. So I felt the label was saying: ‘THAT! Can you not do THAT?’” She throws up her palms. “I’d put my guitar down halfway through songs because I’d realise what I was writing had the wrong tempo for a mega smash.”
Born in Leeds in 1979, Bailey Rae is the daughter of a Black shopkeeper from St Kitts and a white English cleaner. “My parents bought a small house in a white area in the 1970s, back when that was possible,” she says. Awareness that she was being raised in a racist culture sifted in slowly but steadily. “I saw the
As Bailey Rae grew up, she repeatedly asked teachers and librarians for more information about the detail and diversity of Black experience, but was often disappointed to be told: “That information is lost in oral history. There won’t be photographs. This sort of thing wasn’t documented.” . “This amazing artist called Theaster Gates had bought an old bank, for $1, renovated it and filled it with more than 16,000 books, every single copy ofmagazines. Photographs, sculpture… beautiful things, terrible things. All of Frankie Knuckles’ massive vinyl collection.” Her face lights up as she recalls the snowy November morning on which she first began “opening the Arts Bank’s drawers, unwrapping artefacts.