Corinne Bailey Rae at Tabernacle, W11

In her first public performance since the death of her husband, she performed songs soaked with his presence and absence

For a time in 2007, Corinne Bailey Rae rivalled Amy Winehouse as Britain’s foremost young soul star. But while Winehouse squandered her talent, Rae’s was put into mothballs in the spring of 2008 when her husband, Jason Rae, died after overdosing on methadone.

Monday night was the Leeds singer-songwriter’s first public performance since his death, performing songs from her understandably delayed second album The Sea, which is released on February 1. Although the venue was not full, a nervous but poised Rae, her curls cascading over a simple black top, was clearly among wellwishers. “This is the first time we’ve done the new songs with strangers,” she said as she took to the stage with her guitar and a five-piece band. “We’re not strangers!” came a voice from the crowd.

Her languid tones and sun-blushed soul-pop had once positioned her as a female counterpart to Finlay Quaye, but it soon became clear that Rae, now 30, has undergone a tidal shift towards a more raw, less manicured sound. Jason, who was also a musician, was never mentioned directly, but she has acknowledged that most of the songs on the The Sea, whether they were written before or after his death, are soaked with his presence and absence.

Backed by plangent riffs and cymbals that crashed like breakers, Are You Here, one of the songs written shortly after Rae’s loss, was a spiralling elegy in which she eschewed lyrical enunciation in favour of elemental anguish. I’d Do It All Again swelled with Jeff Buckley-style vocal flutters, sometimes small and bruised, sometimes huge and searching. And Love’s On Its Way was more powerful still, as Rae closed her eyes, raised her face to the lights and spread her arms wide to channel a burst of turbulent mysticism that evoked Van Morrison circa Astral Weeks. Afterwards she blinked and looked out, dazed, as the applause rained down.

Detours into jazz-funk (Closer) and after-hours rock (Paper Dolls) were less convincing, albeit spirited, but her compelling new direction was showcased once more in The Sea’s title track, which was originally written about the death of her grandfather in a boating accident. Absently strumming an auto harp, Rae intoned fatalistically about an ocean that “cleans everything, crushes everything, takes everything from me”.

Her voice was as limpid as it was in the early days, but it was now borne on deeper, darker currents. When she picked up a tambourine in the encore and performed her breezy breakthrough hit Put Your Records On, it sounded like the work of another woman.

Ed Potton, The Times 25-11-2009

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