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.

Explainer

Culture

Gaza

Israel

Politics

2 June 2025

5 min read

Politics is the only way to solve the tragedy of Gaza

Trump is not the first person to want to create a Riviera by the Mediterranean.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A sign projected on to the Houses of Parliament reads: how many is too many.

A projection protest sign, London.

Christian Aid.

Whichever side you take in the Israel-Gaza conflict, the stories can't help bring a sense of desperation. Images of starving children, the fate of Jewish hostages still held in darkness - either way, this remains a place of unimaginable suffering. And meanwhile, the bombs keep dropping, people die, and Hamas retains its hold.

Among Israel’s friends, voices have been murmuring a radical solution to the problem of Gaza. Donald Trump’s plan was to raze the territory to the ground, shift 50 million tonnes of debris and displace its people to neighbouring countries to build the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ in what had until now, been Gaza. The plan might have been met with some amusement when it was aired, but it gave permission for many within Israel to think similar thoughts.

Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, recently claimed that after the Israeli operation, “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries.” Many within Israel seem to think the stubborn, Hamas-ridden enemy living next door needs to be eradicated. To a population weary of decades of conflict, fearing that there will never be peace while Hamas remains in Gaza, and aware of how difficult it is to winkle out the Islamic terrorist group while the Palestinian population remains there, you can understand the attraction of this radical solution.

However, the Israelis might have good reason to be cautious. And that is not a counsel from their opponents - but from their own history.

In the early 130s AD, the boot was on the other foot. It was the mighty Gentile Roman Empire that ruled over the same patch of land, which they were soon to call Palestina. Jews were a minority, but they still harked back to their long roots in the land, the days of Joshua and King David, and even more recently to the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom 200 years before - the last time before the modern state of Israel that Jews were in control of the land.

The emperor at the time, Hadrian, passed through Jerusalem in 130 AD, along with his entourage and his lover, the young slave boy Antinous. He started to paganise the city, erecting statues of gods and emperors, even of his young favourite, all of them offensive to Jewish sensibilities. The smouldering resentment soon erupted with a revolt led by a fierce and determined Jewish fighter, Bar Kokhba. This was the second Jewish uprising after the earlier one in the 60s that had led to the destruction of the great Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, under the reign of the emperor Vespasian in 70 AD. For the Romans, one revolt might just be tolerated, two was too much.

Hadrian came to the same conclusion as Bezalel Smotrich – a rebellious territory had to be erased from the map, although this time, it was Jerusalem that was to be eliminated, not Gaza. Its Jewish population was to be scattered, its name deleted, and memories of past glories buried for good.

And so, in 135 AD, the bulldozers moved in. Jerusalem was effectively flattened, and a Roman city built on its ruins. Aelia Capitolina was its new name, a smaller city, yet decadently built around the worship of Greek and Roman gods, with splendid gates, pagan Temples, a classic Roman Forum, expansive columned streets – not quite the Riviera of the middle east, but maybe the Las Vegas. ‘Jerusalem’ was scrubbed from the map.

At the centre of the sacred Jewish Temple Mount, Hadrian erected a statue of himself. He deliberately planted a statue of Aphrodite over the very spot where the early Christians insisted that the death and resurrection of Jesus had taken place – where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today. Circumcision was outlawed, many Jews were killed, and those remaining were banned from the city, dispersed anywhere where they could find shelter. In fact, the map of the Old City of Jerusalem today is still marked by this design, with the two main Hadrianic streets diverging south from the Damascus Gate, with archaeological remains of the Roman city still visible for visitors.

Yet of course it didn’t work. No-one calls it Aelia today. People's attachment to land goes deep. The Jews could not forget their roots in this patch of the earth's surface. As Simon Sebag Montefiore put it: “the Jewish longing for Jerusalem never faltered”, praying three times a day throughout the following centuries: “may it be your will that the temple be rebuilt soon in our days.”

Palestinian attachment to land is similarly strong. Nearly 80 years after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, families still cling on to the keys to homes that were taken from them during that traumatic period. Like the Jewish yearning for Jerusalem, they too, like people across the world, have a deep attachment to ancestral lands, which go back to the ‘Arabs’ mentioned in the book of Acts, to whom St Peter preached in the early days of the Christian church.

Executive decisions by distant rulers such as the emperor Hadrian or President Trump might seem like neat solutions to intractable problems. But they seldom work in the long term.

The famous biblical injunction ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ was meant not as an encouragement to violence but the exact reverse. It was mean to set a limit to the development of blood feuds, which could, out of anger and trauma, so easily lead to disproportionate reaction and never-ending vendettas. When St Paul wrote “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’”, he was recalling an ancient piece of Jewish wisdom that set limits on human capacity to sort out intractable problems by violence. He knew a better way: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford and a Seen & Unseen writer, argues that there are really only four ways you can deal with neighbours who prove difficult: you can try to control them, cause them to flee, you can kill them, or you can do politics – in other words, try to negotiate some form of common life, as ultimately happened in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and so many places of long-standing conflict.

Politics, the business of learning how to live together across difference, is messy, complicated and hard work. Especially so when there are deep hurts from the past. Yet, as the failure of Hadrian’s radical solution shows, there is no real alternative in the long term.

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