‘Grief was a really heavy burden’

As singer Corinne Bailey Rae prepares for the Sunday Independent’s Rock Against Homelessness fund-raising concert, she shares how her mother and her faith kept her going after the death of her first husband, and why her latest album champions the stories of black women in history

In 2010, when Barack Obama was US president, he invited Corinne Bailey Rae to perform at the White House. At the concert, Michelle Obama told the singer that she was on her iPod; and that herself and her husband often listened to her music. The former first lady wasn’t just paying lip service. In the summer of 2016, Barack Obama told the world that the song Green Aphrodisiac — from Bailey Rae’s album The Heart Speaks In Whispers

— was on his official playlist.

Growing up, such an experience would have seemed fantastical to a black, working-class girl from the north of England. Back then, there was no money for a family car, let alone the guitar that she wanted. And the routes to musical accomplishment seemed more difficult, if not blocked entirely, because of the colour of her skin.

In the culture of the 1980s England that she grew up in, “someone playing the violin with brown skin or a ballerina with brown skin was a novelty to see”, Bailey Rae says. “Yet these were the things I was doing. I was playing the violin. I was doing ballet.” A few years ago, she went to a concert by the Chineke! Orchestra. “They are an orchestra of people of colour. I went with my young children,” she says of the two daughters she shares with her second husband Steve Brown, whom she married in 2013.

“It was so normal for them to see 60 black musicians on stage playing classical music, but I had silently a tear rolling down my cheek because I thought this wasn’t what orchestras look like. They still don’t. So it was amazing to see that engagement and diversity — and to see that it was normal for my children. I was really happy that they were able to be in those spaces and feel that this wasn’t an unusual thing.”

However, that doesn’t mean that things have changed completely.

“Racism is still very prevalent, and it is prevalent in different groups. It is prevalent in class too. If you are a young black, working-class boy walking down the street, the way you experience, say, ‘stop-and-search’ is different to a middle-class person who has light-skin privilege, who is walking around a different area of a city or a countryside accompanied by their white partner.”

She experienced racism herself as a child. “What I’ve said about race before is that, being »

» young, I often felt like the racist terms that were used at me were the same racist terms that were used at the Asian children. The kids didn’t really understand which insults to fling. I really remember… I still call it the ‘P’ word. That was much more familiar to me than the ‘N’ word. When I was a kid, it was always people insulting you as if you were from Pakistan or India. I used to get really confused by that. They’re not just racist, they can’t work it out.”

They were not just racist, I offer, they were also stupid. “It was always quite scary,” Bailey Rae agrees. “It was always scary to be walking home. But then you’d sort of think, ‘They can’t even get it right — they’re not even calling you the right name.’ But that sort of thing of being shouted at in the street, that was rare. It was much more common to have people want to touch your hair or ask you about the things that they felt were different about you compared to them. Those sorts of things.

“Or just the everyday thing of you couldn’t find a birthday card with a black face on it or books with black children in it. It is such a different time now. I had family in the US and they would always send things over to us that kind of normalised our world and our experience, with kids’ picture books with black children, or postcards or birthday cards with black children. It would feel like a novelty to see those things.”

Born in February 1979, Bailey Rae grew up in the Leeds suburb of Moortown. Her mother is white and from the area, her father is black and from St Kitts. Nineteen months later, her sister Candice was born, followed two years later by another sister, Rhea. They lived on the fifth floor of an estate block. She has memories of sunlight “beaming in”.

When she was 11, her parents’ marriage broke up, but her father was in the house as much when they were separated as when they were together. And because her father was one of six children, and her mother one of four, there was

When I was a kid, it was always people insulting you as if you were from Pakistan or India. I used to get really confused by that. They’re not just racist, they can’t work it out

always a plethora of cousins around. Her paternal granny used to have parties at her house in nearby Chapeltown. In Caribbean culture, extended family is a solid unit, Bailey Rae says.

“My parents’ divorce was kind of unusual because my parents continued to hang out. My dad would just come round and then we’d all just be in the same room. They are a highly functioning divorce. But it is still a kind of fall for children that their parents don’t get on any more.”

Bailey Rae is particularly close to her mother, Linda. “My mum is an amazing, working-class, white woman. She left school when she was really young. She started off working in a shoe shop, then she cleaned the houses of the people we went to church with.”

She later worked at her daughters’ school. “She started reading with the children at school. She didn’t have any formal teaching education, but they used to have parent volunteers to read with the children. They really liked her, and they wanted her so much that they kept offering her things. She ended up working with children with learning difficulties. She did that for decades at the school. She trained and ended up with all these qualifications. The school ended up winning the Stephen Lawrence Award, which is the award for inclusion and diversity.”

Linda reorganised the curriculum to embed representation of black history into what was already being taught. “So when you were studying Florence Nightingale, you’d also be studying [Jamaican battlefield nurse] Mary Jane Seacole,” Bailey Rae explains. “And when you were doing the Victorians, you’d also do Frederick Douglass,” she adds, of the 19th century African-American civil rights leader. “It wasn’t ‘Oh, it’s black people history week. Let’s unroll the dusty papers and do something about Martin Luther King.’ They didn’t use the terms ‘decolonising the curriculum’ then but that’s what she was doing, introducing these different historical figures.”

Bailey Rae didn’t have to look to Seacole or Douglass for inspiration when she had Linda. “I was really proud of her. I had her as an example.

“She did mentoring programmes for some of the parents who were low in confidence, or she’d solve conflicts.”

She passed on a sense of “being capable” to her daughters. “She ran our house, and after our parents got divorced, she would always be the woman who did everything. Even when they were together, she was always the one who was wallpapering the bathroom or tiling the kitchen or wiring the plugs. She is one of four daughters. Her mother worked at a sewing machine and her dad was an upholsterer. I just really admire her.”

“She has a strength, too,” she continues. “It is not a caricature strength. That sense that all the problems are solvable. I got that from her. Also, she is really emotionally open. She has good relationships. She has good friends. I saw that modelled a lot: You have your friends. They’re a team. They are people you can talk to and trust. You can tell them private things. They hold your confidence. They help you out. And similarly, when your friends come to you, that’s forever. You can keep people’s secrets and problems. I would see my mother doing that.”

Bailey Rae saw her grow in this role, as peacemaker, as wise woman. “When I was little, I used to like to hang around if my mum was having a cup of tea with someone. Eventually I would get shooed away. But there was ‘big woman talk’ happening that I didn’t really understand. They would try to be euphemistic and stuff but I knew that heavy exchanges were happening.”

These exchanges she later found out usually involved people wanting advice from her mother about their marriage, their children or their finances. “I was happy that my mum would be able to help them.”

In later years, it was Bailey Rae who would most need her »

» mother’s help. On March 22, 2008, her first husband of seven years — jazz musician Jason Rae — was found dead at a friend’s flat in Leeds. The coroner’s report found he had died of an accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol. He was 31, two years her senior.

For almost a year afterwards, Bailey Rae sat in her pyjamas at her kitchen table. She didn’t know when or if she would emerge out of her grief. She believed that the rest of her life would be “a silent void”. “The shock of losing a partner, losing the future as you’d planned it, felt like the end,” she later told The Guardian.

Linda was her rock. “She was there when I woke up. She was there when I went to sleep. She’d do the washing and help tidy the house. She’d sit with me. We’d just sit together.

“When someone dies, everyone wants to visit you. You can’t look after everybody, cook for everyone and make everyone cups of tea. She’d be that presence, helping. Or sometimes people would be there for a bit, and she’d look at me and I’d say: ‘I’m really tired.’ She’d say: ‘Go to bed.’ I didn’t have to feel I had to stay up and receive everyone else’s sadness. All those things. She was there a lot.

“Both my parents were the same. My dad came to visit every night. I’d hear his car, reversing into the drive. He would sit up with me as well. It was just their physical presence.”

How does she feel, looking back on that young woman? “I feel like I’m the same person. It feels like it was a really, really long time ago. It was 16 years ago, and it feels like it was 16 years ago.

“I feel myself that it was a really heavy burden. Almost every year that would go past I’d say: ‘I feel so much better than I did a year ago, that was really awful.’ I would talk as though it was in the past tense. And then a year after that, maybe two years, I’d say, ‘I can’t believe how I felt then. I feel so much better now.’ But then over that year I would then reflect and think, ‘Actually it is still really present.’ It took me a long time to escape the gravity of that situation and that loss, and just do the reorganising of my life and just the physical missing of a person. The mystery of, ‘where does somebody go?’ Especially if you are in the house where they lived. So you see their shoes and coats and records...”

Does she still live in the house she shared with Jason? “Yeah, I still live in that same house. They vanish but their ephemera is still there. That’s a really confusing thing. I feel for that me. A lot of times I am trying to send that me... it is a bit weird, how timing works, but I am sending that me hope. I am saying to them: ‘Look at where I am.’ I am beaming that back to them as a kind of hope. In the time that it was the hardest, the strange thing is I did have this seam of hope. It was very strong and apparent. There did seem like there was a way out of the heaviness. So, I’m at both ends of it. I’m where I was receiving hope that I would be able to come through this pain and also being on the other side of it, that I let myself know I have come from the past. It is quite complicated.”

I say that a few years after my dad died, I was brushing my teeth and I could see myself in the bathroom mirror years before in that moment of pain. “It’s like the layers inside you,” she agrees. “It’s like all the people you’ve ever

been. It is the weirdest thing, especially as you get older, because you are the holder of all the yous.”

Her faith and, of course, her music sustained her through the tough times. Since childhood, she played music and sang in Moortown Baptist Church. It was there that she first met other young people from similar backgrounds, some of whom remain close friends. Simon Hall, her youth leader at the church, also became an important figure in her life. “He came over from Oxford University where he had studied philosophy and theology. He was a brain. That was really fresh energy for me at my church, having someone who said it was alright to ask questions. I remember specifically one Sunday school at someone’s house and him asking: ‘Is God driving the train or is he watching the train from above?’

“He was frying our brains with these theological questions about how much agency we have in our lives, and how much the divine interacts with us, or not. It was the big questions. I really liked him because his theology was more expansive. It wasn’t just like ‘God is a superhero that swoops in if you are good enough or say the right prayers’. It was more like ‘the suffering Christ, the Jesus that is every person’. It wasn’t this disconnect between God and people. I also liked Simon because he liked Radiohead, Bjork, all the music that was coming through in the early 1990s.”

At 15, she started feminist-rock group, Helen, inspired by female acts like Belly, Veruca Salt, Courtney Love and PJ Harvey. Equally influential was the black American music her aunty Lornette Smith stocked at her store, Jumbo Records.

Bailey Rae loved Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants from 1979. “I still think he is amazing, that freedom in his music. I loved Marvin Gaye as well. That rawness and that gentleness and all that complexity around him coming out of the church and having disapproval from the very person who he wanted to have approval from — his father.”

She studied English Literature at the University of Leeds, working part-time in the cloakroom of a jazz club called The Underground. It was there that she met Jason Rae and began performing with his band. She soon landed a record contract and, in 2005, released her first single Like A Star. The following year, her debut album went to number one in the UK, and sold four million copies worldwide, with Put Your Records On as the standout hit.

She was nominated for three Grammy awards in 2007. At Mary J Blige’s after party in Los Angeles, she met Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder. She and Wonder bonded and are friends to this day — she has performed with him on stage in Hyde Park. Then in 2010, there was that gig at the White House.

It was in Chicago rather than Washington, however, that she found lasting inspiration. In 2017, she paid a visit to the city’s Stony Island Arts Bank, which includes archives of black history. “I knew when I walked through those doors that my life changed forever.”

Her Black Rainbows album, released last September, centres on the black experience. Her current single, New York Transit Queen, was inspired by the story of model Audrey Smaltz. Peach Velvet Sky was drawn from the story of abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, who was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. Last year, when I met Bailey Rae for the first time in Dallas, she told the audience at her show that night of Jacobs: “In her early 20s, she escaped her abusive master and hides out in the crawl space above her grandmother’s storehouse. Through a loophole in the wall, she can see the people pass by, she can see her children and grandchildren grow up. Eventually, she attains freedom and sets up a school for black children... I was so inspired. So, I wrote a song about what the sunset looks like from her loophole.”

Now, she says simply: “I feel like I am the carrier of these stories.”

Corinne Bailey Rae will play her critically acclaimed ‘Black Rainbows’ album in full at the ‘Sunday Independent’s Rock Against Homelessness’, in aid of Focus Ireland, at the 3Olympia on May 26. Special guests on the night are Aimée, The White Horse Guitar Club, Toshin and Isaac Butler, with Laura Whitmore as MC. Tickets, priced €30, are available from ticketmaster.ie. ‘Rock Against Homelessness’ is proudly sponsored by Cadbury, Arachas Insurance and Hard Rock Café in Temple Bar

It took me a long time to escape the gravity of loss, and just do the reorganising of my life and just the physical missing of a person