeed human rights since the sixties now seem to be reversing. Does she hope to change people with her music?

“The answer is incredibly self-indulgent, but I think yes,” she says with a laugh. “Billy Bragg always says songs can’t change the world but people can and songs can change people, and I think that’s a pretty good standard.”

But in reality, Petrie is often playing to crowds whose political ideologies match her own.

“I get accused of preaching to the converted a lot,” she says. “And I guess that I do, but I look around the world and from a feminist perspective and a queer rights perspective and a socialist perspective and an anti-racist perspective, it’s not like we’re winning.”

It’s not like we have absolute socialist domination of the world, so if you are trying to fight for those ideas, to have a place you can come for a few hours and feel like you’re not alone and just to be reminded that there are more of us, and more people who see that this world is wrong and built on inequality and oppression.”

“That’s powerful, because you can’t keep going if you’ve nothing in the tank and increasingly I’m seeing it as part of my job, whether or not I can change anyone’s minds or not. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after a gig and say, I feel like I can keep going now.’ I’ll take that. If that’s all we can aim for at the moment, I’ll take what I can get.”

Grace Petrie plays Cyprus Avenue in Cork city on June 10. Doors 7pm. Tickets here. For details of Grace’s other Irish tour dates in Galway, Dublin and Waterford, see her website.