Corinne Bailey Rae is already making a name for herself Stateside, but upscale arthouse film audiences — the type of folks who gobble up CD offerings from Starbucks — will get to know her a bit better over the coming months in director Roger Michell’s Venus. A number of songs from her eponymous debut album — plus an extra track or two — rather surprisingly dot the film’s soundtrack, including adult contemporary FM hit “Put Your Records On.”
“It
arrived late in the day,” says Michell of Bailey Rae’s placement in the film. “I’d never heard of her when we were making the film. I’d
laid up a lot of quite serious classical music on the temp score… music full of
strings that I knew wasn’t quite right. And then my 10-year-old daughter
insisted that I buy her this CD that we then played on a long journey to
Wales, and by the time we arrived I’d sort of worked out where I could fit all
these songs that seemed to fit so wonderfully within the tone of the movie. [That music] sort of handed the film
back to (the character of) Venus, it’s her music. And then I met Corinne and she wrote some
incidental music. She’s also a Northerner, too, a young woman in her 20s from
up north who came to
has really arrived.”