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Brilliant new interview with Andrea on Business Post magazine: 02-Aug-2020 12:07:32
| CorrsClub Time: 25-Apr-2024 08:21:29 |
https://www.businesspost.ie/life-arts/andrea-corr-on-music-memoirs-and-the-joy-of-ignoring-emails-091bb979
Looks like you need an account in order to read the whole thing though, so here's the full article in all its glory:
ANDREA CORR ON MUSIC, MEMOIRS AND THE JOY OF IGNORING EMAILS
by Nadine O'Regan
Thirty years after the Corrs took their first steps on their way to selling millions of records, Andrea Corr has written a memoir of her life and career that dwells on the small moments rather than the big ones.
Andrea Corr lets out a belly laugh. “How do you deal with having your kids constantly?” she says, repeating my question, slowly and deliberately. “The constancy of your children. That’s funny. We’re not allowed to say that!”
She starts laughing again, although she’s far too loyal to her two children to issue so much as a squeak of complaint in their direction.
Corr might be famous all over the world for her music, writing and acting – as part of the Corrs, she has sold more than 40 million records – but she’s also a proud mum to an eight-year-old and a six-year-old, both of whom were born in tough circumstances, after a long physical fight, about which she writes movingly in her memoir Barefoot Pilgrimage.
Mind you, she knows where I’m going with the light-hearted query. The subject has cropped up because I’ve been asking Corr about how she has coped during lockdown and restrictions in Ireland.
Has she, like many people, been baking banana bread, mainlining Netflix, homeschooling her kids and wondering if she’ll ever get a break? How has she been coping?
“Like everybody, I think I’m bewildered by it,” she says. “It’s like life was completely interrupted. There has been a lot of cooking. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, it didn’t stop.”
I grew up with Andrea Corr on my radar – she has been famous since her teens, so, as much as I’m willing to accept that she does these regular things, the thought of her busying herself in the kitchen is up there with imagining Enya on an exercise bike in her front room during lockdown in Dalkey: logically possible, but not the first place to which my mind leaps.
Corr is still an MTV video to me, singing with her sisters Caroline and Sharon playing drums and violin in the background, with Jim somewhere off to the side on guitar, and the wind ruffling everyone’s hair, in a dramatic, glamorous fashion, probably on a clifftop.
An unfeasibly beautiful and talented family, when the Corrs shot to fame in the 1990s, they left most of Ireland trying to figure out how just one clan got all the good genes for themselves.
Over the years, the Corrs have split off in different directions – with Jim now known for his controversial views – but Andrea Corr has never stopped creating, whether singing, acting, writing or recording solo projects.
We meet twice for this interview, first in a Dublin hotel, and then – in true COVID-era fashion – via a WhatsApp call, and both times she is funny, interesting, steely and not to be underestimated.
At the hotel, she has her long-time manager John Hughes in tow, with his daughter Anna Lucy, and the first thing he does is bellow: “Have you read the book?” I have, I tell him. “Good,” he says, before giving me a quick quiz on it. Corr’s memoir – already a winner at the Irish Book Awards some months ago – is newly issued in paperback and it’s a remarkable read, arresting for its poeticism, honesty and poignancy.
When she enters the hotel, Corr radiates presence – at 46, she has lively eyes, a quick intelligence and an elfin, gothic aesthetic. (Prior to them beginning their relationship, her husband told her that he thought she was the kind of girl who was “in the corner writing poetry about death”.)
Clad in her trademark black, she’s chatty and friendly, but watchful of her words, as befits a woman who has spent years being transcribed for public consumption.
“Sharon has had the most difficult situation,” she says of lockdown, “being in Madrid. We tried with the Zoom calls and stuff like that, because we all had birthdays – well, not Jim – but we did rely on each other to perk each other up. We did what every family does.
“But at the same time, any creative person is isolated quite a bit. You do work on your own and on your own time. And I find I’m not very good on the phone. I just don’t like it.”
Corr has been spending a lot of her free time drawing. “I’ve got my COVID artbook,” she says. “I’ve got a little book of drawings and I’m drawing every day.”
While sometimes Corr struggles with anxiety – she mentions a book called The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, which she has found very helpful – she is quick to look for the silver linings in the COVID-19 situation, even if they come from places that might initially seem strange.
“There’s always worse,” she says. “There is always a worse situation. And it might sound odd, but I feel almost fortunate that our parents weren’t around for this. Because with Mum’s lung condition, she would have been the first one out. And similarly, the idea of Dad alone in the house in Dundalk. We almost felt lucky that we didn’t have to worry about that. I feel for everybody who is worrying about their parents.”
Big moments
Memories of Corr’s beloved parents Jean and Gerry form an important part of her day-to-day reality. “It’s part of the ghosts that surround me in a way,” she says. It’s a sentence that to anyone who has read her memoir Barefoot Pilgrimage would immediately ring true.
One of the most surprising parts of the memoir is how little time Corr spends dwelling on the supposed ‘big’ moments in her life: the awards, the celebrity gatherings and rocketing album sales. Instead she brings us back to the old days in the family home in Dundalk, where her mother and father (who also had a day job for the ESB) played together in a wedding band, having met at a dance hall and fallen in love against melody. “There was always the sound of music, the radio on,” Corr recollects. “Top of the Pops was like Mass.”
In the memoir, Corr documents the early years: the tragic death of her brother Gerard who died in a road accident at the age of just three, before she was born; the family’s gradual recovery; and the siblings’ movements into musicianship.
“Dad taught us all the piano from the age of six,” she recalls. “Then we got more into traditional music as we got older, hearing sessions in the pubs we worked in. I learned the tin whistle. Caroline took up the bodhrán. Caroline had been taught the violin.”
The band was formed in 1990. At 15, Andrea auditioned alongside her siblings for the film The Commitments and she was given a speaking role.
In 1995, the Corrs travelled to the US to record their debut album Forgiven, Not Forgotten, the record from which would stem trad-influenced pop hits such as "Runaway" and "Love to Love You".
Produced by David Foster, the album sold in the millions, going to number one in the Australian charts. But Corr looks back at that recording period as being fraught with anxiety, not just because she was suffering from bronchial asthma, but because of the environment she was in.
“David had worked with Whitney Houston,” she says. “He worked with these phenomenal singers and those discs were all over the walls, and the Grammys were sitting on a shelf. I was from Dundalk and had played Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” She starts to laugh. “It felt like a bit of a stretch.”
Was she ambitious as a young person? “I don’t think I was ambitious,” Corr says. “I think we were collectively ambitious – ambitious in how hard we worked. My father would say, ‘You’ll rule the world!’, every single year. There was a collective enthusiasm and ambition, but I feel more of a homebird. I didn’t like leaving home, funnily enough. I liked it there.”
Home was simply not an option for many years, as the band toured relentlessly, abroad and around Ireland. The first time I saw the Corrs was in Bantry in west Cork in the 1990s, when they played on the back of a truck as part of a summer festival. The crowd before them stretched down the street, seemingly for miles, and there were no big screens, so the band were just tiny dots in the distance.
“That truck was our home!” Corr says fondly. “No, it wasn’t but it kind of was. We had crazy times going around Ireland. I really remember those first tours. We were so naive. And I think that was part of our success, the naivety. There was that blind faith. When I look back, there were so many obstacles, so many reasons not to be successful.”
The Corrs went from playing on the truck to performing on David Letterman, at the MTV Europe Awards, and even doing their own MTV Unplugged, with albums such as Talk on Corners,/i>, In Blue and Borrowed Heaven continuing to yield singles that tapped into the higher realms of the charts in countries around the world. It was thrilling and exhausting.
In 2006, when the band went on hiatus, Andrea Corr was ready for change. “I was ready to stop,” she says. “I was ready not to talk about ‘we’ for a while. We’d been doing it forever.”
Her creative arc barely skipped a beat in the process – she moved easily into theatre (she took the lead role as Jane Eyre in the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2010) and recording solo projects. But at the same time, emerging as a solo artist in her early thirties, Corr didn’t have the relationship-led support that her siblings enjoyed.
“My previous relationship broke up when I was 32,” she says, ”and that’s when other people are getting settled. When [my siblings] were doing that stuff, you do compare. You’re going, ‘Oh, they‘ve found love, they’re having babies.’ I did get a bit worried.”
Corr met businessman Brett Desmond, son of financier Dermot Desmond, through his friendship with her brother Jim, and the couple married in 2009, presumably once Desmond had broadened his perception of her as the girl in the corner “writing poetry about death”.
She smiles when I mention it. “Now I’m more in the corner,” she says. “He has just joined me there.” Out of respect for his privacy, she is careful to keep much mention of her husband out of the book – although there is a dedication to him and the children at the start of it. The one exception is her decision to speak about the couple’s early attempts to have children.
As she documents in the memoir, Corr went through five miscarriages. “That’s part of our story and my story,” she says. “I wrote about that because it was tough. I had scarring, things went wrong from the first miscarriage, so that’s what probably led to the others. It’s a syndrome that can happen. I prayed. I do believe in the power of prayer.”
Before Jean’s birth, there were more terrors. “I had a hard time. I nearly died in the birth. I lost a lot of blood. It was an emergency C-section. Then I had a lot to recover from, because I was getting blood transfusions, I was worried that she’d nearly not know I was her mammy. These were not rational anxieties. I was very anxious at the beginning.”
Corr pauses. “The love was overwhelming. But I did look like I’d been run over by a bus. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m forever changed, but she’s worth it!’ She laughs. “I have Jean and Brett now, and I’d go through it all again, many times, to have each of them.”
Running free
Talk of the children brings us back to where we started in the interview, looking at the life Andrea Corr has now, and where she’s at in it, whether baking bread, drawing or simply living in COVID times as best she can.
She’s tried with the home-schooling, she says, but easily confesses that she’s not about to join the teaching profession any time soon. “It’s not my forte,” she laughs. “Fortunately they’re eight and six, so it’s not applied maths yet.”
You suspect there’s an essential part of her, too, that resists being confined, even by a global pandemic, and that insists on running free to lead a life of artistry, as least as much as she can.
She admits that she nearly flooded an apartment the family were staying in once, when she was writing a draft of the memoir, because she was so engrossed in the chapter she was putting together. “I get very absorbed,” she says. “The apartment was full of water because I got so immersed in the world I was in.”
Corr has also used COVID-19 as a handy get-out for not answering her emails anymore. “Rather than feeling like now I’ve loads of time to respond to emails, I’ve just let them build up,” she says, with a measure of satisfaction. “There is a freedom in that.”
While she’s shy of talking up future projects, she has tentative plans to write more books, but not necessarily in the memoir vein. “I don’t really read memoirs, other than that I love John McGahern’s memoir,” she says. “I love fiction. So I would hope to be inspired.”
It almost certainly won’t be long before we’re hearing from Andrea Corr again, even if she’s not sure herself exactly what form her creativity will take; and if she believes there’s an essential enigma to it.
There’s a nice line in the book that Corr quotes from a former teacher of hers, a Jesuit priest called Father Brennan: “Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.”
You feel it’s a credo Andrea Corr embodies.
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Barefoot Pilgrimage by Andrea Corr, published by Harper Collins, is out now in paperback
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