Corinne Bailey Rae: ‘I was seen as boring. Lily Allen started a campaign against me’

Celebrities are rarely who you think they are, but the discrepancy between the soft-spoken Corinne Bailey Rae of her early magazine profiles and the outspoken musician in front of me today is surprising all the same. “In the British press, I was seen as boring and straight,” says the singer, who is now 45 and still lives in her hometown of Leeds. “I was making acoustic music, wearing these kinds of old-fashioned dresses.” She raises her eyebrows. “I was also married. I was so not interesting to them.”

Her perceived dullness was a blessing in a way. Before her 30th birthday, Bailey Rae had achieved a level of fame that might’ve combusted with the wrong kind of kindling. Her self-titled debut shot to No 1 upon its release in 2006 (in the US, it stayed on the Billboard 200 for the next year and a half) and her swoony second single “Put Your Records On” reached No 2 on the singles chart. She was nominated for Grammys and Brits (three each) and performed at the White House on the invitation of Barack Obama. Her admirers include Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and Mary J Blige. Prince was a fan.

Bailey Rae’s neo-soul pop remains a staple at cafés and on easy listening Spotify playlists. More recently, a TikTok trend introduced a new generation of fans to the palm-tree sway of those breezy early hits. So when Black Rainbows arrived last year, a fistful of politics set to heavy beats and scuzzy guitar, it struck like a bolt from the blue. As did its place on the shortlist for this year’s Mercury Prize award, which came as a shock to the singer – albeit less so following the string of rave reviews upon the album’s release. The awards will take place tonight and see Bailey Rae, nominated once before in 2010, in good company alongside Charli XCX, Dublin pop singer CMAT, and London rapper Ghetts.

Inspired by a 2017 visit to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a sprawling archive of Black life curated by artist Theaster Gates, Black Rainbows is an excavation of what Bailey Rae saw that day. On it are songs about perilous beauty standards thrumming with an electronica current: “My Black hair kinking/ My Black skin gleaming.” Another, “New York Transit Queen”, calls back to Bailey Rae’s glossed-over punk past as part of an all-girl alt-rock group in Leeds. On “Erasure”, she launches a scabrous attack with her guitar against the exploitation of enslaved children.

It is less easy listening than it is compulsive listening. It was so different to anything Bailey Rae had done that she had originally planned to release it as a side project separate from her name. “So that it wouldn’t disrupt anything that I had made before,” she explains. “I’m used to making records about my internal world: my experiences, relationships, stories I had or had heard. But this felt quite obscure and the people I was working with at the time perceived it to be a sidestep. I felt I was always asking permission to go and make this.”

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The freedom of Black Rainbows has been hard-won, she says. “It’s a real reaction to my third album, which was so heavily controlled.” Released in 2016, The Heart Speaks in Whispers was mostly well-received by critics, an LA-infused evolution of her frothy sound that had been steadily falling away since 2010’s The Sea. It was written in part after her husband, Jason Rae, died of an accidental methadone overdose in 2008, leaving Bailey Rae as a 29-year-old widow. She is now married to keyboard player Steve Brown, with whom she shares two daughters and collaborates frequently.

“The label was hands-off with the record after he died. They knew they couldn’t put any pressure on me because I was so vulnerable,” she says. But by the time of the third album, it was back to business. The message rang in loud and clear from above: “You need a hit now.”

Thus, Bailey Rae was shoved into a revolving door of co-producers and co-writers. “I found it to be quite soul destroying because that’s not how I make music,” she says. Call it naive, but Bailey Rae thought she was “clever enough” to game the system. “I thought I could get around it by giving them a few things they wanted, and they thought they could trick me,” she says.

Those sessions took their toll. “After a while, I didn’t need to be in a room with eight older white men to tell me if something wasn’t a hit,” she says. “I had absorbed all those critical voices in my head.” Bailey Rae came out of the process “bruised” and “running to Black Rainbows as a retreat from that pressure and those rules”.

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There are no rules on Black Rainbows; songs are allowed to run on for as long as they please and genre is treated as something both porous and sturdy, like a coral reef in the tropics. “I could just follow whatever idea came into my head,” says Bailey Rae. These were things she couldn’t shake. Like the lynching postcards she saw at the Arts Bank or the tray that invited smokers to flick ash in the open mouth of a young Black boy – part of the Bank’s “Negrobilia” collection of household objects depicting Black people in grotesque ways.

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“They were reminiscent of images that I had grown up with,” says Bailey Rae. She recalls being in history class at school and opening her textbook to a two-page spread of horrific photos of lynchings. “It was the only time that people like me were featured in those lessons, and it was in this degraded and victimised status,” she says.

Recent years have seen something of a re-evaluation of how stars, particularly those young and female, were treated by the press in the Noughties. For the most part, Bailey Rae was protected from the worst of it, she says. The press were too fixated on Amy Winehouse (“I loved her a lot”) to bother with a sensible-seeming singer with no lad mag-style photos to her name; “they used to contact my label and ask, ‘Are there any FHM-style photos of Corinne?’”

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What they wanted from women in entertainment back then, says Bailey Rae, was for you to be sexy, swearish, and loutish. “They wanted to see you falling out of bars and clubs. There was so much focus on that sort of thing, and Amy kind of absorbed all that press; I was very much in the shadows in terms of that,” she says. “Because of the way I presented myself, they infantilised me like I was this young, innocent girl.” It wasn’t only the case in the UK. In 2006, in a live review of her show, a New York Times critic wrote that Bailey Rae “seemed incapable of doing anything crass or deviant or bombastic”. Similar reviews attested to this perceived cherubic, butter-wouldn’t-melt quality of hers that she didn’t recognise herself.

“I was just seen as boring,” says Bailey Rae. “I remember Lily Allen started this campaign against me, ‘Oh Corinne is so middle of the road.’ She had started talking about me like that, but I wasn’t going to engage in [any back and forth]. I thought, ‘I’m not going to bother with that. Stevie Wonder likes me, so it’s OK that Lily Allen doesn’t like me. That’s fine.’”

Everything changed, of course, when her husband died. “It was a drug-related death and so suddenly everyone was so interested in me. There were rows of photographers outside the house,” Bailey Rae says. “It really gave me a strong measure of the British press and who they were – as if I needed it.” She recalls receiving a note under her door that said, “If you want to talk, I’m here” together with a phone number. “As if I would call a journalist two days after my husband had died,” she says, shaking her head. “I’d love to call that woman now and give her a piece of my mind. And the fact that I wouldn’t give a statement to the press just totally infuriated them.”

Bailey Rae has become good at saying no. “I’ve enjoyed growing in self-knowledge and power as I’ve gone through life,” she says. “No, not that bikini. No, not that outfit.” At a photo shoot for the first interview she gave after Jason’s death, she saw a smashed mirror on set. “I think the editor wanted to put a real tragic spin on it, and this photographer wanted to get my reflection in this smashed mirror,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I just knew they’d make it the cover and the headline would be ‘Shattered Lives’ or something, so I said, ‘That’s not the story I want to tell, so I’m not doing that – no.”

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Almost two decades on and she still feels frustrated about the circumstances surrounding Jason’s death. “It is really annoying that it wasn’t a different story,” she says. He could’ve easily woken up in hospital instead, regaled their friends with the wild tale and sworn never to do it again. “There were so many of our friends who had done crazier things or taken more risks,” she says. “It was frustrating to compare his relatively low-risk encounters to date with that one dumb decision. I guess it’s really easy to die.”

Black Rainbows has been characterised as a hairpin turn for Bailey Rae, but anyone who has been paying attention will know it’s not as shocking a diversion as it first appears. “Put Your Records On” is at its heart a song about female solidarity. You’d be forgiven for not noticing, though. Bailey Rae, herself, took time to recognise Black Rainbows as part of herself.

It was only when, having forgotten to tell the graphic designer to leave it off, she saw her name on the album artwork – scribbled in indistinct shapes like smoke rings caught in a hurricane – that she decided to release Black Rainbows as Corinne Bailey Rae. “Seeing it written that way changed the whole way I thought about myself as an artist,” she says now. “For so long I’d associated my name with a certain logo that I didn’t identify with any more. When I saw it, I was like, ‘Yes, this project is me. This is my name.’”

‘Black Rainbows’ and Corinne Bailey Rae’s new single ‘SilverCane’ are both out now. The Mercury Prize 2024 winner will be announced live from Abbey Road studios, in a BBC Four broadcast between 8pm to 9.15pm.