On one of the last truly sweltering days of summer, Corinne Bailey Rae stands outside the Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds, squinting into the dusty sunlight. From the window of a braking car, someone has called her name and short-sightedly she moves towards the kerb to see who it might be. Inside are two friends, a couple she hasn’t caught up with in a while. The woman was pregnant last time they talked, but now she and her partner are proud parents of several weeks’ standing. Life has continued on, it is clear, while Bailey Rae has been off selling 1.5 million copies of her debut album and cracking the US Top 20. “You turn your back for a minute…” the singer muses, smiling, once Goodbyes and Catch-Up-With-You-Soons have been exchanged and the driver has pulled away.
These inner-city streets northwest of the centre have been home to Bailey Rae (she assumed the second of her two surnames on marrying Jason Rae, a saxophonist) for the past nine years. Prior to that and from birth she lived in the suburb of Moortown. As her full warm accent attests, she is Leeds through and through. But suddenly, and bewilderingly to her, she is known and admired almost everywhere. Elton John has praised that self-titled CD, released here just seven months ago. Burt Bacharach swooned over her voice when they met recently on the set of
Later With Jools Holland. Prince turned out to see her when she made a first stage appearance in LA. In short, songs recorded largely in a basement studio a few miles away in Idle last year have floated out on the airwaves and instantly have bewitched the world. Indeed, such has been Bailey Rae’s impact that she has been nominated for no fewer than three awards at next month’s MOBO (Music of Black Origin) event, including Best UK Female, Best UK Newcomer and Best Song, for the summer anthem
Put Your Records On.
Hyde Park is now more than ever her home, for she and Rae have bought a first house together here (it’s reported to have cost them £130,000). But she spent last night in a London hotel after recording her own TV special, and tomorrow she is off to Seattle to begin a US tour. Even as customers come and go at the New Pin Launderette and Dry Cleaners across the road, plans are being made for her and itineraries drawn up (“
The Big Issue is a yes, but to repeat, she’s not interested in doing any lifestyle or fashion stuff whatsoever,” the publicist from her record company is saying patiently into his mobile phone). If Bailey Rae sleeps in her own bed for more than two consecutive nights between now and Christmas, it will be a small miracle. What she once dreamt about is actually happening and as a result her life is scarcely her own.
We repair to the Clock, a café where Bailey Rae used to wait on tables and organise staff rotas (like everyone she encounters in our time together, the owner Rob appears delighted to see her and genuinely thrilled at her new success). “As an everyday person, you don’t really think of the promotional side of things,” she observes while waiting for hoummos and pitta bread. “You might see someone’s picture in a couple of magazines with some words attached, but you don’t realise all the planning that’s gone into it. You don’t know that their record’s out in 60 different countries or that Japanese film crews have been turning up in their home town. When I’m on stage now I force myself to look out into the audience and take in all the faces, just to remind myself that these are real people who know my songs and who’ve paid to come and see me.”
America’s ready embrace of those retro soul-inflected tracks might bring coals and Newcastle to mind, “But I think on closer listening they’re hearing something that’s also very English and guitar-based and quirky, rather than any imitation of what they themselves do so well.” Bailey Rae says her aim was to achieve an intimate and conversational tone, both in her singing (her cracked, artless style has been compared to Billie Holiday but is actually
closer to Erykah Badu) and in her lyrics (“impressionistic details like the expression on someone’s face, or the fabric of a dress, rather than any definitive statement about what was what”), and she has succeeded. Amid the strut and swagger of most contemporary urban music, she is sweetness and light in the best sense of those words.
And her background? It is like a macrocosm of her music. Her father arrived from St Kitts aged 15, his family settling in the predominantly West Indian Chapeltown area of Leeds. He met his future wife on the local soul scene of the Seventies (“I think he smacked her bum in a disco,” Bailey Rae smiles before noting quickly, “Courtship was very different in those days”) and they married when he was 20, she 19. Was that a big thing for her mother’s family? “For both families,” the eldest of their three daughters rightly corrects. “It’s so common now. It almost seems like everyone here is mixed race. But it was very unusual in those days for people to marry across racial lines. There was only one other family we knew where the mum was white and the dad black.”
Happily, both sets of parents liked and welcomed in their offspring’s partners, but outside of the home things were less relaxed. “Apparently, strangers would look into my pram and ask my mum what on earth had possessed her to have a child by a black man – either that, or they’d assume I was adopted. It was such a big thing for a white woman to have a brown child. Now, in just the space of one generation, it’s so different. Thank goodness.”
Domestic life for the growing family (Bailey Rae has two younger sisters, one an actress, the other “working with kids and wanting to change the world”) was eventful, due largely to her mother’s inclusive nature and generosity towards waifs and strays. “She loves caring for others, and there would be different people living with us from time to time, skint or between jobs or down on their luck for some reason. She was a good friend to others, always. In fact, often my mates would come round to the house to see her rather than me. And I’m quite like her in that sense. I love my house to be busy and to feel like I’m a host.”
But what both Bailey Rae’s parents displayed as role models for their children was more than just soft hearts and a love of company. By example, they taught a sense of community and of civic responsibility. Her mother went from cleaning private homes to being a classroom helper to gaining the necessary qualifications to work with children with learning difficulties. Now she has a job promoting ethnic diversity in the curricula of Leeds schools. And her father, following a failed business venture, has gone on to teach computer skills to youngsters who have fallen behind in class or been excluded, “which includes a lot of black and Asian kids, as you might imagine”. That her parents’ marriage should end in divorce when Bailey Rae was 13 was not the big deal it might at first seem.
“I wasn’t at all traumatised. What I actually felt was relief. You can tell when people aren’t getting on, and I think it’s a big mistake when a couple say they’re going to stay together for the sake of the children. Kids are perceptive. They know. Also, I think it’s a really bad example to set of marriage, showing it to be a union of two individuals, each of whom would rather be elsewhere.”
In fact, family life continued on much as normal, with her dad still living nearby and coming round for meals or to share in birthday or Christmas celebrations. Neither parent has remarried. “All my mum’s attention stayed focused on us. She was still a cleaner back then and went without things herself so that the three of us could have lessons at this really good ballet school. She didn’t have a boyfriend all the time we were growing up, either, and has only just recently started to see people.”
But if the younger Corinne felt set apart from her peers, it was not due to her mixed-race parentage. “The sense I had as a small child of not quite fitting in was entirely due to my being bright at school and eager to please. All three of us girls were pretty straight in that way. When you get your work read out in class time after time, it does tend to separate you a bit from the others.” That academic bent lead to her achieving four A grades at A level, and then to taking an English degree at Leeds University. That she left with a 2:1 and not the hoped-for First clearly still rankles a little, and Bailey Rae says she would like to return to academia at some point in the future. But, she reasons, “You make your choices and I’d found music long before then and no longer had all the time I’d have needed to study.”
She had joined her first band aged 15, just as she was about to enter the sixth form. “It was an exciting time. Even at that level you felt part of something. Grunge was big. Kurt Cobain had just died. And the Duchess of York in town was the place to go, because Nirvana had played there. There was loads of competition. Everyone was checking out everyone else. And there was I in my bedroom with a guitar, working on some little idea, not knowing if it was any good or not, and then saying to my mates, ‘I’m going to play something to you but whatever you do, don’t look at me while I’m doing it, OK?’”
Helen, the group she formed with her best friend Jenny, won a locally organised talent competition, Bright Young Things, in 1997, so attracting the attention of would-be manager Bob Miller. “He didn’t have loads of experience but I could see he really believed in me,” is her simple justification for then having chosen to be represented by him. It was Miller’s opinion that she should leave the band and move to London, where she might collaborate with other more experienced songwriters, but Bailey Rae would not be convinced: “Helen was me, my two best mates and my boyfriend of the time, and I wanted it to be all of us or none of us.” First one and then a second member left, however, and soon she found herself a solo artist by default. “And yes, record companies seemed more interested in that than they had been in the band,” she now admits.
By now a graduate, Bailey Rae supported herself by working in a jazz club, the Underground. “At night I was behind the bar or checking coats, and by day I hung out with all the musicians, many of whom would invite me on stage during their sets. There was something extra-special about that place. Looking back, I’m glad I invested so much time there. It was really important for me to do so.” And not least because it was where she met her husband of five years.
“It was a friendship that turned into something else,” she says of their romance. “But very early on I realised I wanted to make him the one. I wanted to hang out with him, make dinner with him, to just be in his company all the time. And I still feel that way today. If he were to come round the corner right now, I’d be suddenly a bit shy but so excited to see him again unexpectedly.”
They waited for two years before marrying but to have the ceremony was important to both of them. “We wanted that big commitment. And it was a brilliant occasion in this old church in town – his big Scottish family, my dad’s black family and my mum’s Yorkshire one, plus loads and loads of friends. I love the way it was, which was perfect, and the fact that it can never be changed.”
Content in her personal life, Bailey Rae then worked on amassing enough material to comprise that first album, which was self-financed and recorded before ever a contract was struck with EMI. “We begged favours, and worked with other writers and producers whenever they found themselves with a day free,” she says of this strategy. “But I wanted to have a finished product before signing with anyone. That way I could be sure they were buying into me and not what they thought they might be able to turn me into.”
Of course, now that she is a proven success story she has become a magnet for all kinds of everyone. “Isn’t it mad that the minute you might be able to afford some nice things for the first time, people want to give you free clothes?” she remarks of the attentions of designers and stores attracted by her singular style. But the prospect of becoming officially rich at some time soon? “It will be weird, yes, but I’m not frightened of it,” she says carefully. “Hopefully, I’ll find good things to do with any money that comes to me and water projects are at the very top of my list. I’m certainly not aspiring to a big house with a swimming pool. With a billion people in the world lacking clean drinking water, you just couldn’t do it, could you?”
Equally unsurprisingly, her mother’s phone has been ringing off the hook these past few weeks, with friends both real and would-be congratulating her on the fine job she has made of bringing up her daughter. “But that’s a middle-class way of thinking, that you’ve only got reason to be proud when something tangible has been achieved,” says Bailey Rae, finishing her modest lunch. “I’d still be doing music but working here part-time to make ends meet had none of this happened. My mum is proud of all three of us because we’re out in the world using our abilities. Anything else is just the icing on the cake.”
Corinne Bailey Rae begins an eight-date UK tour at the Newcastle Academy on October 1. A single, Like A Star, will be released to coincide. Her debut album is available now. A podcast featuring her music is available at www.timesonline.co.uk/podcast
