CORINNE BAILEY RAE PRESENTS BLACK RAINBOWS

Roundhouse

★★★★★

“Bailey Rae creates beauty from pain, with a voice that is spellbindingly theatrical”

As Corinne Bailey Rae begins this orchestral, one-night-only show of her 2023 album Black Rainbows, she recites an incantation: “We long to arc our arm through history to unpick every thread of pain”. This lyric from the opening track, A Spell, A Prayer, sets the tone for the show – a resurrection of historical figures, both real and imagined, brought to life by a dizzying array of genres each perfectly suited to the characters they conjure.

Bailey Rae is best known for her 2006 debut hits ‘Just Like a Star’ and ‘Put Your Records On’, soulful, easy listening tunes you would certainly find in Spotify’s ‘Easy 00s’ playlist, likely followed by Sandi Thom’s ‘I Wish I was a Punk Rocker’ or Lemar’s ‘Not That Easy’, both from the same year.

Black Rainbows represents a radical departure from the hits that made her name. Though Bailey Rae has maintained some level of success with subsequent albums, she has spoken of how writing her third album, The Heart Speaks Whispers, was a slow and difficult endeavour due to the pressure, both internal and external, of writing pop hits in the style of her first records.

This album feels like a release. As we learn from Bailey Rae throughout the show, she has diverse musical influences – from Nirvana to Billie Holiday – that feel as though they are at last each able to come to the fore. Seven years since her last album, Black Rainbows is gloriously unbound by expectation and, as the album cover suggests, represents a rebirth for Bailey Rae, but one that builds on adolescent questions, early musical influences, and recent epiphanies, rather than eschewing them to a version of herself that’s nothing more than dust.

As the artist explains in the introduction to ‘Erasure’, a track that begins with Bailey strutting across the stage strumming her electric guitar against a driving, progressive percussion, the development of this album was inspired by visits over several years to the the Stony Island Arts Bank, a Chicago-based archive of more than 26,000 books on Black history, art and culture in a building saved from demolition by artist and curator Theaster Gates. The collections represent survival and triumph, notably in the archives of Ebony magazine and DJ Frankie Knuckles but also oppression and despair. In her investigations through the archives, Bailey Rae felt like the objects were talking to her, urging her to tell their stories. Gone are her dreamy lilting vocals of the noughties. In their place we find gnarly, distorted and strained vocals, reminiscent of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs – much more indie rock than easy listening. Erasure’s angry, punk-inspired guitar riffs and screeched lyrics perfectly speak to the artist’s anger at the repression of black femininity, personhood, and childhood evidenced in the archives.

It’s a style that’s echoed on ‘New York Transit Queen’ a few songs later, a track dedicated to Audrey Smalts 1954’s winner who was featured in a centre page spread of Ebony magazine. Here is where the Guildhall Session Orchestra starts to really come to the fore – with the brass section evoking the sound of subway trains screeching along the tracks and bellowing their horns. The more than 30 piece orchestra comprised of students and alumni from Guildhall School of Music and Drama includes a full string section, percussion, keys and vocalists alongside the brass section. And in keeping with the ethos of Roundhouse Three Sixty – the new festival of music and culture taking place across April of which this show forms part – current students from Guildhall have also created original arrangements of each of the tracks for the night’s performance.

Many of the stories told through the album are harrowing reminders of the horrors experienced by Black people no more than a few generations ago. None is more shocking than that of teenage Harriet Jacobs, told in ‘Peach Velvet Sky’, who hid in a crawl space above a barn for seven years to escape her Master’s violent delights. But in this, as in ‘Red Horse’, a cinematic song similarly inspired by an unnamed and unknowable pre-teen slave girl, Bailey Rae creates beauty from pain, with a voice that is spellbindingly theatrical, taking cues from the jazz greats of Billie Holiday, Earth Kitt and Sarah Vaughan. In each piece, she re-casts the past with a hopeful and happier ending, conjuring such vivid images with her lyricism that you can visualise the dapper cowboy whisking the girl away.

The show concludes on an indisputable high, dancing off the woes of what came before with the jubilant atmosphere of ‘Put it Down’, lengthily extended from the album version. Grabbing a whistle, Bailey Rae joins the crowd on the main floor of the Roundhouse, joining the party whilst hitching up her skirt to get a better groove, lighting up the faces of everyone in the audience as she dances past. It’s an epic finale that shows off the transformation of this versatile artist who deserves a rediscovery, much like the historical characters she herself has sought to reinvent through the creation of her masterful Black Rainbows.