Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey

Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, is an atlas of capacious faith. Jonathan Evens explores her inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white portrait of a young woman's head against a dark textured background.

www.corinnebaileyrae.com.

Black Rainbows is the latest album from multi award-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. Part of a project which also includes a book Reflections/Refractions at the Arts Bank photographed by Koto Bolofo, live performances, visuals, lectures, exhibitions and more, the album is inspired by the objects and artworks collected by artist, archivist and curator Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space. Last year Bailey Rae performed in Black Chapel, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Gates. A shared element of their collaborations, work and inspirations are their Baptist upbringings and experiences.

Black Rainbows represents a significant development in Bailey Rae's music and career. By turns angry and reflective, noisy and still, celebratory and keening, original and grounded, the album broadens her musical palette considerably through a marvellous melange of electronica, jazz and punk meshed with soul and R&B. The album ranges from righteous railing against the casual erasure of Black lives and memories to a vision of a world in which we dig our gardens and live, find work and time to dance, in a new utopia. It also extends Bailey Rae’s exploration of and engagement with black history and culture beyond her own experience, through collaborations with Gates and also the Stony Island Arts Bank, which was her inspiration for the album. Her longing, shared in ‘A Spell, a Prayer’, is to arc an arm through history in order to unpick every thread.

Bailey Rae has spoken of the way in which her visit in 2017 to the Stony Island Arts Bank at the invitation of Gates, its founder, transformed her.

“I knew when I walked through those doors that my life had changed forever.”

Two things changed. One was a deeper engagement with the Stony Island Arts Bank's basic premise that black people matter, black spaces matter and black objects matter. The other was developing the confidence, through the example of Gates as artist, lecturer, potter, choir director, business owner, to, as she has said in an interview for Wilful Publicity, just:

"be myself and follow all of my interests and allow all my fascinations and obsessions to come through in my music in the belief that we are all people, and we all have those connections and questions and interests."

Christian Viveros-Faune has written that Gates developed his practice as "an artist-curator-activist", serving "different kinds of communities as an artistic ‘bridge’," out of engagement with the Church, having been both Director of Chicago’s New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church Choir and "an urbanist in Seattle for a Christian mission that ran a housing programme in poor neighbourhoods.” His artistic projects have included processing a 250-person gospel choir he assembled from local churches through the galleries of the Milwaukee Art Museum while singing hymns Gates had scored as a response to poems written by the slave-era potter Dave Drake. The musical offerings of Gates' house band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, also combine spirituals with Zen chants. The Black Monks of Mississippi performed in Black Chapel, as also did Bailey Rae.

His entrepreneurial projects have included the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative which consists of 32 units made for those who receive affordable and low-income housing support with a space for theatre and dance, and a mission is to share culture first with the folk residing in the 32 units. Similarly, the bank at 68th and Stony Island was once a vibrant community savings and loan bank but today, through Gates’ intervention, provides the South Side of Chicago with 17,000 square feet of space for innovation in contemporary art and archival practice.

Surprisingly, the kind of faith-informed arts-and-community-connecting entrepreneurship practised by Gates, is not unknown to Bailey Rae through her own background. As a member of Moortown Baptist Church, she was part of Revive, a fresh expression of Church begun by then Youth Pastor Simon Hall. Bailey Rae has said that Hall encouraged the young people in Revive to write their own songs, provided a first guitar for her, and encouraged her to develop a "capacious faith." Her first recordings were on the Revive albums Beautiful Day and Neither Work nor Leisure. Under Halls' leadership, Revive has become a church for people who like Jesus but aren't too sure about church. He has also developed Left Bank as a community arts venue (of which Bailey Rae is a patron) in a disused Anglican church, whilst also setting up The Wren Bakery, a social enterprise using baking and barista training as tools to help women build self-belief and gain transferable skills for employment, and Queer Church Leeds, a community which celebrates LGBTQ+ people and aims to create a safe and open space for both fellowship and discussion.

Bailey Rae has shared her own exploration of faith in her music through songs such as 'I Would Like to Call It Beauty,' ‘Walk On’ and 'The Skies Will Break' and has done so in relation to both grief and celebration. Steve Stockman writes of one such song:

“Love’s On Its Way is a prayer. It begins “Oh Father”, confesses misunderstanding at the great mysteries, looks at the state of the world and then after more confession asks that her response to this world would not be just the prayer but the action of her life."

Black Rainbows ends with a stunningly beautiful track 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' inspired by a book in the Stony Island Arts Bank about the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; ancient churches hewn from rock. In an interview with Forbes magazine, Bailey Rae said:

"On one of the pages of this book, it said, it was a picture of a throne that had been made. So it was carved into the wall, solid stone wall. There was a throne and this is where God was meant to sit when God was in the temple. But I really loved that line, the Throne to the invisible God. I thought, before the throne of the invisible God, what else is there to do but kneel? What is the invisible God? What is the thing, the reason, the way we get here, the how, the why, the infinite, the eternal, the thing that makes us all connected?"

This is where Black Rainbows ends. Through its tracks, Bailey Rae takes us on a journey from the rock hewn churches of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs' loophole, in order to explore Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure of Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence. Yet, 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' is where her energised and empathetic, wracked and anguished, celebratory and creative journey through Black history and the continuing legacy of racism finds its resolution. In a place not of simple submission, but of living the questions raised by a capacious faith where responses to prayer are both the actions of life and also the explorations found on this album.

Article

Books

Culture

Morality

2 April 2025

5 min read

Never Let Me Go: 20 years on

Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is the perfect Frankenstein story for today.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Four young people peer through a window.

Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in the 2010 film adaption.

Fox Searchlight Films.

This article contains spoilers.

Human beings are creative. For good or for evil, making new things out of raw materials is something that we can’t help doing, whether that’s writing new books, creating new recipes, or building new houses. Why are we born this way? Christians would say it’s because of the imago Dei: because according to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, we are made in the image of God. If God created the world and every one of us, and if we’re made in his image, then it follows that all of us have this creative impulse within us, too.

But if creating is something natural to us, does it follow that it’s also core to our identity as human beings? In other words, is making something that we do, or something that we are? Are we different from all other living creatures in this world by being creators ourselves?

Although he doesn’t call himself a Christian, these are precisely the kind of theological questions the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks time and time again in his books. And nowhere does he ask them more powerfully than in Never Let Me Go, which was published 20 years ago.

Never Let Me Go starts off as the story of three children at a boarding school. Kathy, one of three friends, serves as our first-person narrator; it’s through her eyes that we slowly realise something sinister is taking place. As Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow into teenagers and then young adults, it’s finally revealed that they are clones, brought into being thanks to advancements in cloning technology in a dystopian post-World War II Britain. They are brought up for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Or, to put it more bluntly, they’ve been raised for slaughter.

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have a happy childhood at their boarding school, Hailsham. Their future is hinted at by their teachers, but they’re largely shielded from the truth. All around the country, we later find out, clone children are being raised in horrific conditions. But Hailsham is different, because its Headteacher, Miss Emily, is part of a group that believes the clones deserve to be treated humanely – at least until someone needs a kidney transplant.

But, though treated in a ‘humane’ way, society doesn’t see the Hailsham clones as ‘human’, and that’s precisely what Miss Emily is trying to prove: that they are not unlike real, normal people. So, she encourages the children to make art. ‘A lot of the time’, Kathy tells us, ‘how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating”’. The children don’t understand why they must always paint and draw, but they’re told that Madame Marie-Claude, a mysterious figure, will collect their best artworks for a seemingly important ‘gallery’.

Years later, Tommy and Kathy have become a couple. Before dying – or ‘completing’, as they call it – after her second ‘donation’, Ruth tells them that she believes a deferral is possible for couples that are truly in love. Kathy and Tommy go to Miss Emily’s house, their former Headmistress, certain that, as children, they were encouraged to produce art precisely to be able to prove, one day, their true feelings.

They are quickly disappointed. Miss Emily reveals that Hailsham has now closed down, but that while the school stood, it was meant as an experiment, aimed at convincing the public to improve living conditions for the clones:

‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all…we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any human being.’

Equating creativity with human identity does make sense, to an extent at least. In The Mind of the Maker (1941), Christian novelist and critic Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the closest we can get to understanding God as our Creator is through engaging ourselves in creative acts: ‘the experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation’. In creative acts, from a Christian perspective, we partially grasp God’s creation of us.

Ultimately, however, being creative in imitation of God, is not enough to get to the very core of what defines a human being. There are all kinds of factors, from old age to mental or physical disability, that make any form of traditionally creative act highly unlikely for some people. By that definition, someone in a coma or a newborn baby is not fully human.

That’s exactly the definition of humanity that underpins the cruel society of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We need a better definition, and Christianity provides a unique tradition to help us on the way. A Christian concept of the human person is one that looks both at why we were made, and what we were made for. Christians believe that God made us out of love, and for the purpose of being in communion with him. He made each one of us as a special and irreplaceable individual, and for each of us our telos – the end or aim of our life – is to join him in heaven.

If we embrace this definition of what it means to be human, then the extent to which we are able to express our intelligence or creativity while on earth doesn’t really matter anymore. If we believe that merely to exist is good – not to exist and fulfil our potential through this or that accomplishment, but just to exist – then we can’t deny that each member of the human family is, in fact, a ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word.

It is precisely this God-shaped hole that makes the concept of human dignity so fragile and slippery in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is, ultimately, the perfect Frankenstein story for the modern day. It warns us about the consequences of what might happen if we try to treat other human beings as things we have paid, but even more powerfully it shows us the danger of valuing human life for its creativity, instead of loving it as the creation of God.

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