by Andrea Corr
He really did a lot of work on these first demos, though. And it is true that a lot of what was recorded in that room made it onto our first record, or at the very least, was mimicked.
Sharon would pluck the beginnings of tunes on her violin and we would all hum melodies inspired by the sound. These melodies would often, unsurprisingly, sound similar.
The words were in the day and from … somewhere in the heart, yes, but it is also true that they were very much straitjacketed in the rigid laws of rhyme in those nursery days, and the fit of their individual rhythms into the all-important melody was paramount. Often we repeated verses and I don’t personally have the honest excuse that I heard from a young writer the other day: ‘Because I really like that verse.’ We treasured every moment of a six-minute middle eight (until Johnny broke the spell. Enough is enough) but we could halve a verse happily. Fewer words to write. To repeat.
I think it’s true to say that we were moved and excited more by music than by words in those days. Today words almost do it all for me. Look at me now. Ha. Mutually exclusive they are not, though, nor will they ever be, and this is the song every songwriter is trying to write, I believe. When the music cuts your heart out describing the true meaning in the words. The blood and the beat. The pulse and the pain of the only human heart. That is when a song is truly worthy of its name, to me.
One day, walking to that house, Jim told me that he had itchy feet. I said:
‘Really, Jim? That’s amazing. So are mine!’
I did not know what he meant then, but I do now.
And so backing vocals into the morning.
Horizontal on the carpet.
Roll a metre away from the Superser …
And there’s smoky frost in your words again.
And then school the next day … like the night before never was. But there was evidence and it built up slowly.
Forgiven, Not Forgotten was being born.
And now for the years that made the overnight success.
Blind, naive, bolstered faith. For this was never to be local. We were to ‘rule the world’, as Daddy would say.
‘There will be a time when you will never be home,’ John would say, like a missionary telling us,
‘St Peter will indeed let you in!’
And underneath our collective, excited enthusiasm, I was, in honesty, terrified.
Because I loved home. I love feeling safe.
Demo tapes appeared on desks
Big black and white cheeked photos
While the ministry of serious walks
Transported insured ears
They chin scratched through showcases
And friend filled papered gigs
A cockney accent lingers
Too confident to feel
‘I can’t ’ear it. I just can’t ’ear it’
To a word we’d never say
It echoed throughout London
Just like a big mistake.
We set up in the room across the hall from the studio, the room of terrors … I mean mirrors … where we would rehearse for TV shows and gigs, and we used Daddy’s camcorder to record ourselves, watch back and endeavour to eliminate what no unsuspecting viewer sitting down to watch the telly of an evening should ever see. Sadly this wasn’t foolproof, so I apologise for my spaghetti swinging arms. Miraculous I didn’t knock over anything or anyone or just gather momentum with all that arm-swinging till I rotated and couldn’t stop. Have to be carted off while the credits ran. A spinning flop. And I apologise on behalf of Caroline, who stared at you eerily while she played the keyboard, like Joey ‘The Lips’s mammy, till you felt shifty and uncomfortable there in your own chair, in your own house, innocently watching what should have been a lovely programme. Sharon calls herself a rosy-cheeked and wholesome dairy-maid taking a break from the milking to play her violin. Lovely girl. Jim was even rosy, when spotted.
(© Darren Kidd/Shutterstock)
It has been revealed to us that when the Hughes family are down in the dumps collectively, there is nothing they like better to cheer them up than a screening of these early TV shows. A real family favourite.
Jim drove us to these, and to gigs, in The Sound Affair’s red Hiace van. Very practical. It could carry us all and our equipment: Jim and Sharon in the front, the children in the back taking turns on the wobbling deckchair. Preferable always to the hard ledge facing the keyboards and the elbow of a mic stand stabbing you in the face. (They can’t give you points or revoke your licence years after the fact, can they?) Maybe it was the oncoming gig and nerves on his part but when we stopped, we stopped. Suddenly. When we moved off, we moved off. Suddenly. It was all sudden. There was nothing gradual. And the deckchair and its child became a very unstable bumping chair, often on the verge of beating them all to Dublin.
When he saw a red light he would speed up to meet it …
And he is Leo. It is me that is Taurus.
We did showcases for record companies and so keen were some eager beavers that they came all the way to Dundalk and watched us perform. We recovered from the let-downs by renaming those that had peacocked, all knowing and sparkly-eyed before us. And that would make us all better again. Just minor adjustments, really …
And we were ready to brave another day.
Whelan’s, a music venue in Dublin, comes into focus. Still largely papered, we were not quite the loudest whisper yet, but this was to bring us to America. A friend of John’s, Bill Whelan (who would soon write Riverdance), had produced a few of our demos. He brought along Jean Kennedy Smith (the then American ambassador to Ireland), and having loved us, she invited us to Boston, to play the Kennedy Library for an American Ireland Funds event.
And it’s our first time on a long-haul flight, crossing the Atlantic together. It’s mind-blowing how innocent we are.
‘They’re going to feed us?’ I disbelievingly asked John, and ‘There’s movies!!’
But the best of all, Sharon …
We had been given the in-flight toilet bag, containing toothbrush, eye mask and the essential socks.
‘Why socks?’ asks Sharon, holding them out from her bag.
‘Because when you hit a certain altitude, your feet swell,’ John replies.
I did notice, in retrospect, she smelled the socks at this point.
Mid-flight, mid-movie, post-food, Sharon whispers to me,
‘I don’t think my feet smell … Do yours?’
And then the reason itself. Diplomats, politicians and networking eyebrows make up our audience. John had jokingly pointed to the exits when we were nervously sound-checking, in this glass-walled prism: ‘If it’s all going wrong, I will be leaving through this door.’
The speeches were endless and serious leg-stretching and bathroom breaks were needed by the time we began to play.
And it is, in fact, all going wrong. I’m singing to the exit when it gets even worse. A big, white-haired, grey-suited man is making his way towards the stage. He is on the stage and he is signalling for us to stop.
I close my eyes and in my head hear, Could the owner of vehicle registration number … make their way to … when he takes my microphone from my hand and, with gravitas, says:
‘This band, The Corrs, they are our guests from Ireland and I want to hear them. So if you don’t, please leave now.’
It was Teddy Kennedy, and needless to say we went down a storm.
From here we went to Los Angeles, knocking on record-company doors by day and sleeping on Judy’s floor (an artist friend of John’s) by night. Even the few that were curious couldn’t really understand this Celtic pop sound, and so the doors … they closed like dominoes. We moved on to New York for more of the same, until a meeting with Jason Flom, at Atlantic Records. He was closer to interested and said offhandedly, almost as if he didn’t know he was speaking out loud, ‘I’d love David
Foster to hear this.’
David was their in-house producer at the time, and in New York producing Michael Jackson’s History album. John jumped on it but, though he tried, Jason could not get us a meeting.
Now it’s a sweltering June day in New York. We are all dressed in black, carrying our instruments, when John realises we are close to The Hit Factory.
‘Let’s just go in,’ he says. And somehow we manage to get through the sci-fi, superhuman bodyguards (perhaps through the V of their huge legs) and into reception.
‘We are here to see David Foster,’ John says with authority. David is called and appears down in the lobby. He brings us to a piano, where we play ‘Forgiven, Not Forgotten’ and a couple of others.
I remember he couldn’t stop looking at the bodhrán.
‘What is that?’
We could see he liked it, but many had before, and so our last night in America began.
The next morning John rang our rooms to tell us when to check out, car pick-up time, etc., and just before he hung up, he said:
‘Oh, by the way, you’re signed to Atlantic Records and David Foster is going to produce your first album.’
January 95
Suitcases on the floor
Scapulas and Violets
‘Don’t let them go’s
Next door
Solemn lights in windows
Car leaving before dawn
The band that Jean and Gerry made
They fled the nest as one
Malibu, California
The sunshine paradise was drowning when we arrived. The cliffs crumbling into the Pacific. Towels at doors, and mud and muck up Sycamore Meadows Drive. The Irish had brought the rain, it seemed.
The studio was at the bottom of the garden, down a path, beyond the pool.
David’s wife brought us fairy dust and wands, I think (or have I dramatised? … or had she heard ‘Siog’?) and we knew we were on a different planet.
We got to work. The songs were there. It was just a matter of recording them, and I saw – and I don’t use this word lightly – genius in David Foster. A generosity, too, as he happily had Jim co-produce, acknowledging the work that had gone into our demos.
Oh, I was wildly insecure. Painfully so. Grammys intimidatingly watching from every shelf –
‘What’s she doing here?’ – and platinum records for wallpaper. He had just gotten three, I think, for The Bodyguard. Whitney Houston. And here I am the singer … need I say more?
I got bronchial asthma and lost my voice entirely and it became a bit of a nightmare. So many lead vocal-less tracks waiting. The songs unsung. Time. Money. I became so shy around David and asked to do my vocals with Jim, alone.
Imagine this? It is, without a doubt, David’s forte. Just listen to every lead vocal on a David Foster production – beyond stunning. So, gift horse, mouth. Nose off, face. That was me. Not for all of it, but for some. Ah well. It is forgiven, not forgotten, and it’s history.
We were nearly finished and soon to leave, with our record complete, nearly five months later, when David walked into the living room. To Sharon and myself around Caroline on the piano, playing a song we’d just written. A song Caroline had begun at home in Dundalk.
‘What is that?’ he asked again.
And so began the time of firsts. First photo shoot. First video shoot. First actual CD in your hand. First ever time to hear our song on the radio. What David had come in on us playing.
And last shall be first: ‘Runaway’.
Our name like a beer in the San Diego DJ’s mouth. First promo tour. Voice wake-up. Five a.m. coffee. I smell hazelnut?
We sang and played to America driving to work and on the school run. Blankets over heads on red eyes. Another station. Another hour. Another city. Another day.
Bod Ron, Bow Ron, Coors, Cores.
Smile, photograph.
Autographs in case.
A family from Ireland.
You guys are great!
And you’ve got to hand it to America: no snobbery or ‘too cool’ here. It doesn’t matter how, just get there.
So serenade in a back garden and hope she says yes.
On a turkey for Thanksgiving, laughing under big hats.
CD 1 stops.
Grip and grins.
In-store signings.
Play to win.
Play …
Because there’s an aesthetic that blinds and dumbs. Though how, anyway, can you manufacture a family band, tell me? Test tubes?
But there is real beauty in this, because there’s only ever one first.
And all is hope, promise and jet lag.
Our original bass player was Roland. On the surface he was perfect. Incredible time-keeping and precision, and he was so unassuming and subtle on stage. A real contrast to the spinning top at the mic. However, he became unreliable. Prone to fierce mood swings. He could pull a strop at any moment. We never knew when. Delusions of grandeur, maybe. I have a suspicion he was on the steroids. Ah ah … Dignity, Andrea! Anyway, he let us down one too many times, mid-song, mid-gig. Exposing us like Milli Vanilli, and we had to let him go.
Jim was reluctant, as he had introduced Roland, and was then – as he is now – a loyal friend.
So two tall young men, a guitarist and a bass player arrived at the factory one day where we were rehearsing for our first tour. Anto Drennan and Keith Duffy.
The pillars.
John had called them, forgetting (or did he?) to let us know that we were endeavouring to replace Roland with real live human beings.
Two, three, four …
Caroline counted us in to an entirely new experience that day. Liberating. As if we had been running in a walled-in and sterile gym before. Looking out of a small, square window. Keith has soul. So much feel and groove that Caroline was in heaven. And I remember forgetting cues to sing again, so blown away was I by Anto’s playing. His guitar solos.
And it’s likely they are laughing, reading this now. Because like the sky in Ireland, they are on the ground. So a perfect fit in every way, these adopted brothers.
But even they’d admit we were, and are, good together.
And we had a lot of fun.
The sandwich tour began and I had lost my voice again. Jim would often be sick before a gig, as would Caroline and myself. But that may not have been due to the nerves in our case. More likely a dose of hairspray poisoning, and that last look at ourselves in the mirror before we went on stage.
Mini, our monitor man, thought me a diva, I think. As no matter how loud I was (all the way to eleven) in my monitors, I still couldn’t hear. It so happened, though, that I wouldn’t need to sing. By the time we reached the west, the audience was singing every word of ‘Runaway’ back to us. It was all over the radio now. Spinning, as we bussed across Ireland.
And why ‘sandwich’?
Because that’s all we ate, except for a couple of late-night chip stops with Barry Gaster, who booked these early tours, until Keith threw a wobbly and there was ham and bread quivering for mercy on a Cavan hotel carpet.
He was a pioneer back then, Keith. Never taking his eye off the plight of the musician’s rumbling stomach. He led the protest and the very first boycott on sandwiches.
We stayed at places like The Feeble Brown House in Sydney. The Rodent Inn by a motorway truck stop on the outskirts of Denver. The Holiday Bin somewhere with an abandoned pool and tumbleweed. No holidays there for years. Towns and halls, where beds climb the walls, of bathrooms with ransom notes in sinks. ‘Liberate toothbrush hostages from the clutches of “The Room Do’er”!’
Would you really want them back?
Yes. One could arrive into one’s hotel room from the hotel bar, of a bleary weary evening. All excited for a bed cloud and the chocolate that just may be awaiting you there
(defeats its luxuriating purpose, this chocolate on the pillow, I think. I will have to turn the light on, get up and brush my teeth again now. They don’t show this in the Galaxy ads but it’s a real mood-killer), only to find the room completely bare. No bedside lamps. No TV. No nothing. Just staring, surprised wall sockets and a blue flex, perhaps. There’s the echo of the bed, chalked on the carpet. Proof that a bed had, in fact, been there. It’s like a cordoned-off crime scene.
We travelled the world together and we grew in number. Like something that rolls and does gather moss. And we witnessed world wonders together. At least they were wonders to us Irish.
Black flies black out the windscreen on the road to Reno. Dangerous love. The love of the mating flies in a dark smoky cloud and the love of the driver. Who has driven now for thirty-six hours straight. Party bus, drive me to party plane, please.
And now it turns, faster and faster. It blurs with the speed and you can no longer see us, the spokes on the wheel. We are everywhere at once. I’d often have to turn back at passport control in an airport, to ask where we’d just come from. I had nightmares of doctor examinations with cameras on me, a spotlight in my eyes and a microphone to my mouth. Little did I know then that I had foreseen the future’s reality TV. ‘No’ was not a word in John’s vocabulary back then and so it wasn’t part of ours either. And none of us would ever want to be the one to let the others down. So it was yes. To everything. We toured and promoted, all at the same time. Half-hour support slots, championed by John Giddings and Denis Desmond (whose desks our demos had providentially landed on), back to back with our own headline tours. In fairness to John Hughes, he was with us all the way, and not sipping cocktails with de blonde on a yacht somewhere.
He seemed to be moving always and to pace. This pacing intensified before our performances. I’d say there’s a ‘there went Johnny’ path, worn side stage in venues throughout the world, in fact. And he seemed always to be thinking of ideas for us. Often completely wild ones, but the whole thing was wild so why not? Apparently the wildness was working. He made spider-web maps of possible scenarios and he talked of one wild day when we would sell our first million. And of another wild day when we would own one. Each.