by Andrea Corr
Jim had to chaperone, too. I wanted to be grown-up cool and in the pub like the Commitmentettes. I didn’t appreciate his fraternal guard, even though he always brought me out with him and always included me, a teenager without altitude. I had nothing to complain about. But I did complain. Judas’ed him in a way, in my diva-shy, on-the-cusp confusion. He told me that I was not nice any more, one morning, and it stilled me. The possibility that what he said was the truth. The folly and fumble of my try-it-on youth.
Mum was my chaperone for the overdub recording. Our first ever visit to London. Me then just semi-sweet sixteen and she forty-eight. We stayed together in the Hilton on Park Lane. Golden-chandeliered, head-rising awesome to the two of us then. A bit of ‘What’s she doing here?’ too.
We queued up for the Hard Rock Cafe, I remember, in this surreal London night. Like we had entered the Tardis, she and I. Had fallen from the couch watching Doctor Who, and had ended up here.
We didn’t get in to the Hard Rock, as it happened.
Pigeon-holed even then. Too pop.
And the mistress cried in Alan Parker’s Evita, not only because she was yanked out of her lover’s bed and her post-coital slumber. But because her chance to express how she really felt, her song, was stolen!
Oh well, I understand. It is a beautiful song.
And then there was Anne, in The Boys and Girl From County Clare, who, when not falling in love, rowing with her poor mother, Maisie, or playing the fiddle without moving her fingers, loved nothing better than a few late-night sandwiches (washed down with a glasheen or three) in Ballygally, Antrim. Three witches, one broom and a ghost. She was a bit of a drinker if the truth be told, and thus appeared a tad bloated of a morning.
And Car Hen all to myself, too. Another vital presence in our story is Caroline Henry. The red coat Hi-de-Hi! witch with an unfortunate talent for organising. Tall, ghostly Cork girl (‘never put your shovel where there’s no gravel’, ‘two tits in a bun’, ‘her auntie Biddy Shmiddy and pain is it?’) who will make you laugh till you cry and make you feel so lucky you are with her and that you are alive. The appreciation is like my mother’s. Lots of ‘look!’s said, and then you see. The turf fire. The trees. The glasheen in your hand. The intricate, tiny-handed artwork on your cup. Nigel Slater’s food descriptions. Car Hen makes you see and feel so lucky. How wonderful is that? These are the only friends we need to have. Illuminators. But there’s endless ‘homework’, too (signing a million album covers – why didn’t I just sign ‘A’ to begin with? … ‘Baby C, did you do your homework?’), but again I just feel so lucky. Because she just laughs and she loves.
(© Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo)
Finally, Lily (poor Lily) of Broken Thread who was, sadly, dead … though at large in the Himalayas. This movie never saw the light of day, which leads me to question my choices. Maybe this wasn’t one for the method acting.
I, also, had written songs on my piano in Dublin.
Little picture songs and stories. I loved Björk’s Debut record and Nellee Hooper’s production. So visual and evocative. And it was avant-garde, for me, in that the tools he uses to paint with are more often technological, and not live instruments. Apart from the orchestrations, it is without a doubt quite a departure from The Corrs records. But having said that, I could never have created a Corrs record by myself. There are four of us. Four writers. Different combinations. And no matter where the song has originated, be it one of us on our own, or two or three of us, it becomes what it is through the attention we, all four, give it. Thus we share the credit.
Bono and Gavin Friday introduced me to Nellee and I played the songs on the piano in his studio in London. With Nellee standing behind me, unknowingly reminiscent of the terrifying piano lessons, I managed to get him to commit to producing my first solo record, Ten Feet High.
And I learned to be scared of the H word in all of its forms. Because ‘That’s a smash hit’ can ironically be more worrying than ‘Where’s the hit?’ I learned that one is indeed the loneliest number, and that the ‘we’ we had needed a break from was something to miss.
I had been uncomfortable in interviews before, but at least I could be quiet and hide behind my hair, when there were four of us. Now I have full responsibility and accountability in good times and in bad. No one to share either with, I found anti-climactic and deflating.
But I love, and am proud of, this record, as is Nellee, and if I were to do it over again, I would make it exactly as it is. Ten years on.
‘Ideal World’
Jeanie marries when she’s twenty-one
She has a baby one year on
And every year that’s the way that life goes
Lost herself in domesticity
A feeding, cleaning entity
She can’t recall what she was before
In an ideal world kids would keep their rooms tidy
An ideal world he’ll be home from his work on time
And in the morning I could lie in …
Johnny signs his share of autographs
For all the people he makes laugh
And he walks home to an empty flat
Does his best to fight the silence
Late-night TV, Vicodin
He can’t forget what he had before
In an ideal world she would still think I’m funny
An ideal world she’d be waiting in bed for me
And in the morning we could lie in …
Molly’s sitting in a waiting room
The top doctor will see her soon
In the body nature gave her
Worried if she’ll ever wake up
Wondering if she’s better off
Why can’t she be what she was before
In an ideal world he would still think I’m pretty
An ideal world he would only want bed with me
And in the mornings we could lie in
In an ideal world you would make a decision
An ideal world you’d be making a home for me
And in the mornings we could lie in
Sunday mornings we could lie in …
In an ideal world
There were days and nights in this time I am looking back on that seem now blessed in a magic light. Living in my doll’s house, Birdie’s nest, the rabbit hutch. A yellow-bricked, sash-windowed mews on Heytesbury Lane. The lane that Caroline and Frankie also lived on. The twisters bookended. Her room down a gravel hall. Dragging closed the wooden gates in the evenings or the afternoons either and shutting out the world. Dancing on a reinforced wooden table that never gave out, no matter how many feet trod on it. My own blue NEFF oven. Dinner and wine make my brown eyes benign. The skylight above my bed. Waking one morning, basking in the glow I was bathed in like a newborn’s first wonderful glimpse and the phone ringing beside my bed.
‘Bosom! Have you seen the sun?!’
‘Yes, Bosom! I was just wallowing in it. It’s beautiful!’
‘Not the sky, Bosom! The paper!’
In the light of that late summer, early autumn, I felt like I was suspended in the heightened awareness that it really is all borrowed. Suspended like a leaf. A borrowed heaven. Gavin Friday and Bono on either side of me walking in Merrion Square in Dublin, feeling like it was the perfect place to be and we three the luckiest alive. Walking where our ancestors walked. When I felt that even the leaves on the trees knew that they were in their final and most beautiful moment before they would fall. They glimmered amber and gold like the colour of my girl’s hair.
Bono and Gavin, along with Maurice Seezer, had written a breathtaking song, ‘Time Enough for Tears’, for the Jim Sheridan movie In America. We walked from the light into the gloaming of the Davenport Hotel and drank champagne before we emerged giddy into the glare of the day. We played while we worked; our work is our play, you see. I sang th
e song in Maurice’s house and later my brother Jim would ask Bono and Gavin how they brought that vocal from me. ‘Time Enough for Tears’ was nominated for a Golden Globe and, wearing as gothic a Christian Dior dress as I could find, my Nancy to Gavin’s Sid, I went with Gavin and Jim Sheridan. The Irish in LA. During the award before the ‘Best Original Song – Motion Picture’ category, I looked around nervously, noting the expressions on both the winners’ and the losers’ faces: remarkably similar. As if the losers were as delighted that they had lost as the winners were that they had won. ‘Hell, yeah! [Clap clap clap clap] I am a winner losing to that winner!’ Gavin, however, did not seem to notice this good-sport protocol, or if he did, he did not believe in it. The camera’s red eyes blink into life, the robots circle our table and the spotlights blind. ‘And the award for best original song goes to …’ It was not us. I began to clap. And Gavin in the glare of the spotlight said, ‘That’s a fuckin’ shite song. We’re being overrun by fuckin’ hobbits!’
(© Amy Graves/Wire Image/Getty Images)
From here I am led to another family, the Mundys.
When my agent told me that the Old Vic theatre in London was casting for Dancing at Lughnasa, I scrubbed off my gothic eyes, threw on a housecoat, and showed up to read for the part of Chrissie … pretty much. I believe Brian Friel to have been one of Ireland’s, indeed the world’s, great playwrights. And it is at this moment that the theatre hooked me. Coming from the world of pop music, it was liberating in its complete lack of vanity. No playback. No post-mortem. Very little glory. Just the knowledge that you all, a few hundred people, felt something in a room, went through something together, one evening, and then it was gone, disappeared off into the ether. As an art form, it is, to me, a real expression and celebration of our humanity. And you would want to love it, because it is hard work. Eight shows a week, one day off, until you emerge three months later.
(© Alastair Muir/Shutterstock)
I created a few mondegreens here, too, in my complete lack of experience. On opening night it is traditional for the actors to give each other cards, I was told, to which I whispered to my closest Mundy sister, ‘What is the significance of carrots?’
And I thought our director was telling us to ‘march’ with the kite, at the end of the play, when she talked of the proscenium arch.
Interesting idea.
Before we opened, we had a dress rehearsal for Brian Friel. After which he came up to me, kissed my cheek, and said in his Donegal lilt:
‘You’re lovely.’
Now there is more glory than I could ever need.
In the meantime, a not-so-strange stranger, a friend of Jim’s, had infiltrated my world. On realising through conversation that we had been in each other’s company many times, I asked him had he not liked me before. He replied that he had thought me beautiful, but that he had also thought that I was ‘in the corner writing poetry about death’.
Looks can be deceiving … or can they? So Brett and I married, the August after I had finished the play.
And it seems to me now that he saw the truth of me then, which I had yet to meet. Maybe this is what human love really is. Recognising who their other is, before they truly know who they are themselves.
I pretend for a living. He couldn’t pretend if his life depended on it. And the Picasso face of his truth is my beautiful face. And there is no deficit in the leg.
For I meditate these days in a graveyard, when he is at work and the kids are at school.
Hush. I think I may be a witch.
Breathe into the yew tree and ask to hear the voices and absorb the stories that are told in tears now. Tears newly shed for all their silenced early pain. The dew on my evergreen branches.
Voices my neighbour, the crow, describes as ‘stilled’.
Let me sway in your air till your tears fall down my face. Use my living hand, my beating heart and my undying hope for this world of mortals to unstill your voice, so through your death you can teach us how to live.
And now more characters to play, though this time through song.
After I sang on a charity record, ‘The Ballad of Ronnie Drew’, in Dublin, John Reynolds, its producer, approached me with the idea of making a record of covers. Songs that I had loved and had not written. I was reluctant at first, having had quite enough of solo records for the time being. And I had found myself more predisposed to the word ‘no’ in this time. Once you say it enough, it’s actually quite a nice word. Paradoxically positive. He soon persuaded me, though. And the luxury of just being a singer and interpreter of other people’s work appealed to me more and more.
John is a special man. As his parents were special people before him. They fostered twelve children and John lived as a foster child among these children. Such generous, loving spirits they were that they mother-fathered them all the same. And so inherent must this love and generosity be that John saw it as a blessing to have to share their love. Remarkably and so refreshingly non-judgemental, this English Irishman. You are good as you are. You are actually the better for the gritty bits.
We made a record of songs that had marked moments in my life, engraved, like the lines reaching across my hand. Songs from the bumping chair. Lifelines. This was a joy. A choir made up of a thousand Brian Enos in Donna Summers, state of independence. Billie Holidays, I’ll be seeing you, saving me (and, I must admit, the guests) from making a speech at our wedding. A small tour, a big laugh. Falling up the down escalator in a German airport and laughing at the word Ausfahrt. Caroline joined us for ‘Breathless’ when we played the Union Chapel in London, and Daddy was there, too.
I did an interview around this time in which I was randomly asked whether there had been a teacher in my school years who had had an impact on me, growing up. There were a few, in honesty (Mrs Crilly’s ‘clean as you go’ still in my ears when I cook, Mrs O’Hare and my essay on our garden – ‘Shadows stretch, long and skinny …’ God, I was at it already), as I liked school and think I was lucky in my friends and in my teachers. But I mentioned one in this interview, from my primary school.
I was about seven, I think, and to my shock, they had chosen me to play the princess in our school production of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Swineherd. In an early rehearsal, I ran off the stage, crying, and into the cookery kitchen next door. I couldn’t understand why they’d picked me and was so overwhelmed and shy. My teacher calmed me down, sat up on the shelf of the window in the kitchen, and told me that she knew that I could do it.
(© Andrea Corr and Peter Gaynor in the Gate Theatre Production of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre)
And so this leads me to the opening night of Jane Eyre in the Gate Theatre in Dublin and receiving a card (not a carrot) with a simple message written in it:
You can do it, Andrea
Love Mrs O’Donaghue
I cried taking my final bow as Jane and withdrew to my room.
We have reached the intermission now. The curtain is down. What will we play while the whispers grow to talk to laugh? While knees creak their yawn to a satisfied stretch … ?
Harry Nilsson singing ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’, I think.
Banking off of the northeast wind
Sailing on summer breeze
Skipping over the ocean like a stone …
Skipping over a ten-year ocean
The orchestra Gerry wanted
The band he got.
Skip a generation
To a chamber octet …
And the greatest blessings of all …
Jake, Georgina, Ryanne, Cal, Flori, Brandon, Jeanie and Brett.
The Mama Eye
I, now, am a hand-squeezer with a traffic-conducting head.
Non-optional extras include blinkers, tiger blood and hi-fi, bomb the bass sound.
Always read the label before crossing.
Side effects
may include vomiting, diarrhoea, feeling funny, a loss of libido with or without stomach pain, a funny feeling and death.
Adverse side effects may include having to cross Edith Grove yet and sorry for your trouble the lamp-post flowers.
And in and out and in …
Hahhhhhhhh with a deep inhalation before finalllll ignitionnnnnnn
haaaaaaaaaaaaae
‘VRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrmmmMMMMMMMMMM. Come on, babas!’
I cross Beaufort Street
on the King’s Road.
‘No Go Baby’
Walk on by my fruitless market
Hills and hips and heartache
Tear stain kiss my swollen belly
Angel echo there
But it’s fading
I am wasteful
I still feel you
No go baby
I still want you
No go babe
Spring clean your room
When I’m asleep
Light, housecoats and vacuums
Put me back
All spick and span
Brand new
Like you weren’t there
Yes I’m brand new
New born virgin
I still feel you
No go baby
I still want you
No go babe
I’m so sorry
No go baby
I won’t hold you
No go babe
I wrote this song a long time ago
Before you ever were
About another little soul