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David Bowie, Phil Collins, Harry Styles, Oasis, Michael Jackson, Raye. It is quite a list that London’s Rachel ‘Raye’ Keen joined this weekend with the six Brit Awards she won on Saturday evening, when the most important British music awards were presented. In fact, never before has anyone won so many Brit statuettes in one evening.
“The artist I was three years ago would never believe I’m in control – I’m my own boss,” said the 26-year-old singer with the confident, versatile voice on winning Song of the Year, British Artist, among others of the Year and British Album of the Year. In her bare feet, grandma takes the stage: “You have no idea what this means to me. I’m crying on national television.”
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Three years ago, Raye was already promising, but for only a small group of people. At the age of seventeen, the singer signed a contract with record label Polydor (part of Universal Music Group) for four albums. She had already dropped out of the famous Brit School (Performing & Creative Arts), where she was accepted at the age of fourteen, but where she felt “trapped”.
That did not change with her record deal, because an album never came and that was not her fault: she wrote a whole collection of top 40 hits. For others. David Guetta, John Legend, Charli XCX, Rihanna, Ellie Goulding, Little Mix, Beyoncé, all had success with Raye’s songs, while she remained in the background. At the end of 2020 she released mini album Euphoric Sad Songs out, but that wasn’t what she wanted.
See you in 2021 tweeted that her label would not allow her to release an album. “Album after album is gathering dust. Now I’m giving those songs away to A-artists because I’m still waiting for confirmation that I’m good enough to release an album,” she wrote, with a photo of her tearful face there.
Not long after, Polydor let her go and in February last year she self-released her debut, My 21st Century Blues. A pop album as self-therapy, with heavy topics wrapped in sharp dance rhythms, heavy bass and tapping beats, with influences from rap, R&B and gospel. The songs are about alcohol and drug abuse, about being drugged, about… body dysmorphic disorder (imagined ugliness), sexual abuse, climate stress. “There is power in making public feelings that you usually keep to yourself!” she said early last year in an interview with NRC, as one of the rising stars of 2023.
Raye performs at the Brit Awards. Photo Tolga Akmen / EPA
Amy Winehouse
Her single ‘Escapism’, about escaping into drink and drugs after a painfully ended relationship, took off on TikTok and reached number one on the British charts. In the Netherlands the song reached number 10 in the top 40 and became a mega hit on 3FM. And it has also gained a foothold in the United States. She climbed to number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was invited to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and she went on tour with Kali Uchis and SZA.
Rapidly rising popularity, a history of drinking and drugs, intense trauma and at the same time a killer voice – the comparison with Amy Winehouse is obvious. Winehouse was also accepted at the Brit School at a young age and did not complete it. She is one of the examples of Raye, who even almost played the leading role in a biopic about Winehouse. “I recognize a lot in her urge to survive, the problems she had. Many of her idols are also mine: Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick. I also love sixties jazz, the energy of big bands.”
Raye seems to have left the self-destructive path of her troubled fellow citizen. Whether she will become such a big star is still uncertain – surprisingly, she was not nominated at all at the last edition of the most important music awards in the Western world, the Grammys. She didn’t mind anyway, tweeted she said: “The Grammys are awarded for the best the music world has to offer, and I have hardly shown what I have to offer musically.”
On Friday, July 12, Raye will be at the North Sea Jazz festival in Ahoy, Rotterdam.
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