GRACE PETRIE
PHOTO WILSON CLARKE
“I was in school the first time I picked up a guitar,” folk singer-songwriter Grace Petrie, 31, tells me. “Even at that tender age, I had a vague and completely misguided idea that doing so might be a route to impressing girls,” she laughs. After leaving school with the intention of “becoming famous and very little else”, Grace paid her dues performing around her hometown of Leicester, before forging her path toward an international platform. But how did she go from wooing girls with her “Argos beginner’s acoustic” to becoming one of England’s most sought after protest singers?