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.

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24 October 2025

5 min read

Will the owner of ‘Halloween’ please come and collect it?

A mutant festival of saints, spirits, and supermarket costumes resists belonging to anyone

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A witch, a priest and a druid stand in a store and look quizzically towards a halloween pumpkin

Nick Jones, Midjourney.ai

The trouble with modern Halloween is that it’s hard to say who it really belongs to. Our contemporary public holiday – 31 October, when people dress up as skeletons, light jack-o-lanterns, and go ‘trick-or-treating’ – has a few prospective owners.

Perhaps Christians could claim it. The term “Halloween” is a shortening of ‘All Hallow’s Eve’, which is the day before All Saint’s Day (1 November) in the Church calendar.

But this doesn’t fit with a few things. Don’t Christians dislike all that dressing up as evil spirits, and summoning up misrule and revelry? Instead, the case is made for a pagan ownership of Halloween: it was all due to a Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced ‘sow-in’). This was a day for appeasing evil spirits, contacting the dead, and acts of mischief – all better fits for modern Halloween, surely?

Sadly, we just don’t know enough about Samhain to say. We only have evidence about it from centuries after the Christian era, and in limited scraps like: “Samhain, when the summer goes to its rest”. It is unlikely the Christians invented this, to be sure – but none of the data tells us how it was celebrated.

In fact, there is no evidence at all that All Saints Day was a churchy attempt to ‘take over’ a pre-existing pagan festival. From the get-go, Christians commemorated their dead on the basis that they were still alive in heaven, and able to bring prayers to God. A quick peek at the Book of Revelation (the final book of the Bible) gives a behind-the-curtain look: “and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel”.

Over time, it became more official which ‘holy ones’, or saints, should be honoured at which times. This was not about making dead Christians into gods, though. A famous theologian called St Augustine explains the proper view of the early Christians as they kept hold of bones and clothing from their dead: “We do not build temples, and ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices for these same martyrs; for they are not our gods, but their God is our God”.

Gradually, a date was set to celebrate all those great men and women in heaven – from this came All Saints, or All Hallows Day. A tradition in northern Europe set this on the 1 November: “As a jewel worn on the brow sparkles time and again, so November at its beginning is resplendent with the praise given to all the saints” reports an English calendar from around 800AD.

It is all well and good celebrating those who have made it to heaven. But what about the majority of Christians? Those who had died unrepentant and lukewarm – what on earth could be done for them? Here came another separate development: offering prayers and worship on behalf of those who had died as forgiven sinners, but who were still, if you like, serving their time for their bad choices.

It gradually became the norm to tack that practice onto the pre-existing All Saints Day, so that the souls of regular Joes could have powerful heavenly intercessors close by. And so, All Souls Day became an established part of the Church’s year too, falling on 2 November.

But here’s the twist. This season of ‘Hallowtide’ (All Saints and All Souls together) carried on for centuries, until England suddenly and violently abandoned it all in the sixteenth century. Seemingly overnight, the Reformations of the Tudor monarchs ended All Souls Day by scrapping all mention of a purgatory for the dead, and attempts to pray for them there. All Saints Day limped on in the new Established Religion as a remembrance of Christian exemplars – but they were not to be thought of as in radio contact from heaven anymore.

Some people tried to carry on as usual, in illicit gatherings on hilltops, where they would burn straw, and gather to ask for help from great saints and pray for loved ones. But the majority followed the new religious settlement and tried to forge new communal rituals as best they could. The night still had a ‘supernatural’ afterglow thanks to centuries of the now-absent All Saints and All Souls.

Then, in the nineteenth century, there was a comeback. Irish immigration to the USA and Great Britain plonked a fully formed Hallowtide into English-speaking culture again. It took like a duck to water. Perhaps this was to be expected. Here was a civilisation which had been rapidly deprived of its ordinary way of expressing connection to their deceased loved ones, as well as a sense of protection from heavenly guardians. They were clearly starving for some way to communicate feelings about ‘the beyond’, and to find hope in the darkening, colder days.

‘Halloween’, really a modern döppleganger of All Hallow’s Eve, quickly became a popular national custom – a world custom, indeed, due to US influence. It took from Christianity that otherwordly atmosphere – but it did not jettison any of the customs that had arisen since the Reformation, and which were themselves continuations of folky responses to the coming of Winter; Samhain is almost certainly a part of that background here, even if it is not a direct connection, as we have seen.

This Halloween mystery has a twist, then. Here is really a mutant of a festival that belongs to no one in particular - and that is the point. One could really call it one of modern pluralistic society’s great achievements. It has taken over management of this eerie season from the church, and arguably made a successful shared custom out of it. On the other hand, it is arguably consumeristic, tacky and frequently immoral: it was only a few years ago that supermarket costumes allowing people to dress as ‘mentally ill’ showcased this shallowness.

So, as a Christian, I have some regrets that Christianity does not really ‘own’ modern Halloween, anymore. Because the original All Hallows, as well as All Souls, seem to me to be a historic high point of confidence about our human fate. Here was a whole civilisation that seemed to announce to itself, every November, that death, human wickedness, and the Devil, were not in charge here – those who had died in Christ were now more fully alive; that no one is so beyond hope that they are not worth praying for. The darkening nights and colder air must have seemed less daunting to them.

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