Review

Culture

Music

27 October 2023

5 min read

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.

Article

Culture

Generosity

Virtues

4 June 2025

6 min read

We need to rescue volunteering

Our use of the word now reflects unwanted obligations, rather than a deep desire to serve.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

Two small lifeboats raft together on a river rescue.

Lifeboats on the River Thames.

x.com/rnli_teddington

It’s a hot summer evening and there are 30 of us sweating in our dry suits. Tuesdays usually mean lifeboat training, but this night is a little different. An intermission from the usual intensity of a team-building exercise: racing two lifeboats across the river Thames. Allocated into teams of two rowing in a knockout tournament, we are going to be here for a while. Our cheers provide the soundtrack for the BBC radio crew recording a programme on volunteering. The mood is convivial; the competition is fierce. None of us have to be here; all of us choose to be. We are a lifeboat crew, and we are all volunteers.

Around 25 million people in the UK do some form of volunteering. And they are celebrated during Volunteers’ Week, which has been running for 41 years. The benefits are well documented these days. The mental and physical health boost. A sense of purpose. The chance to learn new skills. A route to forging connections with other people.

Despite this, though, the number of people volunteering has been on a twenty-year decline. One in three organisations are struggling to retain volunteers, in part due to the cost-of-living crisis making people’s time and capacity more precious than ever.

Beyond that, our use of the word seems to have shifted to reflect unwanted obligations, rather than a deeply held desire to serve. ‘I suppose I better volunteer to put out the chairs’ we might pronounce with the deathly weight of Katniss Everdeen’s ‘I volunteer as tribute,’ glancing to the left and the right in case anyone saves us from the undesirable task. It seems the very idea of volunteering needs rescue.

It wasn’t on my radar to be lifeboat crew, but an unexpected new job in an unfamiliar London suburb unlocked this possibility. When I considered ‘Why wouldn’t I?’, I couldn’t find a strong reason. So, one autumn evening I trekked down for my first Tuesday night at Teddington lifeboat station. It was time to fill in the paperwork: I was officially a volunteer.

Over the months that followed, I found myself wondering why other people gave their time, energy and skills to complete the nearly 50 training modules and to be available 24/7 when someone on the water was in need. I hungered for people’s stories, to know why they kept answering the call when their beds were warm and the night was unknown. So, over the four years that I was on the crew, I asked them. I spoke with teachers and students, company directors and full-time parents. I heard stories of multiple generations on a crew, their family’s blood running orange and blue. One woman spoke of overcoming her fear of heights to scale the side of a boat; another had an unexpected tale of a dolphin attack. Each time, I had the same question: why do you do it?

And I was struck by the fact that none of them gave an answer that fully added up. They could name parts of it: care for people, teamwork, a love of the sea. Sometimes of the reasons they started (‘Dad did it’) were not why they stayed on (‘I could make a palpable difference’). I didn’t meet anyone who didn’t enjoy being on the water. Play and peril can co-exist – and we need to have moments of joy along the way if we’re going to be in it for the long haul. But in each case, the answers always seemed to come up a little short. If I was looking for something neat and complete, I wasn’t finding it.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby. At some point, volunteering will cost you something.

Back on the river, the knockout races are suddenly interrupted. A call from the coastguard: there’s a person in difficulty in the river. The mood switch is instantaneous; the action swings from contesting to collaborating to get a boat headed upstream as fast as possible. Somewhere, someone is having a very bad day. This is what we exist for.

The RNLI was born out of a need. In the early nineteenth century, nearly 2,000 ships – and their crews – were being wrecked on British and Irish coasts every year. Sir William Hillary saw this loss firsthand from his home on the Isle of Man, joining with others to rescue as many as possible – but it wasn’t enough. People continued to perish. So, he rallied other activists and philanthropists, and in a London pub, the charity now called the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was formed. Hillary’s motto, 'with courage, nothing is impossible’, can still be found adorning lifeboat stations around the country.

None of the lifeboat crew members that I met seemed to think of themselves as anything but ordinary. They were full of admiration in the stories of fellow crew mates, but saw themselves as entirely human, naming everyday needs and familiar comforts. Writing about courage, Andrew Davison recognised that,

‘The willingness of a courageous person to forgo ease, safety, the comforts of home, and even to risk life and limb, does not spring from hatred of any of those things’.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby (also commendable for its health benefits, sense of purpose, opportunities for connection). At some point, volunteering will cost you something. That sacrifice is needed demonstrates the level of care; otherwise, it’s simply another act of self-actualisation in the service of the volunteer themselves.

It’s dark on the river and the boat crew is still out. The BBC’s team has packed up for the evening. We have tidied the station, no evidence of the antics of hours earlier. We depart. Close to midnight, those of us who can, return. We bring the boat in from the water, and make it ready for the next call, which will inevitably come. One less job for those who’ve been on duty all evening. It’s the least we can do.

In the origins of the term is a spirit of offering. The Latin voluntaries carries a sense of ‘to give of one’s free will’. This, perhaps, is where we’ve lost our way with the whole idea. For there to be a sense of duress in volunteering is to strip the generous act of its power. Where there is obligation on one side and self-interest on the other, we can find the middle ground marked by devotion, by having chosen to serve and therefore having the commitment to see it through. This is the invitation that volunteering can offer us, and that I glimpsed from people who had been volunteering on the lifeboats for decades.

Writing to the sea-faring city of Ephesus in ancient Greece, the church leader Paul encouraged people to ‘submit to one another’, which is another way of saying sacrificially help each other. In smaller coastal communities, a lifeboat crew might be called out to save a family member. In London, a city of millions, it will always be a stranger. But either way the decision was the same: to show up. The reasons why we do it don’t always add up. There are flavours of compassion, of wanting to be useful, to be part of something bigger. But there seems to be something else as well. A dedication to meeting a need. Put another way, we might call it love.

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