by Andrea Corr
There is one night in The Coachman’s Inn with our Nanna Lizzy I vaguely recall when I try. But all I seem to have retained is the taste of the Coke and peanuts that I was really there for.
Or maybe I absorbed how poor Nanna felt, those ghostly days in her surprised presence. For she was then surfing the skipping record, and we were indeed minding her.
It started in her early sixties and at this stage she was already looking like she had just gotten the worst fright. Horror-stricken. Her white hair stood up perpetually from her hypnotic self-soothing. The continuous and purposeful upward stroke of her long bony hand through the hair above her anxious brow. Again and again and again. Slowly but surely, she was rubbing herself out.
It is awful, Alzheimer’s disease, even to the eyes of a child. To witness the slow live fade-out of a loved human being. To see Mum over her own mother’s bed, holding a cold and unresponsive hand. Reaching towards a lifeless expression, for eyes to engage and see again. For one elusive moment of lucidity. Telling her who she, her daughter, was …
‘Mammy, it’s me … Jean.’
But sometimes in life, it seems, disease can arrive with a comic introduction. If you don’t laugh you’ll cry.
She boiled a head of lettuce. That’s how it first showed itself. And they all laughed, she included, knowing so little of what was coming. Of who …
‘Where’s yours, Jean? Paddy, Paddy, Paddy. The dog, the dog, the dog …’
The sad truth is that I was too young to have met who Lizzy really was or who she had ever, if only for too short a time, been.
I can smell the horses outside The Coachman’s and the fat of grilled sirloin steak, fried onion rings and the frost of the forbidden night-time … an anniversary of theirs … when he softened enough in the familial smiling wine hug of it all for her to approach the ear-piercing subject.
A roaring success. Sharon had green studs, Caroline blue, and me … danger dizzy red.
Sometimes I imagine we clocked up many of Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ in the very air we breathed in that house. And the inevitability of it all is like a carnival, slowly but surely winding its way towards us. The wind carrying the whisper of it every now and then. Because all the while we were growing. One brother to three sisters in a border town. And I see it all as a film reel turns, fast-forwards and flickers to a stop. Through the pebbledash snow the pictures emerge and slow, and the tastes are in my mouth …
Cucumber and cheese
On a cocktail stick
Banana sandwiches
Orange splits
The apple swung with the money in
Dad held to help me keep
Mum’s apple tart
The barn braic
God bless before you sleep
We’ll have Jean’s mince pies
And Oh Holy Nights
Say the ghosts of the settee
Rhubarb dreams
And cut grass
And pencil on my hands
Skinny legs, a runny nose,
Short hair for boy or girl …
Jim has perfect pitch, though he allows for a semitone sharp. For that was the persistent tuning of Grandad’s black piano upstairs. And he was the trailblazer. Being the eldest, he pushed the merry-go-round. He was always mouth-drumming or knee-drumming or head-drumming. An all-the-toms fill would alert us to his arrival – if we had managed to miss the unique sound only he made when turning the handle of the kitchen door. It just was so definitive. No question. This door shall open! Or indeed the door left open. Cue Gerry:
‘Could you shut the bloody doooooor!’ Musical in itself, how Gerry voiced this. It started low and rose both in tone and volume and he danced on the word ‘bloody’ before he crescendoed and held ‘doooooor’ on the money note. Immersed in music, we were.
Jim’s bedroom housed the piano. And the high, out-of-reach (you’d think) shelves of his mahogany wardrobe held his remote-control helicopter and his train set. Always my first port of call when on the best side of sick. Still off school in a stolen day alone in the house and roaming free in my nightgown.
We were all taught to play that piano from the age of six. So when I peer into that room with its purple walls, one of us is always there.
For Sharon’s practical exam in her Music Leaving Cert she played a piano piece she had composed herself. It was haunting and beautiful. She is there playing that now in my mind’s eye, in our bottle-green St Louis school uniform. And she loved to play Erik Satie. There’s something about the touch of her hand on the keys still. Something romantic.
And of course, as there is only fourteen months between Caroline and myself, we shared – as we did everything else – what became known as the ‘terrifying piano lessons’.
I never could quite decide which was best for me, to go first or second. For she was the golden child. Fingers tinkling away while I nervously waited on the bed, sucking my thumb. Actually seeing the smile of pride on the back of his head. In retrospect … no argument. Go first, Andrea.
Daddy would grumble behind me, ‘Ach, fingering,’ while I tried to swap my thumb for my baby finger. Small hands knotting and twisting the Beethoven.
Caroline, God love her, didn’t enjoy this either. Every single week she would plead with me,
‘Andrea, you need to practise your piano. It’s Monday … lesson on Thursday.’ And every week, Wednesday would arrive and I’d have been too busy to practise, so I would learn what she now played perfectly by frenzied ear and thus not have a clue where my fingers should go. I would run out of fingers every second bar.
It’s like our nanna, who one day I saw relentlessly trying to walk through the glass in the sliding doors. Again and again and again. Poor Lizzy Blee.
But somewhere I never needed reminding to be was the ‘bumping’ chair by the record player, corner of the living room, by the window. On the contrary, I needed to be pulled off it to go to school in the mornings and to bed at night.
I must pause here and define bumping.
To bump … While seated normally on an upright, cushion-backed armchair, one rocks back and forth to the rhythm of the music, hitting the chair back, with one’s own back, on the downbeat (Corrs Dictionary, circa 1980).
We all bumped to various degrees (Gerard included) but I was the champion bumper. My absolute favourite pastime as a child. I’d sing with the singers and be the characters in these three-minute stories. More than a little bit disconcerting to Dad’s ear, hearing his ten-year-old sing ‘Darling Nikki’.
So if I really am the original loser, or indeed ‘danger dizzy’, as Jim named me, it is due to the fact that the areas in my brain assigned to hold on to keys, credit cards, phones, etc., have been burgled and colonised by words. There are lyrics loitering there from before I was born, claiming squatters’ rights. (Ah! Mum wasn’t the only one hooked!)
I remember a painter working in the house, kindly asking me to stop playing ‘River Road’, and a friend of Sharon’s who came to stay, not so kindly, to stop playing ‘There Must Be an Angel’. But not once did Mum or Dad tell me to stop. It was indeed very rare for them to tell me to turn it down and now I see the wonder of that. I’d say it was nearly more annoying for them when I had the headphones on, while they watched Panorama or Daddy’s ‘aul’ news’, than when it was blaring. The music bleeding through my headphones and the whining springs of a near-extinct, beloved bumping chair.
But we were all so affected by songs.
Jim little more than a toddler, in tears begging Daddy ‘Don’t play “Daddy Boy”’ (“Danny Boy”). And this boy with all the talent Daddy’s passion yearned for, would go on to help them and even play with The Sound Affair a few times. So easy was it for him to listen once and write down the chords of every new song they were learning. Something that was painstaking for Daddy was so natural for him. As if his ears were born fluent in
music.
Jim saved up or was helped (I’d say more often helped because how could you not help when you have been known yourself to appear home delighted with a synthesiser instead of a new vacuum cleaner …) and he bought a TASCAM 244 Portastudio. Then he was up there recording. His head nodding in headphones. His knobble-knuckled fingers playing basslines, snares, kicks, high-hats, toms, padded strings, piano and brass (very questionable … should be banned) all on a keyboard, rocking back and forth all the time, his expression intense. I have seen a computer screen reflected in his glasses so often that it now appears to me always there. It was all he wanted to spend his time doing back then. There were early songs I really loved and would bump to when he’d let me have the tape he’d made (can’t scratch it but can wear it out … spooly mess … Run!). I could sing them still. He had disco lights in there that flashed red, amber and purple on the walls and hopped to the music and sometimes he would amplify his voice and an ‘Andreaaaaaa!’ would descend on me from nowhere …
Like God had caught me doing what I shouldn’t be.
And we followed him through the years, the fashions, the genres.
Mod-dancing through the awkward cool pain of adolescence.
Ska, punk, pop …
Pop held on to him though and still does, I believe. Melody. The beautiful chords he writes that make my heart swell, lose a breath, inspire … His were the records I bumped into skipping, into scratched. When I hear these songs now I still sing the skips; they repeat in my head like a malfunctioning robot and Nanna’s hitting the glass again. These will never be the grooves the artist intended.
Nik Kershaw, The Human League, Kraftwerk, Heaven 17, The Police …
In a box in the attic now.
There’s a parallel house
And another Blackrock
A parallel family
Three girls and a boy
But the dad is the singer
Two brothers the band
A minor detail now
We never know where we’ll land …
John Meets a Family Band
The clever lunacy of it all. How random yet fated. Because it seems to me now that John Hughes was always to be the fifth Corr.
He was a singer and songwriter, in a band with his brother. They made the Billboard Hot 100 but it all fell apart. They fell apart.
And he was out on his own.
Jim at this point was a session musician, keyboards and guitar, with an 8-track recording studio. They met through mutual friends and worked together, recording and producing a couple of John’s songs.
In the meantime, Alan Parker was coming to Dublin to begin open casting for the film The Commitments. And John’s childhood friend, Ros Hubbard, was casting with John himself, co-ordinating all the band and music auditions. For The Commitments were to be a real band. Real singers and musicians. He advised Jim to audition. Jim asked to bring along his three sisters. And our family became a band.
Big-haired, blushing, caught between bunny-in-the-headlights shy and divadom, we performed ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘I Don’t Go for That’. No drums, no violin, no guitar. An arm-swinging, hip-swaying lead singer and three keyboard-playing backing vocalists.
And now our pivotal moment. Ros Hubbard to John: ‘I’m gonna go out on a limb now, but John, you should manage this band; and Corrs, John should manage you.’
And somehow, it was absolutely right. No question. Of course.
Now another house
The back of the wall
Egg carton
Wall papered
Sound boothing
Us all
School uniformed girls
And bespectacled boy
And a Sandymount faithful
To Music, the Call
So we started to write and record in a house Jim rented in Mount Avenue, Dundalk, an area known as ‘the back of the wall’. The very first offerings, Dad wrote lyrics into Jim’s keyboard melodies, like slotting shapes into a puzzle. ‘I Feel Love’ and ‘Siog’ (meaning Fairy Fort). If the song got beyond my range (well a song about fairies probably should, in all honesty), Jim speeded the track up and I soared like a chipmunk; or if indeed it got too low, as was ‘Siog’, he tried slowing me down down down, and there I was in the belly of a whale.
And it was pop as 90s pop could be. Brass-stabbed D50 explosive drama time. Hungry hands in desert sands (not Daddy any more, mea culpa). Out on my own, leave me alone.
But by this time John’s wife, Marie ‘de blonde’, and their four kids had caught the bug. A virus that attacks the ears. You no longer hear the bad, and you’re high on ‘what’s good about it’-itis.
And if you listened really carefully and turned the sound down, in those embryonic days, you may have heard the pleading lament of a neglected violin, leaking out of a case in Sharon’s bedroom five minutes away.
John heard it.
‘You play the violin, Sharon. Why aren’t you playing it?’
Dundalk had been blessed with a talented teaching priest, Father McNally. And Sharon had grown up as one of his students. Reluctant at times … lessons on a Saturday don’t do it for most teenagers, but doesn’t it show you that sometimes it really is worthwhile for parents to insist. She travelled when she was around fifteen with the Irish Youth Orchestra, all the way to Wallingford, Connecticut (can’t believe I have remembered that. I can see it on the ‘I heart Wallingford’ T-shirt she wore home), and she visibly loved it … looked different when she came home, like she had a secret. And the awe and wonder grew a little more in me as I watched, still and always the baby.
Her training was classical, yes, but here comes our signature: with her classical bowing she wrote trad–pop riffs.
This grew wings, for like a zeitgeist in our own little world, traditional Irish music reached out to each of us. We all worked in our Auntie Lilian’s pub, and the Thursday-night trad sessions were epic. The flute player from these sessions, Kevin Shields, taught me the tin whistle. And Caroline learned bodhrán through a videotape, believe it or not. I suppose that’s today’s YouTube lesson.
She also happened to have a drumming boyfriend at the time, and this is how she became ‘The Drummer’. Her focus is ferocious. Paradiddling through Band-Aids and golf gloves, her girl hands blistered and her job corresponding with her black-and-white brain. Kick, snare, kick, snare.
We would walk together to Jim’s rented house at the back of the wall, Sharon’s violin swinging by her side, Caroline and myself still in our school uniforms. There were always cups of what I presume was old tea with maps of algae growing on their surface. Somehow it always reminds me of the aerial view of Los Angeles through the window of an aeroplane now. The skin on that cold milky tea. When cleaned (of course), I would have the baby cup (of course). We ate Toffypops, Wagon Wheels, Kimberleys, Mikados and Snowballs in an upstairs front room. A Müller Rice was seen as a healthy and sophisticated option. Carton sitting by Sharon’s chair, its silver tongue curled and a licked happy spoon fallen by its side. There were torn orange curtains partially drawn on the squared sash windows that looked out either side onto a country road, stone walls and fields. If you wiped the condensation, that is, that ever lingered on the inside of those squares. (Oh, there’s an earwig in the black mouldy damp corner! Where have all the earwigs gone? Are they endangered now? I never see them any more. #savetheearwig.) And speaking of insects, there was a spider in a web spanning one of the peeling wall corners, which Jim named Henry. We never managed to figure out whether Henry was alive or dead.
Just chillin’ to the tunes, man. Spider on the wall rockumentary, if you will.
The room’s walls were decorated with egg cartons and purple fruit trays to insulate the sound, and by the back window there was a stand and microphone adorned with a homemade pop shield of wire hanger and a stretched nude nylon tights leg.
Welc
ome to the recycled studio.
Black-and-grey flexes were strewn about along with random pieces of orange carpet (orange? Again?) liable to send you tumbling onto the Superser (in winter you could smell the gas from it and three bars lit orange(!!) were never enough). Or worse, you’d stumble on the equipment and get tangled in the skeleton of a keyboard stand. Jim cradling his Precious above you, at war with a robot in the scrap. A surgeon’s reflexes, he had.
(Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange ye glad I said orange again.)
This house was the gate lodge to an equestrian school and horses clippity-clopped by daily, but never at night thankfully, when we recorded vocals until the cusp of late and early. We all loved coming up with harmonies together. We still do. We can feel the resonance. A sort of buzz or phasing when we sing together. Something about the vocal cords being so similar and yet coming from four individuals. It seems to grow warm. I like to imagine it’s the sound and vibration of the minutest differences, rather than the similarities.
Or maybe it is Gerard … The ghost in our machine …
I vividly remember returning after school one day to listen to what we had finished recording at 3 a.m. that morning, to hear it all absolutely synched together … absolutely in tune with each other and absolutely, woefully flat. My whole body reaches up when I remember it. My eyebrows, my shoulders … Up up up. To this day I much prefer sharp to flat. If you have to slide off-piste at all, that is.
Jim worked for hours while we did a lot of watching. Rocking on three wooden chairs facing him in his illuminated, blinking, beeping office of computers, keyboards, drum machines and guitars. A surgery, really. Dr Jim. The family doctor.