by Andrea Corr
Now that is funny.
‘Harmony’
More walls since Good Friday he said
There’s nothing good about that
Down Bombay Street
There’s flames at our feet
And they burn like the Indian sun
It’s a far cry from home you land
Your brothers and sisters behind
This battle scar’s long
Like a mourning song
You know though you never had learned
Now we’ll never know the man you’d have been
The one who brought peace to a land born in pain
Taught love to a daughter
Kindness to a son
But you’ve ended before you’ve begun
And a main street became the front line
My beloved a casualty of time
It’s wrong, it’s wrong
No matter what side you’re on
To end them before they’ve begun …
Thinking of Nelson Mandela and that particular quote on love, I am reminded of a non-fiction book that I read that had an impact on me: The Human Animal.
And it told of love and how it causes our pupils to dilate when we feel it, or get a rush of it. Or, the most wonderful, that as a baby, your pupils are dilated all of the time. So that someone, when looking, will think the baby loves and needs them and so they will pick the baby up. Our little pupils communicating so much. The idea (eyedea … sounds like a real part) is so sophisticated and beautiful that I feel it could only be God. The droplet that falls from the sky into the water and radiates to wash-paint the briefest, most beautiful sun. ‘So good of you to drop in, welcome!’ It can be every day ecstatic to be a witness to that moment.
Cause and helpless effect. Automatic. A reflex.
Love is our greatest reflex. It is what our eyes want to do. They want to be crying-laughing, heart-eye emojis. Like the glorious stretch they will live on in the pinpricked lonely darkness. It is true for all of us, I think.
I believe in our goodness. And while our heads are turned daily towards the darkness and towards hate, I choose to focus on love. I feel like rebelling when I watch the news these days. It seems to me a particularly shameful time. But no, I will not accept that we are as pathetic as depicted and resign myself to our doom. A race to be pitied if not just to cringe, crawl and blush about. Let’s begin a rebellion of love.
I believe we could get better and that art, throughout the ages, has been trying to show us this. I see redemption at the end of a book. At the end of a life. The final paragraphs in A Tale of Two Cities are to me the most beautiful and inspiring. And these particular lines came upon me in a sort of eureka moment:
‘I see … the vengeance, the juryman, the judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people, rising from this abyss and in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.’
And that made me really happy. To be reminded once more that there is no new sin and that we are on our way, though it is indeed ‘gradual’. And to think that no matter how we modernise, when we fight and kill each other, why we fight and kill each other remains the same. I have registered and tipped my Border Town girl hat at the complications, but there is a centre and it is peace. Where the pendulum rests is love. It does not waver or doubt. It is not judged and it does not judge. Love is where we begin, where we proceed to end and where we never end.
I hope.
I think we are decadent. And I mean from that, not that we indulge too much (if drinking tea is a worrying sign, then I think we can gather that I have no problem with overindulgence), but that we waste so much. We waste so much happiness and beauty while we fight over it. Like your children fighting over a toy: ‘It’s mine!’ and you take it away with a ‘Nobody’s getting it now.’
And you bomb it.
On the news today I watched an illegal immigrant scale a building like he was Spider-Man. To save a dangling four-year-old boy. A stranger who is legal but a refugee nonetheless. The spirit in his little body fleeing a civil war. Seeking asylum from neglect.
The eyes dilate in love, like they are drinking up all the light.
The story of humanity could be a love story.
Rooms
The rooms we frequented. This one ornate and solemn. The Vatican.
His Popemobile made him appear as if to float by our pew. Don’t catch Jim’s eye, whatever you do. Daddy with us, and I am brought back to a day a long time ago when I let go of his hand, and he lost me in a field in Drogheda. The east coast leaned into the water of the Irish Sea with the weight of a third of Ireland’s population. As if the island itself had fallen to its knees in reverence. I am surrounded by walking skirts, trousers, shoes and boots, on mud-worn, trampled grass. My five-year-old self carried away from my family on a skyless adventure that smelled of wet coat.
So I did not get to see His Holiness on this occasion, but twenty years on we would sing the ‘Oh Holy Night’ we had sung yearly to Dad’s family, for Pope Saint John Paul II.
And the maestro enters a white-walled rehearsal room in Bologna. White towel draped around the shoulders of a Hawaiian shirt (could this be right?). Imposing, jet-black sooted hair and a baton taps one, two, three to …
Silence.
I imagine, now, the hush that followed orphaned Oliver’s ‘more’ and all eyes are on us, including his …
‘Mm … Please excuse us, maestro, but we do not as yet know the song …’
And here is where the aesthetic is at last appreciated, by us. For his entourage breathed a sigh of relief with not just a little nervous laughter. Which led us to believe that in ordinary circumstances, this would not be tolerated. And thank God we learn quickly, in Italian too, because he waited for us and then we went out, he in a dress suit now. And all the Italian children sang ‘Oi Vita Mia’ with us.
Glorious. Pavarotti. The stage floor beneath our feet seemed to tremble in homage, when he sang.
And now ‘the family from Ireland’ sing ‘Oh Holy Night’, again, (and the ghosts of the settee chuckle far off … ‘I told you it was good!’) … but this room is in Clinton’s White House. Bill’s towering and learned focus is like an etching in my mind.
‘God Only Knows’ with Brian Wilson on a stage in the garden of Buckingham Palace. Thankfully I was all laughed out at Jim’s ‘bumbubumbubumbubummmmmmmmm’ backing vocal by the time you saw us.
And Paul McCartney watching while we sang ‘The Long and Winding Road’ so slowly, each line drawn out and drawled, like we really meant it. Like we needed you to really understand how terribly ‘long’ this winding road was.
Caroline could not hear any of us in her monitors (that’s a lonely place to be, believe me) and as we all know, too fast is worse than too slow, so she committed wholeheartedly to the latter. We set off at dawn and reached our destination, your door, at twilight the following week.
Having toured the world again with In Blue, we returned home to record our Live in Dublin record and DVD. Mitchell produced and played with us again and we persuaded Bono and Ronnie Wood to join us for a couple of songs, friendships having been formed when uniting for Omagh and also having played support to U2 and the Rolling Stones in America. Blessings and musical high times for us all. ‘When the Stars Go Blue’ and ‘Summer Wine’, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Little Wing’, orchestrated and live in front of an audience again. So the tension never leaves and we are suspended for always here. I think this transcends and it’s what you feel when you listen and watch. Luck and just a ‘little bit of magic’.
> All beauty all fade away
All moonlight return to day
All sunrise all shooting stars
All earthbound bare feet in clay
You know we’re standing on
Borrowed heaven
All heartache all rivers cried
Don’t stay out too late tonight
I love you, don’t wanna die
You taste like paradise
I know I’m breathing in
Borrowed heaven
You gave me life and
I will give it back
But before I do
I’m gonna hold it tight
This is my prayer
All body all skin all bone
All silky all smooth and warm
All pleasure all pain are one
Almighty I stand alone
I know I’m living in
Borrowed heaven
Borrowed Heaven follows In Blue.
It is digital pop, as if we are trying to squeeze sunshine to warm ourselves again. This was to be our last studio record of original songs for a decade, but we didn’t know that then. Olle Romo, whom we had met when working with Mutt, produced this, which we recorded in Dublin, in LA and indeed Africa, where we sang with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the title track.
A vivid memory that I have of this time is, strangely enough, of another band. ‘Summer Sunshine’ was our first single and throughout the week of release, we were battling for the top spot. I woke in my bedroom in London with the windows open and the most beautiful song serenading from an open car window. It billows the curtains, into my bedroom, into my ears … And I know there’s no way we have beaten this … Keane’s ‘Everybody’s Changing’.
Defeat can sound sweet.
And everybody was changing, in our world. It was my opening line in ‘Summer Sunshine’:
‘Everyone’s changing, I stay the same’.
Sharon had married, as had Caroline, and now Caroline was pregnant with her second child, while touring this record. She moved from the drum kit to the bodhrán, out front, when the baby grew too close to the snare. I remember one day in particular in our dressing room in a venue in Liverpool. I heard her on the phone to her husband Frank. ‘Did he just talk?’ she said, almost frightened. Jake, her baby, hadn’t said his first words, but she got very upset before the gig and I knew and understood that this time with her was running out. She would have to choose for the moment and Georgina, within, was also pulling on her. They needed her and she needed them. Ultimately she left us to tour America without her and returned home to her own young family. Keith’s brother, Jason, joined us as drummer. I see now how amazing she was to have stayed so long, and also how hard it must have been to watch the carnival move on.
The children, by the way, are a testament to that pivotal decision.
And the corners soften and melt,
to become arcs,
and the arcs join hands,
and it’s time to go home.
Around the lyric book,
still smelling of the smoky pub fug,
and the metal of the music stand it sat on,
her hands on the pen,
on the pages,
Dad’s, a Chinese lettering,
the chords above her words.
The yellowed paper,
dog-eared and listening,
holding on still,
to the applause.
We gathered with Mitchell, Anto and Keith in a studio in Dublin to make what is, to this day, one of our favourite records. One that we have all admitted to playing in our time apart: Home.
We embodied our past and that of our parents and learned the songs that they had played before us, embracing exclusively our traditional history. The Celtic without the pop-rock. ‘My Lagan Love’, ‘Black Is the Colour’. And a song that I will always find hard to sing without crying, ‘Heart Like a Wheel’. Indeed, Jim and myself recorded it live, in one take, for this very reason. They were all then orchestrated by Fiachra, again. And if you listen really carefully, you may just hear Caroline’s second child, Georgina, making her cooing, gurgling baby sounds, in harmony with her mum, her uncle and her aunties.
There were strangers dangerously close to infiltrating. Romantic visions of … what?
Domesticity??
Dissension in the ranks
Blinkers thrown off one by one
Peep sneaking at imagined personal lives
That didn’t include
Suitcases
Deadlines
‘We talk’
Small couches
Hairdryers like breath
The colour brown
Democracy
Headline angst
En masse
Pigeon-holes
And a definitive lack of a clean white page.
On one of our final tour dates, we made our last live CD and DVD, Live in Geneva. Caroline rejoined us, now a mother of two.
John knew he had a chance against men, but cried off, defenceless, against the little people.
The small but deadly. The babies! So as we raised our hands for our final bow, that snowy night in Ischgl, he bowed his head side stage and raised the white flag.
(© Ofer Wolfberger/Getty Images)
Now the stage goes dark.
The personalities hang empty, inanimate, though close still, in flight cases. Shoes assemble with the dust of untold stories of stages throughout the world. The ghostly Braille of their tired soles. Echoes of glory and ‘Do you know who I am?’s rustling in silk. Hierarchies forming in the blackout.
‘She wore me accepting that Brit Award, I’ll have you know!’
‘Well, you could have done a better job of protecting her modesty!’
Guitars, keyboards, violins, bodhráns, drums, whistles, huddled next to each other in lock-ups, and the question moving between them:
‘When oh when will this get boring?’
And back in the house three doors close …
Keys turn and lock.
Jim, Sharon and Caroline. Retreat into their private, longed-for worlds.
A Solo Cello Outside a Corr-us
Although I wasn’t where they were in their lives, I was ready to hop off and move alone. There were the stirrings of independence and individuality in me. As, of course, there were in us all. I had unrealised dreams. More ordinary and everyday visions, but dreams nonetheless. Behind the smile where anxiety hid from John’s ‘never home’s and Daddy’s ‘rule the world’s. Behind the blushes, there were things that I was never brave enough to say. To admit.
My Leaving Cert results were good. I remember a bright afternoon in our living room, all of us there, and Mammy being torn. Torn for me. She suggested tentatively that I could do both, third-degree education and be in the band. But she was quickly dismissed. Caroline and I had only applied to a few universities in the unlikely case our heads fell off and we could not be in the band. And they had waited for me, the baby, to finish school. While waiting, Sharon worked in a music store and came home with the summer of the Cocteau Twins and Rosie Vela. She and Jim also formed a trad duo where they played locally in the same rooms that Mum and Dad so often had. Sang and played songs from their book. Songs we would later seek out together.
It was just a fleeting moment of a question that didn’t even seem to suspend for a millisecond in the air between us. For it fell as soon as it rose. A blind fork in the road where fate took barely a second to decide. I looked at her wondering too. Hoping, maybe, in that single moment, that this scenario may be possible. But we all turned left together. Then.
Now, in retrospect, I know how lucky I am that I did not have to decide my entire future at eighteen. It all happened. A unique education. And just how lucky I have been in my life so far, I canno
t quantify in words, though I am trying. Back then, though, I didn’t know that.
So here was my chance for individual choice.
If my head had indeed fallen off, I would have liked to study English Literature and Theatre. Stories made up of words sung into music, they had always formed pictures in my head. Five-minute dramas, in which I was the character. When eventually we wrote, this was still the case, with characters sometimes imagined, and sometimes true. Sometimes deemed fictitious, to hold on to the truth.
To play a part. To act. I felt offered the chance to experience without the personal fallout. And when someone else has written the story, then I am not accountable. Be ‘it’, or indeed ‘she’, good or bad.
Wow. Maybe baby isn’t brave at all.
But it feels instinctive to me to want to feel what it’s like to be somebody else. Try you on. To fall down the well of your story. Something I have always done in my head. From the bumping chair to right now wherein I am predominantly Mary Duane on The Star of the Sea. I cannot in truth tell you why.
Sharon Rabbitte, a deep-thinking girl of few words, was the first film character that I was to inhabit. Though on the surface, involving only three lines, each of which was the same, one might imagine that this would be a breeze. However, as Roddy Doyle had largely written The Commitments in the lesser-known language of Swearish (spoken throughout Dublin and parts of rural Ireland), it required some method acting. I was not very popular so, around this time. But we suffer for our art and I think it paid off. Don’t you?
Actually the overdub that we recorded was in fact more offensive and made us laugh a lot.
‘Go and shite!’ became ‘Go and vomit!’
I stayed in Jury’s Hotel in Dublin. I can smell the soap now. See the flower on the paper wrapping. So many hotels that I have stayed in since, but this was the first. In the evenings I was too shy to be around strangers in the lobby. Felt I’d stick out like the impostor I was. So I’d walk out to a shop in Ballsbridge, close to where I have a house now, and buy chocolate, Cadbury’s Golden Crisp I remember. And that would be my dinner for one, looking out on the Dublin night through the window of my room. And the Dublin mornings on the set on Synge Street smelled of burnt coffee and seemed perpetually waking but never fully awake. Ever in the half-light. And I am there with Johnny in these mornings – ‘John’, then. Hair slicked back and protecting me now. Protecting me as this one-time stranger always would, for some strange reason. The clever lunacy.