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.

Review

Ageing

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

Film & TV

5 September 2025

5 min read

Foundation shows you can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul

A sci-fi classic unearths transhumanism’s flaws

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A woman confronts a man whose clone stands behind her.

Apple TV.

One of the reasons that science fiction has had enduring popularity as a genre is its ability to illustrate thought experiments. The way it can attempt to answer questions that can’t even be asked in any other kind of fiction is what gives it power as a form of storytelling. One question that keeps coming up is: what if you could live forever, through technology?

One person to attempt to answer this question is Isaac Asimov, one of the early giants of the sci-fi genre. Born in 1920, Asimov arrived into a world that was rapidly changing, and yet, his imagination was still able to outpace it. Much of what he is known for is his depiction of robots, with ‘Asimov’s laws of robotics’ influencing the depiction of androids in Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, direct adaptations of Asimov’s own work were few and far between. Robin Williams’ Bicentennial Man released in 1999 and Will Smith starred in I, Robot in 2004 were the best of the bunch. That is, until Apple TV began adapting Asimov’s Foundation.

Asimov’s Foundation books were written across the span of fifty years. The premise of the stories is that in a distant future, a galactic empire is beginning to fail and cannot be saved. The mathematician Hari Seldon develops the theory of psychohistory, where he uses statistical laws to predict the future of large populations. In the wake of the empire’s fall, Seldon predicts a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Seldon devises a plan to reduce this dark age to just one thousand years by preserving a ‘foundation’ of knowledge. The novels describe some of the dramatic events that frustrate, or are a result of Seldon's Plan. One of the features of the story that the Apple TV show of Foundation focuses on is attempted immortality.

Foundation gives us three depictions of ‘immortality’. Firstly, Seldon orchestrates having his conscience eventually uploaded into the Prime Radiant, a super-computer in order to allow him to shepherd his plans beyond the limits of his own human lifespan. Secondly, his protégé, Gaal Dornick is throughout the first season put into a cryo-sleep that lets her move into the future without ageing. Finally, the characters of Dawn, Day and Dusk attempt immortality through cloning. The tyrannical emperor Cleon decided that the only person fit to succeed him was…himself. So, he creates a revolving triumvirate of his own clones: Brother Day, a Cleon in his prime; Brother Dusk, an aging Cleon who serves to advise Day; and Brother Dawn, a young Cleon being trained to succeed Brother Day. This "genetic dynasty" has been ruling with an iron fist for 400 years by the start of the series.

These interpretations of immortality grant each character the ability to shape and curate history in a way that no one human could ever achieve. But as there’s no drama without conflict, Foundation shows us the downsides of this kind of immortality. Firstly, Gaal’s version, being frozen in cryo-sleep for decades might literally extend her life, but from Gaal’s perspective, it is no longer than it would have been otherwise. Whilst she does get to see history play out, she loses connections with people like her family and her lover Raych. She is unable to build the life she would have planned for herself.

No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about.

Seldon’s version of immortality is flirted with by tech bros and transhumanists like Peter Thiel. The idea of a computer that has the processing power to replicate a human brain turns up in numerous stories, but it’s another false immortality. Firstly, the original Hari Seldon still dies, and the ‘digital version’ stored eventually in the Prime Radiant is merely a copy. We might not think much of copy and pasting a document or file on our computer, but it doesn’t quite work the same for human beings. A copy is not the same as the original. You can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul. In addition to this, we find out at one point that due to a mistake, Hari’s digital self has been trapped in darkness, fully conscious but with no rest, no distractions and no way of communicating with the outside world for 148 years. This naturally drags Hari into an interminable madness.

Lastly, the Empire run by the clones, Dawn, Day and Dusk suffer much the same problem as the other two. It’s not a real immortality; as each clone eventually dies. But in many ways, it’s even worse than death. No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about. This is a trope that is troubling, because a protagonist dying and being returned via cloning is often presented as a ‘resurrection’. It has been used as a story arc in the X-men comics and in Peter Capaldi’s era of Doctor Who, with very little outcry from their respective fandoms. Possibly because the thought that the producers have canonically killed the main character and replaced them with an exact copy is simply too uncomfortable to consider. In Foundation itself, the clones are judged by their fidelity to the original (a cold and petty despot) and any deviation is met with a death sentence. Whilst clones may be one way to rule a sci-fi galactic empire, it’s possibly their inability to adapt to changing circumstances that contributes to the fall of civilisation.

The great irony in all of these interpretations is; you are only immortal to those observing you, and an immortality that relies on perspective is not really an immortality at all.

It seems that hard science fiction, and ancient Greek myths can at times, overlap in their focus. Viewed in one light, Asimov’s Foundation series can be seen as one long story of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to give it as a gift to mankind, only to be punished by Zeus for his actions. Asimov appears to be telling us that mankind can’t accurately predict the future and you can’t live forever. So despite being a staunch atheist, one of the great minds of science fiction might be suggesting that immortality may belong squarely in the realm of the divine.

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