A week before Collingwood Pride kicks off, LGBTQ+ legend Carole Pope will be making a stop in town.
Black Bellows Brewing Co. will be hosting Pope for an intimate 50-seat show on July 8 in their parlour.
As lead singer of Canadian rock band Rough Trade, Pope blazed a trail through powerful vocals and provocative lyrics, eventually striking out on her own.
Throughout her decades-long career, she has won three Juno Awards, multiple independent music awards and a Genie Award, and has four gold, one platinum and one double platinum album.
“We like doing intimate shows. We played in Collingwood once before. It’s fun,” Pope said. “We’d been trying to get more of a spoken-word acoustic thing together.”
Pope will be accompanied by Tim Welsh on guitar.
“It’s a fun, easy gig rather than playing with a whole band.”
When comparing her songwriting now to the songs she’s written in the past, Pope draws parallels.
“It’s still political and funny and dark. I’m a less stylized vocalist now. I don’t use those ’80s inflections anymore. Except in High School Confidential, a little bit,” she said with a laugh.
“I still have so much stuff to be pissed off about,” said Pope.
A prolific songwriter, Pope’s music explores themes of sexuality, sexual politics and the status quo. In 2020, Rough Trade was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
These days, Pope says there’s plenty of fodder for her songwriting in the news. She points to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that the constitutional right to free speech allows certain businesses to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.
“That was the scariest thing,” said Pope. “There’s a lot of nasty behaviour going on with minorities and queer people. It’s a horrible 1930s flashback that is happening right now.”
“All the work queers have done is just being up-ended,” she said.
Looking ahead, Pope is currently working on new music, and is working to gather financial backing for Rough Trade The Musical, a rock musical written by Pope that takes place in New York in the 1980s.
Rough Trade The Musical follows the real story of her brother Howard Pope, a guitarist and one of the original members of the ACTUP movement who fought to get AIDS drugs released to the people who needed them. Howard Pope died in 1996 of AIDS.
“Putting on a musical is extremely expensive. We’re just trying to get a workshop going to get producers to come in and look at it and hopefully throw some money at us,” she said.
Pope says audiences attending the July 8 show can expect some storytelling woven in between songs from her past and present.
“I like telling little stories about the songs – like how a song came to be,” said Pope.
Carole Pope will be playing on July 8 at 7 p.m. at Black Bellows at 40 Simcoe St. For more information or to buy tickets, click here.
