Corinne Bailey Rae at Wakefield Exchange: Leeds star on USA success, English Teacher and 20 years in music

“I hadn't looked far ahead. When I was just starting out and I had my first record, I didn't really realise, I didn't understand, I guess, that artists toured and toured in other countries. I had been on one or two maybe airplanes when my first record came out and I was 26, so I didn't really have much of a global perspective. I didn't know that you were an artist in all these different countries. That the label would call them ‘territories’. I would see Top of the Pops and think, Oh, here's Kylie again, with another song, but kind of imagine that in between she’d be putting her feet up or something. I didn't realise she would be in New Zealand and Australia and South Africa and Japan and Europe and America and Brazil.

“I didn't realise the things you do to draw attention to your work.”

Once her own music was out there, the world in turn embraced Bailey Rae too. Perhaps nowhere more than the USA - a thrilling prospect because it is “the home of so much music that I actually really love and I deeply, deeply influenced by and then to meet artists that were, are, my heroes,” says Bailey Rae, 46.

To collaborate with them - acts such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller, Al Green and John Legend - felt like a “huge affirmation”.

Still, she is Yorkshire through and through, enjoying the dual benefits of international recognition and continuing to live in her beloved Leeds.

And her upcoming show is a little closer to home. She will be the first headline musical act at the new Wakefield Exchange venue – the city’s former market hall which opened earlier this year and which Coun Hannah Appleyard, the council’s cabinet member for culture, leisure and sport, recently said she “would like it to be almost like Piece Hall in Halifax”.

For Bailey Rae, it’s another feather in the cap for the North of England more widely.

She says: “I think it's really good for Wakefield that it's got this new venue. I love the Hepworth and the art that's in and around that city, and obviously it's not very far from Leeds as well. So when I heard it was happening, I thought I want to be one of those artists, I was really grateful for the call. I think it's good for just the regeneration of the North. There's so much talent here. Also, it causes people to come up and to stop and to stay in the hotels, to go to the restaurants, to go to the bars, to bring their entourage with them.

“I think especially for graduates, it's really good for graduates to know that once they finish university that there's so much to do up here between Leeds and Sheffield and Manchester and Wakefield and Bradford. Especially if you did want to live as an artist and that wasn't going to bring you a massive amount of money at first. (If) you just wanted to be somewhere where you could exist as an artist. I think that's what I found when I left university, that I was able to waitress and live somewhere, and the rent wasn't too expensive, so that in my free time - which I had a lot of - that I could write songs and I could play and I could just hang out with friends and develop ideas and things.”

She adds: “I think I've been to London three times this week and it's not that tricky, you know, to just get in and out. But it's really great to live in the North, where there's so much opportunity and where it's more affordable for young artists – or any artists.”

Born in Leeds in 1979, she grew up in the Moortown suburb in the city’s north, attending Allerton High School.

At 15, she had started an indie band, Helen, which were reportedly on the cusp of a record deal, but it fell through when Bailey Rae’s bandmate announced she was pregnant.

She studied English language and literature at the University of Leeds, graduating in 2000 (and was given an honorary doctorate in 2011).

However, Bailey Rae became a singer-songwriter leaning into soul and started a career under her own name in chart-topping form with an eponymous debut album in 2006, which featured megahit Put Your Records On.

The track got her Grammy nominations for song of the year and record of the year, and also secured her a best new artist nod (she later won for being a featured artist on Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, which won album of the year in 2008, and later took the Best R&B Performance award for Is This Love in 2012).

Tragedy struck when she faced the sudden death of her first husband, Jason Rae, in 2008. Her resulting second album, 2010’s The Sea, was critically acclaimed and led to a Mercury Prize nomination, while her third record, 2016’s The Heart Speaks In Whispers, was also favourably appraised.

In 2023 she released Black Rainbows, an album inspired by stories of Black life and history found within the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago.

Again she was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2024 but it went to another Leeds act, English Teacher - to their visible shock - the first time an artist outside of London had won the award for more than a decade.

Bailey Rae says: “It was really nice because I know them as a band. I'd seen them perform, I'd seen the lead singer (Lily Fontaine) perform in Leeds at an event we were doing for PRS. That was my introduction to the band. I had just been really impressed. Who is this girl? What are these lyrics?

"It was such an individual voice and it really reminded me of when I was playing in Helen. You'd mostly be in a room with other white boys, that was who was always there when we were playing, but just to be kind of accepted in that world and have this sense of humour, but also these intellectual references, and be able to kind of wear them so everyday, you know, casually. I really like that band.”

She adds that her own “outsider spirit is quite comfortable with being nominated for things I don't win,” she says.

Bailey Rae always wants to champion where she comes from but wishes Leeds in particular was more celebrated outside of the region. Right now, it is the poets that she is most excited about - the likes of Jason Allen-Paisant, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Malika Booker and Rommi Smith.

“It's really important for me to represent Leeds,” says Bailey Rae, who has two children with husband and bandmate Steve Brown. “I feel I do that internationally. I always get asked why I still live here, or if I'm in a certain country I have to explain where Leeds is and have to explain what Leeds is like. And certainly a lot of people wouldn't know that Leeds has such a big Caribbean population” – Bailey Rae’s father, Chris, came from St Kitts – “or that Leeds has the oldest (West Indian) carnival in Europe...”

While she wasn’t looking to far ahead of the start of her career, there are numerous exciting events coming up for Bailey Rae two decades on: she wants to release another set of songs from the Black Rainbows recordings and in March next year will publish a children’s book, Put Your Records On, illustrated by Gillian Eilidh O'Mara.

For her next album, she would like to make something “nourishing and kind of mystical”, she says, but given Bailey Rae’s first album came out in February 2006, will soon celebrate 20 years as a solo artist.

“It's so weird because it feels like an incredibly short time but then really, really long time as well. And so much has happened,” she says. “My first husband died in 2008 so if I go back to that point in my mind, that is a very, very long time ago in my mind, but at the same time, the first album being on the other side of that chasm, it shines so brightly for me because it comes from a very happy time in my life. Not uncomplicated, but I guess before I had experienced this huge grief. And so I think when I'm able to look back on the first record, I just feel the way that my life has grown and developed, it's kind of been like a rainbow bridge to those early feelings and those early relationships. Just what it feels like to fall in love for the first time and to have no attachments – the only things you have to do are like a bunch of essays and work behind a bar but all the rest of your time is free to think and to listen to jazz and to stay up all night and go to parties and go dancing and there was so much of that spirit in that first record for me.

“And that freedom is something that has really stayed in me. I think getting to be a musician, it kind of wins you this free life, this alternative life.”

Corinne Bailey Rae plays Wakefield Exchance on Saturday, October 18. Tickets: www.wxwakefield.co.uk