Rabble-rousing UK folk-singer/provocateur Grace Petrie, along with accompanist Ben Moss, touches down in Halifax (on her way to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa), for a show at The Carleton on Sunday, November 13th. Show time is 7 PM and tickets are $20 +HST.
More than a decade after first emerging, protest singer, LGBTQ+ activist, comedy audiences favourite and folk star Grace Petrie stands out as one the most important songwriters working in the UK today.
Exploding onto the folk scene in 2010 with the low-fi acoustic guitar/vocal release Tell Me a Story, Petrie quickly attracted attention with her polemical folk anthems, acerbic lyricism and open-hearted performance style. Support slots for the likes of Billy Bragg and Emmy The Great soon followed, with The Guardian declaring her “a powerful new songwriting voice”.
The 2010s were spent relentlessly touring and, responding to the evermore dramatic political landscape. Petrie released five DIY albums of protest music in seven years. As a support act for similarly subversive voices in stand-up, including Robin Ince, Josie Long and Jeremy Hardy among many others, Petrie became just as celebrated in comedy as in music, honing a stage presence characterised by wit and warmth that sits beautifully in both worlds.
Gigging everywhere from the Latitude Comedy Stage to the main stage of Vancouver Folk Festival, from Radio 4’s The Now Show to 6Music’s Tom Robinson Show, she picked up an army of supporters from the punk, folk, DIY and stand-up scenes along the way, and by 2018 Petrie’s audience numbered enough that a crowd-funding campaign for her first studio-produced album Queer As Folk smashed its £10K target in 24hrs.
Her latest album, Connectivity, was released in 2021.
‘Just when you thought that what folk music needs right now is a strident, left-wing female causing a bit of carnage, here’s Grace Petrie.’ **** Mojo
Ben Moss is a Lucille Lortel Award-winning singer, pianist, music director, actor, orchestrator and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He was most recently the music director, co-orchestrator, and a cast member of Heather Christian’s acclaimed, award-winning and sold-out Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova, directed by Lee Sunday Evans.