Grace Petrie – Queer as Folk
Self Released – 14 September 2018
As well as being an activist in the LBGTQ movement and a highly regarded Protest singer, Leicester-based Grace Petrie also happens to be a rather fine folk-singer with a strong repertoire of social commentary songs. Queer As Folk, her eighth studio album, finds her in a particularly potent mode with songs that draw on both personal experience and observation, addressing both gay politics and wider social iniquities.
Sung unaccompanied, it opens with an arrangement and reworking of Ian Campbell’s Old Man’s Tale, retaining the Nicky Tams tune but revising the lyrics for a more topical slant as A Young Woman’s Tale, an acapella call to arms that references the Miners’ Strike, the Iraq war, mass austerity and the collapse of the NHS.
One of two covers, it’s followed by a rousing foot stomping romp through Graham Moore’s Tom Paine’s Blues before the first of the wholly new material, This House, a poignant reflection on loss, grief and the memories of a life and a love shared that are contained in a home once shared. Belinda O’Hooley provides the piano part here and elsewhere the album also features contributions from Miranda Sykes (upright bass), Nancy Kerr (fiddle), Hannah James (accordion), Caitlin Field (bass and bodhran) and producer Matthew Daly on drums.
Featuring a string arrangement by Sykes and Kerr, Baby Blue is a re-recording of a song of cheating and heartbreak that first saw the light of day in 2010 and well worth its melancholic resurrection here. Dating back to 2016 and originally released in a stripped-down live version on a ltd edition EP, Pride, Kerr’s fiddle and accordion bolstering the strummed guitar, is in many ways the album’s centrepiece, written in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida it’s both a celebration of the gay community and a reminder that there’s still a long way to go in achieving equality.
Black Tie is the catchiest and most commercial track which has an accompanying video (watch below), a jaunty, fiddle-driven bounce through an autobiographical number about gender divisions and stereotypes and how any expression of masculinity by women is somehow regarded as uncomfortable and unattractive. A call for unity on the queer community battle lines and an expression of new-found self-confidence and rejection of ticking gender norm boxes written as a postcard “to my Year 11 self” saying “you won’t grow out of it, you will find the clothes that fit.”
Working as a gigging musician, rather inevitably means that at some point a song about life on the road and the separation it entails will find its way into the songbook, duly satisfied here by the rolling repeated guitar lines of Departures with James colouring between the lines of accordion and harmonies.
The second cover arrives in an excellent fingerpicked reading of Richard Thompson’s waltzing Beeswing about losing love by trying too hard to keep hold of it, string and bodhran contributing perfectly to the understated arrangement.
Again dating to 2010, Farewell To Welfare was Petrie’s blooding in the protest genre and, remaining as pertinent as ever, is still her show closer, now given a full band stomp treatment. Another live favourite over the years, featuring fingerpicked guitar with fiddle and bowed bass, Iago uses Shakespeare’s manipulative villain as a metaphor for being plagued by insecurity in matters of the heart with voices whispering in your ear that your ‘happy ending’ is a self-delusion.
It’s back on the road for the album’s closing track, inspired by Tom Robinson’s 2-4-6-8 Motorway and any number of any other road anthems about driving home (not to mention borrowing lines from Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) Northbound has the drums, guitar, accordion and chugging percussive fiddle putting their feet to the pedal for a celebratory counterpoint to Departures and the thought of those waiting at the end of the journey.
As a matter of trivial pursuit interest, the title phrase apparently comes from an old Welsh expression that “there’s nowt so queer as folk”, roughly translated as “it takes all sorts” to make a world. An album of personal and political power, passion and perception, it is hugely persuasive proof that Petrie most deservedly earns her place at the table.
Don’t miss Grace’s Queer as Folk album tour. Dates here: http://gracepetrie.com/gigs/