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.

Column

Culture

Digital

Film & TV

Justice

10 April 2025

4 min read

Data scientists should stop watching Minority Report and start watching The Shawshank Redemption

A justice ministry’s prejudicial database leaves no room for redemption.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tom Cruise gestures with his fingers in an e-glove in front of his face

Tom Cruise takes the measure.

20th Century Fox.

The go-to for any news item about using AI to predict crimes before they happen is Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report from 2002, starring Tom Cruise as a futuristic cop, who employs human “precogs” as clairvoyants to get ahead of the villains.

So, I’m far from the first to name-check it as showing the dystopian future that the UK’s Ministry of Justice heralds with its test project to “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide.”

That use of “homicide”, rather than the more British “murder”, is telling, almost like the Ministry wonks have just watched the movie. The pressure group Statewatch has no doubt where they’re heading, with data being used on people who may never have been convicted of an offence and “will code in bias towards racialised and low-income communities.”

Spielberg was always ahead of the curve. But my fear is less the chilling dystopia that Statewatch sees in its precog. Actually, I’m more worried about the past in this context, or rather in how we treat the past.

If I haven’t to date done anything wrong, then I have committed no offence. I am literally innocent. And that’s an absolute. An interpretation of data that indicates that I’m more likely to commit a crime than others is neither here (in my conscience) nor there (in the judicial system).

Furthermore, there’s a theological point. If it is so, as we’re told, that no one is without sin, then we’re all culpable in the pasts that we have lived so far, but the future contains all we have to play for.

To suggest that some of us are more likely to screw up in that future than others is very dangerously deterministic. It’s redolent of Calvinism’s doctrine of the “elect”, those who have already been marked for salvation and eternal bliss, regardless of what they do or don’t do in this life, while the rest of us, however virtuous our mortal deeds might be, will rot in hell.

Neither Calvin’s determinism nor the Ministry of Justice’s prejudicial database leave any room for redemption. They’re just trying to identify events that will definitely (the former) or are likely to (the latter) happen. Conversely, we live in hope (for some of us a sure and certain hope) of a future in which we can be redeemed, whatever we have done in the past.

And that’s why I find Minority Report an unsatisfactory analogy for the development of real-life precrime technology. It is a film that is only about determinism, which leaves no room for either free-will or redemption. And that’s applying a form of intelligence that is truly, er, artificial.

The vital thing is that hope is fulfilled, the prisoners make it to their paradise after worthless lives spent in jail. Justice is seen to be done.

A more helpful movie, richer in its development of these themes – and not just because it’s got the word that I favour in its title - is 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, based on a novel by Stephen King. Here we have the idea explored that the past isn’t only irrelevant to our futures, but doesn’t even really exist in time in relation to the future.

It’s bursting with more religious themes even than Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, which are really only the righteous saviour turning up to defend flawed goodies from evil baddies, again and again. For a start, The Shawshank Redemption is set in a prison, where whole lives are spent atoning for crimes that have or haven’t been committed. See?

Lifers who are released after decades struggle to cope or kill themselves. The central character, a messianic figure, lives in hope with his convict friend of reaching a beach in the Virgin Islands, while the prison warden describes himself as “the light of the world”, but is assisted by his prisoners in money-laundering – washing clean – his ill-gotten gains.

I could go on. But the vital thing is that hope is fulfilled, the prisoners make it to their paradise after worthless lives spent in jail. Justice is seen to be done. But the important thing here is that there is no pre-crime determinism. The future, which often looks hopeless, is rolling out towards the possibility of redemption, which ultimately becomes the only certain reality.

One can dwell on movie plots too long. They are only, if you’ll excuse the pun, projections of life. But it is nonetheless irritating both that a government department with Justice in its title can believe it worthwhile to explore how it might deploy AI to predict who tomorrow’s criminals are likely to be and its critics condemn it by using the wrong dramatic analogies.

Minority Report was a dystopian thriller that suggests that the future can only be changed by human intervention. The Shawshank Redemption showed us that inextinguishable human hope is in a future we can’t control, but can depend on.

Anyone who is interested in justice, especially those who work in a ministry for it, might benefit from downloading it.

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