The New Cue #405 August 12: Corinne Bailey Rae
"I didn't think about whether people who liked Put Your Records On would like this this eight minute song about Lalibela in Ethiopia."
Good morning,
Hope you’re enjoying the summer. Cor, it’s August already - how did that happen? In today’s edition we chat to Corinne Bailey Rae about her Mercury-nominated album Black Rainbows, how she came to make such an astonishing creative left-turn, her tips for this year’s prize and more.
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Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Corinne Bailey Rae
Some people might still associate Corinne Bailey Rae with the chilled-out, soulful vibes of her mega-selling 2006 solo debut and its attendant hit and coffee shop staple Put Your Records On. In truth, the Leeds-born singer songwriter’s path has been a far more interesting one. 2010’s tempestuous The Sea came in the wake of the tragic death of her husband from an overdose, while last year’s Black Rainbows was a complete left-turn that surprised even long-term fans. Inspired by trips to Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank, a vast collection of literature, artefacts and photography documenting the African American experience, it was a sprawling, artistically diverse exploration of black history, identity and culture that took in everything from Afro-Futurist funk, cosmic spiritual jazz, riot grrrl punk, R&B and more:
The album got blanket rave reviews and a couple of weeks ago was nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize alongside the likes of Charli XCX, English Teacher and The Last Dinner Party. Last week, Chris jumped on a Zoom call with Corinne to talk about the genesis of the album, her second Mercury nod and more...
Hi Corinne, where are you?
I am in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. Near Pittsburgh. We flew into Pittsburgh. Now we’re in our tour manager’s hotel room, which is nice.
How long have you been in America?
It’s only seven shows we’ve done this time. I’ve lost track of how many US tours we’ve done in the last eleven months, but it’s been quite a lot. Maybe three other ones aside from this.
Have you got the kids with you?
Yeah. My husband is in the band as well and my mum comes to help look after our kids. In some ways it’s easier than our home life because you’ve got that extra pair of hands and the kids are being raised by someone who’s much more qualified than I am!
How has it been translating Black Rainbows into a live experience?
It’s been amazing. Especially here, because so many of the stories [on the album] are US stories. So, when I say, ‘Oh, there’s 26,000 books collected by [African American run publishers] the Johnson Publishing Company, they know the Johnson Publishing Company. When I talk about [annual fashion event] the Ebony Fashion Fair, some of the audience went to those shows. You know, they read Ebony Magazine as a child, or their aunt had it, so I think the translation has been more from going to Europe and saying, ‘Do you know Ebony Magazine? It was this magazine for black people in America...’ So it seems it makes a lot of sense here. The issues are very present here. It depends on the audience we’re speaking to. In DC yesterday it was a mostly black audience so there’s certain things I don’t have to fill in the sort of shorthand for. At the same time, there’s things I feel I don’t need to say, because I feel like it’s going over trauma, that they don’t need me to tell them.
You don’t need to explain their history to them so much.
Yeah, but I have been surprised as well. One of the songs is about this enslaved woman from North Carolina. So when we played in North Carolina and I started to say, ‘This about Harriet Jacobs, she grew up on a plantation, she was born in 1831…’ I thought I’d see lots of nodding, kind of like, ‘Yeah, we know, we learned this at school...’ But then when I get to the part where I say, ‘She hid out on the plantation for seven years…’ I heard this kind of intake of breath from the audience. Even in this state where she lived and wrote her book. She became really famous in her era, so I thought that story has kind of fallen out of fashion or circulation or been erased or silenced. All those different things. So I think there is still some translating to do.
Next week you’ll be performing it in Leeds in its entirety. How do you feel about playing it to people who might know you more for your early stuff like Put Your Records on?
I feel like the people who have been coming out to see me live for a long time, they’ve seen my growth. Like, The Sea was more of an indie record, so they would hear distorted guitars and big wig out sections. Leeds is really special, because Leeds is where I started off playing indie riot grrrl music [prior to being a solo artist, Bailey Rae was in a punk band called Helen], so I always feel when I’m in Leeds a lot of people say, ‘Oh, we can hear where you’ve been before in this record...’ To a lot of that crowd, it’s not a massive surprise. I’m not saying the same people remember when I was 17, but they can sort of join the dots. It’s just fun in and of itself to play a really noisy aggressive piece of music to an unexpecting crowd.
I was saying to someone a few years ago that whenever I do my shows I always come off stage with my face hurting because I’m smiling so much all the way through the show. It’s not a fake smile, it’s a real smile. A lot of the material is really open-hearted and it’s really uplifting, and with people in the audience we’re all in this joyful exchange. It’s really fulfilling, but my cheeks are going to hurt because I’ve been smiling so much. It’s really nice to be able to do more expressions. Especially aggression. That bitter, disdainful stuff when you’re inhabiting those lyrics.
Would you say in terms of themes, emotions and sounds, that this record is a much broader and more accurate representation of you as a person?
It definitely is. It’s funny because the record isn’t about me and my feelings, it’s about something else. But I think being able to focus on other people’s stories, historic objects and my reaction to them, I’ve been able to bring more of myself. Especially because I thought of it as a side project. So I didn’t think, ‘Oh, how’s this gonna relate to what I’ve done before?’ Or whether people who liked [2016 single] Green Aphrodisiac or Put Your Records On will like this punk song or this eight minute song about Lalibela in Ethiopia, or whatever it was. I thought, it’s a side project so either no one or only a few people find it. It won’t affect my other stuff that I’ve done. People will say: ‘Oh well, this is just a weird thing and then she’ll come back and do something more conventional.’ I felt loads of freedom in that. I felt like I was able to show more of myself without realising.
Did that initial decision that you weren’t going to do it under your own name give you total freedom to do what you wanted?
When I first had the idea and put it to my team at the time, they were like, [skeptically] ‘So you want to write a record about your feelings after looking at sheet music from the 1830s...?’ I had to sort of sell it as a side project to them. You know, like, ‘Oh, this won’t disturb anything that I’m doing. I’ll get back to my real job soon...’ And I felt excited that it was something different for me as well. I had this permission to do something really different and really weird.
How quickly was it after your first visit to The Stony Island Arts Bank that you decided you wanted to reflect all this stuff on your next album?
It just took over. I was shown around by Theaster [Gates, Stony Island Arts Bank founder], and it was like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and he was Willy Wonka. It was like: Look in this drawer! Unwrap this thing! Look in this cupboard! He was my field guide. There’s 26,000 books in there. Being left in that library for days and just being like: What’s this photograph of? Who’s this? I’ve never seen a picture of black pioneers going West. I’ve never seen an enslaved girl dressed in this kind of Sunday best because she’s going to be the nanny for this family, but she’s 12. What?!? There was just loads and loads of questions buzzing around my mind. Just the volume of literature. I’ve always been interested in black histories. I read a lot of the ‘black books’ at school, there were probably 50, or at university there might have been a black studies section, so I would have read a good chunk of that and felt myself to be kind of knowledgeable in that world. Then to just be around 26,000 books that happened to be published in that period [of slavery] up to close to the present day on black subjects. Nothing was missed. I didn’t realise there was all this poetry. I didn’t realise there was all this literature. I didn’t realise there was all these factual books, or people would write PhDs about really specific moments in black history, especially in America, whereas I might have been told as a child: No, it’s all oral history, it wasn’t written down. Or that these people were illiterate so there’s no way to get inside how they thought or felt.
The whole thing was so fascinating to me. Even just looking at stuff. The weird objects, or the really problematic and difficult things where you couldn’t look away, like driving past a car crash or something. So much of that black imagery which I felt the shock of was familiar to me because we had a few pages in our history textbook that were kind of like three pages on black history. And the first one was slavery. You’d see the slave ship diagram, a bill of sale, and then the next page would fast forward to after abolition and there was a page about the Klan and lynching and there’d be two actual photographs of specific lynchings. I remember them so clearly in my mind. When you’re 11 or 12 or 13, these images really stay with you. My sister has done work with Barnardos and she talks about how when you’re teaching that kind of history in classes it’s traumatic for the black children. It’s not just, ‘Oh, that was really awful and sad...’
So, I knew a lot of this stuff but it was more interesting than a stale history lesson or even a massive history book. Imagery is so vivid, isn’t it? I was on my tour bus and I meant to be thinking about my tour but all I was thinking about is this weird little sculpture of a boy I saw. What was that? Was that an ashtray? I need to see that again. Did I really see that? What was that? What was this photograph? Who was that black woman dressed up in a bear skin because was in a circus?
How did looking at those images or those books and artefact translate into songs?
Every object had so much to say. It could just be one photo. New York Transit Queen was about this photo of [African American model in the 50s and 60s] Audrey Smaltz. But the thing about Audrey Smaltz was it’s not just a photo, like actually getting to speak to her, or even just going on the internet to read about her. She’s had several lifetimes in her life.
Congratulations, Black Rainbows has just been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. It’s your second nomination after The Sea, does it feel different this time around?
It’s really different. I just feel so happy for the record. I feel like everything that’s happened with it has been sort of word of mouth. I’ve done lots and lots and lots and lots of gigs where I’m seeing it happen in real time, people being like, ‘Oh, I get it. That story makes sense...’ I’ve really enjoyed being a storyteller on stage, that side of it. It was terrifying when we first started touring because the record wasn’t even out.
You’ve been a Mercury judge in the past too, haven’t you?
Yeah I’ve been on the panel on two separate occasions.
Did it give you more sympathy for critics and judges?
Yeah, and it’s a role I never do. I’ve been asked before to be a judge on the big pop competitions, whether it’s in America or here, and I’ve always said no, because I would not like to be judged in that way. Even if it’s a local battle of the bands thing, I don’t want to be the person who’s crushing someone’s hopes or criticising them.
OK, but if we were to take Black Rainbows out of the equation, with your Mercury panel hat on, who would you like to see win it this year?
Some of the music this year I don’t know, I’m sort of discovering it now. But I had seen Lily from English Teacher at this event we both did in Leeds. I remember her sitting down at this weird out of date synthesiser and she was talking about Lancashire or Yorkshire hills and she was talking about Wordsworth and about how these hills looked like a side boob. I just thought it was really clever. It was funny and sardonic and clever and poetic and it just sounded like her. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I really like this. I really get this.’ So that’s a band I really like, because I really liked her confidence and sense of herself.
I’ll put a flutter on English Teacher, then. Thanks for talking to us, Corinne.
Thank you, it was nice to meet you, bye!
CC