Have you ever been tempted to inject Baileys Irish Cream intravenously? How about snorting crushed candy floss cut with Cadbury Flake fragments and moistened pages torn from The Little Book of Calm? With next month’s release of Corinne Bailey Rae’s third album, The Heart Speaks in Whispers, seekers after dangerous sugar highs will have what appears to be a much safer option. Although the addictive qualities telegraphed by early listens do suggest a risk of long-term dependency, or even lapsing into a diabetic coma.
Every listener has a secret stash of records they go to when in need of a pick-me-up of unabashed luxury. Eighties classicists might cite Sade’s Your Love Is King, where an earlier generation went for Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On and a later for Simply Red’s Stars. My personal choices would be the song on Janet Jackson’s neglected classic Damita-Jo about how much Janet loves humidity, and the fourth Norah Jones album with the big dog on the cover. While all the signs are that The Heart Speaks in Whispers has what it takes to be a part of this illustrious lineage, such safe havens of solitary indulgence are notoriously hard to weaponise in a live setting.
Bailey Rae is taking no chances with the venue for the first show of a campaign that will also take in the Cheltenham jazz festival and a potentially punishing sequence of arena support slots on Lionel Richie’s All the Hits tour. The atmosphere of erstwhile Notting Hill carnival counterculture hub the Tabernacle is now more conducive to a night out with the Made in Chelsea crew, but for Bailey Rae – who played here to launch both her previous albums – it’s a locus of continuity rather than rupture.
The six-year interlude since her last album, The Sea, appears to have left no mark on her seraphic countenance. Nor has this smiliest of performer’s limited armoury of stage moves – raising her arms decorously above her head and/or strategic adjustment of what is traditionally described as “enviable hair” – been subject to any indecorous expansion. But Bailey Rae’s new songs (recorded in LA with a Grammy-laden ensemble including Pino Palladino, Marcus Miller and Esperanza Spalding) do incorporate a welcome expansion of her musical template. And while none of this all-star cast can be here tonight, her backing band of crack London sessioneers (with co-producer and second husband Steve Brown supplying deft touches of Wurlitzer organ from stage left) do a fine job of encompassing those subtle shifts.
The breathy keyboard stabs of Been to the Moon tiptoe towards the seductive territory of one of 2015’s most underpraised releases, Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone. And the subliminal Italian house piano hook of The Skies Will Break more than fulfils its promise to expand into a festival-friendly Calvin Harris moment. OK, so the erotic content of Green Aphrodisiac is more Eat Pray Love than The Story Of O, but the drowsy tune is no less heady for that. And there’s never been any arguing with the vinyl revival prophesy of Put Your Records On.
Bailey Rae’s silken transatlantic style contains no trace element of her formative years in Leeds bubble-grunge ensemble Helen. And a sombre reference from the stage to her last album having been recorded “on either side of a massive fracture” is the only explicit nod to the traumatic 2008 death of her first husband (the saxophonist Jason Rae, who had also played in Amy Winehouse’s band) from an accidental alcohol and methadone overdose. But as the strangely touching communal singalong finale to her debut hit Like a Star testifies, we do not require visual evidence of a swan’s legwork to authenticate its movement across the water.
