by Andrea Corr
Now it is these non-hits, along with those that originated in Jim’s bedroom rebellion – ‘What Can I Do’, ‘I Never Loved You Anyway’ – that went on to sell eight million records. Three in the UK alone.
Talk on Corners was everywhere. Singing out of car windows. The biggest-selling record in the UK by an Irish band, ever. It would seem there’s an upside to not catching it, as people buy and love the whole record and not just a single.
The stars had aligned.
No, actually, there were particular hands lining them up. Simultaneously. Like hands on flint and into flame. Rob Dickins, along with a few faithful record company execs that didn’t need to ask somebody else what they thought of it to know whether they, themselves, liked it. A Tin Tin Out remix of ‘What Can I Do’ and, most significantly, a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’, remixed by Todd Terry, culminating in John once again capitalising on our Irishness and securing a live BBC broadcast of our St Patrick’s night Royal Albert Hall show, where we were joined by Mick Fleetwood. Caroline and himself, thundering alongside each other through ‘Toss the Feathers’. Happy twenty-fifth birthday, girl.
Overnight everything changed.
Forgiven, Not Forgotten was rescued from folk to tearful reunions with pop-rock friends, caught on infrared cameras in record stores throughout the UK. We became the first band since the Beatles to occupy the two top spots in the album charts. Talk on Corners number one, Forgiven, Not Forgotten number two. Forgiven, Not Forgotten was beside himself!!
‘And I’d like to thank God and all my fans!’
And how to remain so grounded through it all?
Do a Spinal Tap in-store signing in Detroit, to two people (who I think just happened to be there) while this is all taking off, far, far away.
But there was champagne popping and dancing in a house in Dundalk, as they listened to the weekly chart countdown, each passing number, wondering, ‘Where are they, Gerry?’
‘All the way at the top, Jean!’
Can you imagine?
World tours, awards and platinum records followed. Helicoptered and motorbiked (not me, too scared) from TV shows to gigs, as every millisecond mattered. Six nights at Wembley, one at Earl’s Court and a Scottish-accented reprimand from our tour manager, Henry McGroggan …
‘You need to learn to choose your nights, Andrea …’
But there are no nights, Henry, and it would be decadent to sleep through this …
Mum was now known to have one ear on the radio at all times. A single headphone in her left ear. One ear on her children far away while she typed and did her work in Dealgan Milk Products, a job she went about getting when she was forty-five. Endless A4s of ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ strewn on the kitchen table. And a glamorous teacher who looked just like Elkie Brooks on the cover of her album. Oh, ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’. I love that song …
When we would call home from wherever, she would invariably tell us who had played us that day and what was said …
Larry Gogan played you today. You were the answer in Tony Fenton’s pop quiz.
No matter how big we got, she did not change. Complacency somehow did not grow in her. It was always wonderful and worthy of a mention.
Even Gerry walking up the town to: ‘The children are doing great, Gerry. What part of the globe are they in now?’ That was ever worthy of a mention too.
Helicopters over Lansdowne Road. Forty-five thousand people making their way. Burger, hot-dog and merchandise stands.
And a breeze that makes waves of our faces
on T-shirts,
like flags leading them on
to pass the house with the steps
where our shadows pose still,
for those first black and whites …
Side stage, John pacing, embracing and then releasing
To Lough Erin Shore
Side screens flicker on
And we are giants and dolls walking towards you
The curtain falls
The roar of love
Gerry and Jean in the mouth of the Roar.
Now I am bowed down with gratitude.
July 1999. She has four months left.
In April of that year, Mum had found herself ‘breathless’, would you believe, but it wasn’t a good thing. From a benign (utterly friendly, if mistakenly, in retrospect) misdiagnosis of asthma, they were suddenly called back in to be told that she, in fact, had cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis. Cryptogenic is probably the scariest word to me here, as it means this disease is not, as yet, understood. Though it has a different name today, it remains cryptogenic and it has the same sad outcome. We have now lost six of her nine siblings to this sorrowful mystery.
But suffice it to say that she breathed something, somewhere, at some point in her life that caused the alveoli to scar over. One doctor called it ‘highly treatable’ while another, more ominously, told her to ‘get her affairs in order’. This left Daddy very angry.
How could you take away somebody’s hope?
But I think he was just angry that we were losing her.
She was in the Beaumont Hospital getting tests while we were rehearsing nearby, to record our unplugged record. On a break, one day, I visited, but she was out of her room. An intern, seeing me there waiting, innocently let slip that a lung transplant was being considered. We hadn’t realised it was this serious.
Mum saw it in my face when she returned to the room. ‘She knows,’ she said to Daddy, looking at me. And what she recognised in my face then, I see now, in us all, whenever this Corrs Unplugged plays.
It is beautiful, though. Probably more so because of this. And laughter and love did fill that Sheriff Street space, too. Mitchell Froom, this album’s producer and a friend now that we have continued to love working with. His Hammond and his authenticity. Flying Quality Street and Fiachra Trench orchestrations. Fate again, as on suggesting we cover Phil Lynott’s ‘Old Town’, we discovered Fiachra had worked on the original and written that joyous trumpet solo.
‘Radio’, a song Sharon had written the same day she wrote ‘So Young’, became the single, but it is R.E.M.’s ‘Everybody Hurts’ that is full of Mum.
Hold on …
She was no longer standing at the door waiting for me (in my mind’s eye now, always wearing a yellow jumper over jeans), smiling the love out the door to me when I pulled up in my car. Nor was there the smell of roast chicken. She was on the couch. I should have known then. I ate at the table and talked in to her. This would never be Mum. How sick must she be? She was to fly to Newcastle with Daddy the next morning for tests and now had oxygen at home, which she used sporadically as if it was an indulgence. Like her lungs would get lazy if spoiled. I got her bag ready for the morning and meant to write a funny note to her to find within when there. Like the little additions to her shopping lists we made, too rude to mention here, that made her laugh in the aisles of the supermarket. But I didn’t get around to it. I washed and I blow-dried her hair for her by the fire. I had never done this before. Oh, her head before me like our roles reversed. Her appreciation is too much for me right now. I noticed her fingernails. They come to mind a lot these days. The perfect white half-moons. The echo of their crescent in the oval tip. The ridges. But they and her lips were at this moment a little blue, I noticed, and we decided she should sleep with the oxygen tonight.
She is muted in these memories. As if I was then already watching through a veil.
In the airport terminal she walked to the Ladies while Daddy and I checked in for them. She took too long. I should have gone with her. Her eyes were so frightened when at last we saw her being pushed in a wheelchair by a young man. She had become faint in the Ladies and had almost fallen. A stranger helped her. I stayed and watched through the window long after the hospital plane had gone. I was rooted there. I felt I knew she would never return.
But thought was too painful at this time, I think, for the memories, they are not vivid. Not vivid enough now. Like the faded and faint little stars your eyes only discern when looking to the left of them. When looking beyond. They are barely shining.
The other day at home, I found a note she had made to herself. A note of prompts for what must have been her first doctor consultation. This line is heartbreaking:
‘Can you make me better?’
She died in November while being assessed for that transplant, in Newcastle.
I had just gotten off the plane in Switzerland, where I was to write with Mutt Lange, when Caroline called to tell me I had to turn right back. That we had all been called in.
She was fifty-seven.
‘How Could I …’
I see you in the kitchen
Bare spuds in water
A red duck in a yellow pond
You knitted plain purl
I jump when I remember
Your snap and hand clap
Yourself you were
Your joy your joy
The loudest love of all
I see your hands on cards
Jack of spades
The queen of hearts
Cheeks flushed
Frightened eyes
Sore intimate
Sore truth
How could I forget you
Now it is really blurred, but it’s not from the speed any more. It is my vision. And the worst part: seeing Daddy, alone. Imagining him in that house they’d built. The stairs and the stained-glass windowed doors that The Sound Affair bought.
Every tree they had planted and the seaweed for the soil from Blackrock Beach.
Now, the kind eyes of our engineer, Tim Martin, and John and Mitchell’s shocked expressions seeing each of us, independently, appear in Windmill Lane to continue making our third studio album, In Blue. We needed to work.
Caroline’s piano to ‘One Night’ and ‘Hurt Before’ had begun this. Both of which were the last songs of ours that Mum was to hear … in this realm anyway. Through headphones, lying in a hospital bed. This time I made it to Switzerland and stayed to write ‘Breathless’, ‘Irresistible’ and ‘All the Love in the World’, with Mutt Lange. He was so caring. I can’t say much more.
A friend wrote me a letter at this time, I remember, telling me there would be blessings to come from this pain, this loss.
I believe they have never stopped coming.
‘Breathless’ went to number one in thirty-three countries simultaneously and is, to this day, the closest we have ever gotten to a hit in America, with In Blue achieving platinum status.
Dad travelled with us a lot from then on, but sometimes I think the hotel rooms, the luxury, the splendour, this rare and coveted world we now inhabited, made him worse. Seeing everything from bedspreads to curtains, to glasses, to cutlery through her eyes, and hearing and not hearing her exclaim, ‘Look, Gerry!’ appreciating every tiny, little thing. And what is a view when looking out at it alone, no one to share it with, and the absence and the empty seat beside you more present than anything else.
The deafening silence.
So he would often appear back in the lobby within minutes of entering his room.
‘First Annual Report’ by Gerry Corr
A year on my love
A year since we parted
You to the prayer wrapped unknown
Me to a cell called freedom
In your place I have memory
A stingy usurper
Dispensing crumbs
From the banquet of your table
Like a donkey in Omeath
Kicking my pride
And your laughter
Animating the Mournes
Or champagne Saturday
When we whooped and danced
To new celestial arrivals
On our cherished firmament
Your light is on dim now, my love
Yet blinding flashes of you
Startle me awake
From the barren limbo of my dreams
You’ll be pleased God is back
He left when you died
Went a.w.o.l
Like he’d been found out
Not having the answers
And permitting instead a soothing indulgence
Why has Thou forsaken me
Yet there again, my dear
I must allow for pre-occupation
With glamorous new arrival
Introductions all round
Glasses raised and all that
Yours a spritzer, my love?
That’s about it for now, my dear
Except to say the blubbering has ceased
And sorrow’s sickly syrup of self
Expunged from the menu
Well … in hope and prayer, that is
My love
Reeling in the Years has just come on the TV. It always makes me cry and today is no different. The year is 1970. The anti-apartheid march and the controversial housing of travelling people.
This is precarious ‘Here we go’ ground that I am on now, so I will tread carefully. God knows, the world does not need another preaching pop star. And I am reminded of the essay for the Leaving Cert exam that I did not choose: man’s inhumanity to man. Probably because I was as uncomfortable with the subject then as I am now.
But what is the point of this human life if we, who are fortunate, do not endeavour to help those who suffer?
Did you see the Muhammad Ali documentary, When We Were Kings? Did you see how he spoke in what was, to me, an everyday voice, with everyday language, on racism. Did you not respond ‘Of course’, like I did? It wasn’t shaming or guilt-inducing. It was enlightening and inspiring. He was inciting love. And if someone has the power to incite the opposite, as is happening today, surely someone good could come along and flip that hate to love. And the rabble, the mob and the herd instinct in us all would redirect towards unity, tolerance and equality? Simplistic, I know, but couldn’t this be utopia if we all could just … get along?
No, it’s more selfish than that.
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’
And there are so many wrongs that are simply wrong, glaringly so. It doesn’t take a creative eye to see that.
The first time we would use our celebrity in a significant way was when the Omagh bombing occurred, in which twenty-nine people were killed, a woman pregnant with twins among the dead, along with three generations of one family. Innocent people (we see it every day now) who didn’t realise they were leaving for the front line when they left their homes that Saturday in August.
We were at the height of our fame and all five of us, John included, sickened. Indeed the whole country was, and beyond. We organised a TV special in Ireland for the victims, and U2 and Bob Geldof, among others, joined us.
A father in the audience that was made up of those, the left behind, will stay etched in my memory always. His face. His mouth a broken line. But more than anything, his grace.
When an artist – Bob, I think – (sincerely) expounded and raged at the horror of it all, spewing vengeance, this bereaved father said something like, ‘It is that, that has us here in the first place.’
And our years reel in to one of our greatest blessings. The ‘someone good’. The leader to incite love. Forgiveness. Dignity, Grace. Nelson Mandela. Madiba. I see my family as beyond fortunate to have met this man and to have played for him five times. When he received his honorary doctorate in Galway, we played and everyone was seated and reserved, until he himself stood up to his full six feet and danced to ‘The Joy of Life’. Now that is a vision I do not want to lose. Caroline’s first child, Jake, as a baby, got to meet him when we played at his eightieth birthday. We played Africa Day in Trafalgar Square, and the
46664 concerts in Cape Town and Hyde Park to combat poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa. I sang ‘Is This the World We Created’ with Brian May. What a privilege that was. He had only ever performed it with this beautiful song’s co-writer, Freddie Mercury, before this. But most special of all was being among the few artists, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel, Brian May, to fly to his safari residence in Africa and sit around Madiba, under the stars, as he told us stories.
And the idea, the truth most impactful of all to me, is that this charming and elegant man with such humour in his eyes had suffered so profoundly by the hand of his fellow human. We visited his cell in Robben Island, where he spent many of his twenty-seven years as prisoner 46664. It is barely long and wide enough to have contained him lying down. It is almost coffin-like in its narrowness. A kind of death in life. To have risen from this with such a love of, and a faith in, humankind is awe-inspiring. And now the Charlottesville horror, and one of the most retweeted quotes in the history of Twitter:
‘People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.’
We received honorary MBEs from the Queen, the monarch next door, for our charitable work and contributions. The first complete band to receive them since the Beatles, and the first ever Irish band. I imagine the Royal Family was fully aware that we are from Dundalk. ‘El Paso’, as a journalist so cleverly (albeit only to himself) christened it.
And to a few, it may have seemed controversial. But we chose to ignore that, and its suggested hypocrisy.
Talk on Corners, as I said, was all over Britain. The peace process was underway. We were seen and recognised as Irish, but also as brothers, as the same. We gratefully accepted all the love, awards and applause we received as we toured the UK, and similarly, we now accepted this honour.
Dad is photographed with us on this day. Playing with Jim’s head, trying to make him laugh. And, though she is missing, he is smiling here. That is a good memory.
And the reason I felt prompted into all of this by 1970, was that Daddy was part of that anti-apartheid march back then, and also fought for the travelling people. A journalist called him ‘the weirdy beardy’.