Grace Petrie, Edinburgh review: 'a force of nature'

This old-school troubadour combines wry humanity with outrage, writes Jim Gilchrist

Grace Petrie, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

A politically-charged troubadour of the old school, singer-songwriter and champion of queer, Grace Petrie is a force of nature onstage, her often droll, sweary but essentially humane polemic veering between self-deprecation, wry musing and outraged holler. She played the first half of this Queen’s Hall gig solo, singing her heart out in numbers such as Farewell to Welfare – “so you’ll find me in the pub, / raising a toast, to the ghost of welfare” – and her anti-fascist anthem, They Shall Not Pass, leavened with a song informed by her love of sea glass and the internet blues of Can You Verify You’re Human?

The second half saw her joined by a backing quartet of fiddle, accordion bass guitar and drums, adding rockabilly exuberance, if occasionally obscuring lyrics. There was wry humour in We’ve Got an Office in Hackney, recalling this avowedly independent musician’s first and only brief encounter with the music industry, adding some peremptory harmonica blasts; and the affectionate Ivy, recalling an all-night drive from Glastonbury Festival for the birth of her niece: “Thanks for not coming during Dolly Parton.”

Petrie may lament a Britain in which she feels less safe, with threats to queer rights and public protest, but, inevitably, she seeks out glimmers of hope and offers a rallying cry, as in her brief glimpse of “another Albion” in Start Again, or the counter-intuitive positivity of The Losing Side, while there was vociferous audience response to her anthem of gay solidarity, Pride.

There was further up-tempo drive for Fixer-Upper’s glimmers of hope in a broken world, before they all but closed with the full-on zest of her LGBTQ manifesto, Black Tie, the audience with her all the way and clearly well-versed in her lyrics.