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

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

16 May 2025

5 min read

The C-list villains reviving Marvel's Cinematic Universe

A thunderbolt of sincerity shows the franchise can still thrill.

Giles Gough

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

Four characters from a film loop warily to the side.

Anticipating the reviews.

Marvel Studios.

This article will contain spoilers for Thunderbolts*

It’s not unreasonable to say that fan expectations for the Thunderbolts* was tepid at best. Even the most diehard of them had to admit that the output for phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a mixed bag. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was deeply heartfelt, the Marvels was an enjoyable watch, but Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania definitely felt like a misstep, and the last Captain America: Brave New World certainly didn’t feel like it had exploited all the opportunities available. So, when Thunderbolts* arrived to round off this phase, featuring a team comprised of C-list villains, it was hard to generate a lot of enthusiasm. Thankfully, this film showed that Marvel still has what it takes to thrill and inspire us in equal measure.

Loosely inspired by a group created from the comics, the Thunderbolts were a team of villains masquerading as heroes who in some cases, ended up genuinely reforming. If that premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s essentially the idea behind Suicide Squad, (a film so bad that D.C. had another go at making a Suicide Squad film and we the audience, were more than happy to just let them).

The original Avenger line up, whilst compelling, always had some distance between themselves and the core audience. A super soldier, a billionaire genius, a rage monster, a literal Norse god and a super spy carried the bulk of the story. That level of brilliance in a set of characters can be inspiring but also alienating. How for example, can a person relate to Steve Rogers? A character whose main defining trait is to always make the right moral choices and be universally respected for it?

The Thunderbolt team is not so respectable. U.S. Agent, (Wyatt Russell) the Red Guardian (David Harbour) Bucky Barnes, (Sebastian Stan) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) have all at some point been trained assassins. The film goes to great lengths to show all of these characters being broken in some way or other. None more so than the character of Yelena.

Whilst this film is definitely an ensemble picture, they make no qualms about putting Florence Pugh‘s Yelena Belova front and centre of the story. Pugh’s star power showed that it could hold up alongside Marvel veterans like Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner, and it’s put to good use here. The film opens with Yelena having something of an existential crisis. “There is something wrong with me” her internal monologue says; “An emptiness. I’m just…drifting. And I don’t have purpose.” Granted having a job where most of the individuals you meet are people you are either going to kill or incapacitate would indeed make loneliness an occupational hazard. But despite the fantastical circumstances, many viewers will be able to relate to the feelings presented.

It's this awareness of her own struggles then, that perhaps makes Yelena best placed to help ‘Bob’, an affable, self-deprecating young man. Bob (played pitch perfect by Lewis Pullman, son of the great Bill Pullman) is given god-like powers by Julie Dreyfuss’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, in the hopes of making him a protector for the earth against any inter-galactic threats. With his new powers, Bob is virtually unstoppable. There’s just one problem; Bob clearly suffers from some type of crippling depression, which when amped up with super-powers makes him ‘The Void.’ His appearance; a black outline sucking in all detail save for two pin pricks of light where his eyes should be, combined with the ability to effortlessly turn people into black scorch marks, is the stuff of nightmares. Move over Churchill’s ‘black dog’, we now have a new metaphor for depression and its all-consuming power.

Battling depression is an area where the church is still lagging behind the world at large. “A depressed Christian has a double burden” writes Dr John Lockley in his book A Practical Workbook for the Depressed Christian, “Not only is he depressed but he also feels guilty because, as a Christian, he feels he is supposed to be full of joy.”

In some evangelical circles, depression is either treated as something that doesn’t exist, is minimised, or mistakenly believed to be the result of unconfessed sin. Spiritual leaders who are ignorant of the nuance around mental health believe that depression can simply be prayed away. When that doesn’t work, they can often blame the sufferer for their lack of healing, putting them in a very lonely place. “One of the most painful elements of mental illness is that it’s marked by isolation, which is exactly the opposite of what people need” writer Amy Simpson said in a 2014 interview; “And one of the things people with mental illness most need is for this kind of loving community to tighten around them, not to loosen”. Why is this relevant to a superhero blockbuster? Well, the climax of the film does a great job of illustrating a positive approach to mental health.

The finale of Thunderbolts* somehow manages to have its cake and eat it. Once again, New York is in need of saving, but also, it’s about trying to help a young person overcome their depression and not completely succumb to The Void. Being able to go into someone’s mind and see their core traumas writ large is the most comic book conceit in storytelling. Inside Bob’s psyche, we see him trying to fight The Void, and failing, and it’s only when he has help from the rest of the Thunderbolts* is he able to get a temporary release from The Void’s grip. It would be a mistake to over-state this scene as a full-on treatise on how to tackle mental health issues, but it might just have some clues as to how to go about it: 1) don’t expect that any battle with depression is decisive. It can always come back and it’s better to prepare for that possibility and 2) you don’t have to battle it alone, it would be madness to even try.

It's a surprisingly sincere place for a seemingly wry film to end, but it really, really works. It could be that expectations may have been lowered, or that we were expecting a film with the emotional depth of a puddle. But Thunderbolts* wildly exceeded expectations, and as the best post-credits scenes often do, there’s a promise that the best is yet to come.

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