A year ago, Corinne Bailey Rae was panicking. Life had changed forever.
‘I totally freaked out. I thought, “if this is what it’s gonna be like, I really don’t want to do it anymore”.’
Her ambition, she says, was to write an album that she was happy with. It turned out that a good proportion of the globe was happy with it too.
‘Put Your Records On went to Number two and no one had really heard of me,’ she groans, through a soft Yorkshire brogue, of the events of February 2006, ‘Suddenly, journalists had gone round my Mum’s house, people followed my friends home in a car.’
Now 27, Bailey Rae is coming to terms with a tumultuous year. When she hit the charts, she became tabloid famous. But somehow, she has embraced the success while avoiding the limelight. Not that she is shy.
‘She’s very low key,’ her publicist explained before we meet, ‘but don’t worry, she does talk. God, she does talk.’
Perched on a sofa in a London hotel apartment, Bailey Rae is immediately off and running, funny and friendly, chattering on any subject thrown her way.
She smiles liberally, setting her luminous complexion alight, her eyes sparkling. She is dressed down but with style in a long grey top.
the gas man came round and said,
‘oh, if I’d known it was you, I’d have brought a CD’
‘I had a really good Christmas break,’ she sighs with contentment, ‘I was so relieved how easily things snap back to normal in Leeds. I’ve used the same taxi company for years and they’re asking me, “are you still working at the jazz club?” I’ve been in their taxis when my songs are on the radio and they have no idea.
‘People stare a bit, I’ve had to remember why they would. The most I get is when the gas man came round and said, “oh, if I’d known it was you, I’d have brought a CD.”
Nominated for three BRIT Awards, Bailey Rae, published by Global Talent, is currently Britain’s most successful export to the USA where she has sold over 1 million records in 6 months and become the highest charting new British act in America for 40 years, the best since the Beatles.
She was also nominated for three Grammy Awards and will soon set off on a joint headlining tour with soul star John Legend in the US too.
‘Music in Britain right now does sound very British,’ she ventures as advice to Brits in the US, ‘we used to fall into that trap, y’know “let’s do a second grade Destiny’s Child and sell it back to them,” it doesn’t work. ‘Americans like the British sound.’
And had she cracked under the pressure of fame, she would have missed meeting her hero. Stevie Wonder invited her onto his radio show and asked her to perform at a charity show. ‘It’s crazy, there cannot be a compliment that will mean any more. I love his songwriting, voice and the whole feel of his music, the textures. He loved the album and Like A Star, he plays it all the time on his radio show.’
She pauses for breath, ‘I was really shaken.’
But few in the UK know of these triumphs. Bailey Rae has remained resolutely elusive - a word of mouth success who hardly opens her own.
‘I haven’t looked for attention. It’s not my world and I don’t want to get into it, I don’t want people to recognise my face. I want people to recognise my music.’
There seems an implied criticism of her tabloid friendly BRIT rivals, as if their notoriety masks their music. ‘They’re better candidates for fame because they do more crazy things,’ she considers diplomatically.
But where Allen and Winehouse draw from their lives, each song a little story about a moment or a man, the singer is coy.
Songs such as Like A Star, Put Your Records On or the new single I’d Like To, tell her story in a more vague manner.
‘The record is personal,’ she explains, ‘But I wanted people to relate to the songs, make them theirs’.
‘They could be about your baby’s father, you and your ex-husband, you and the girl that got away. 
‘They’re my secrets, I know exactly what they mean, which scene they fit in my life and which horrible argument that was.
‘But I don’t want to lock anyone out. I don’t want to make it so specific that people can’t relate to it.’
Perhaps, this reflects her desire for privacy?
‘A little bit, I guess,’ she muses guiltily, as if it had failed to occur to her before, ‘When I do the gigs, I feel like I’m really abandoned and open, like people can read my mind, I’m not hiding behind anything and it’s the one time in my life I don’t feel really self conscious. But maybe in the writing I’m being guarded, I like my secrets.’
I’m really happy being a black girl and a white girl,
a mixed race person whose music can’t be easily categorised
Bailey Rae was born to an English mother and West Indian father and brought up in the Moortown area of Leeds. Her parents split when she was 13 but she has always maintained that this was for the better option and kept in close contact with her father.
She felt responsibility from an early age as the eldest of three daughters, ‘I was a serious child and determined to get things done. I was always good at school and I wanted to do well. That was my ambition for my career, just to write an album I was happy with. Now I want to write another one.’
She sang in the church choir, played violin, but was as academic as she was musical, achieving four A grade A levels. She took an English degree at Leeds University, scoring a 2:1. Missing a First annoys her so much that she has vowed to return to academia. That perfectionism manifests itself in the music studio where she agonises over sounds.
At 15 she formed an all girl grunge band called Helen. They were signed to heavy metal label Roadrunner but the bass player fell pregnant and the deal cooled.
During university she worked in the Underground, a local jazz club, as the hat check girl. They let her play occasionally too and she fell in love with the music and Jason Rae whom she married five years ago.
Jason, a saxophonist, is in her band’s brass section, helping to add that touch of Stax to the likes of Put Your Records On. He is part of a retinue of old mates who keep her sane, including her manager of nine years Bob Miller.
It has helped keep her personal life in check when so many stars lose track.
‘It’s cool because Jason plays in the band,’ she says when asked about the pressure on her marriage, ‘But the first tour of America, we went with quite a small band and he wasn’t there. That was hard, I ran up a big phone bill.’
We talk about whether her mixed heritage marked her out in 1980s Leeds?
‘I don’t feel like racism held me back,’ she says, ‘But it made me self conscious. There weren’t many mixed race families where we lived. People would ask, ‘are you adopted?’ or ‘why’s your hair like this?’ You feel conscious of your colour.’
Now, she senses reverse racism or maybe simple snobbery. That she has won Q and Mojo awards as well as two MOBOs attests to her universal appeal.
‘There’s this attitude that if you happen to be black but you can string a longish sentence together and might have been to university, you’re less authentic.’
‘People were asking, “are you urban enough to be at the MOBOs?” But it’s not about urban, it’s about music of black origin from jazz to R&B and rock and soul. Sometimes I think there’s shrinkage in culture, like the association of black people with urban. Not all black people live in ghettos in London, some of them are doctors,’ she says with mock wonder, before smiling, ‘Some of them write programmes for the BBC!
‘I’m really happy being a black girl and a white girl, a mixed race-person whose music can’t be easily categorised.’
Crucially, her sound remains unique. It is somehow classic, yet infused with modern production and in between all the travelling, she is finding time to write a new record, even teaching herself drums to work out her own beats.
The money is starting to roll in, but Bailey Rae remains fastidious. ‘I haven’t bought anything,’ she laughs, ‘Except my little house in Leeds. I’d like to get a car but I can’t drive so until I learn, there’s no point. I’m terrible at spending money. My husband is like, “let’s get a flat screen TV!” I think, “what’s wrong with my TV?”
‘He reckons I’d make the worst millionaire.’
Life, it seems, has hardly changed at all.