from=3rd August 1998
RELIGIOUS OR NOT, growing up in the Corr household was certainly a
musical experience. Their Catholic father, who worked for the Electricity Board, and
mother, a housewife, were musicians who played in local bands at weekends.
"They passed on their love of music and taught us our instruments,
but they never pressurised us, not like tennis parents or Michael Jackson's Daddy,"
recalls Andrea who still lives in the family home. "There were other musical families
at school – Ireland's like that – and I remember some of them really being
pushed to the point where they forgot that they were supposed to get some pleasure out of
it for themselves. It became a chore."
"Our parents were strict," Caroline says. "Not in a
brutal or awful way, but there were definite rules such as after six on a school night you
didn't go out, and at weekends you had to be home by a certain time. It wasn't
particularly sheltered, but we were well brought-up."
"If we all had torn jeans and
greasy hair and didn't look
so pretty, the expectations
would be different"
Caroline Corr: specialist subject, the obvious
Dundalk, 11 miles from the border with Northern
Ireland, has acquired an unwelcome notoriety recently as the centre of operations for the
"Real IRA", a splinter Republican terrorist group opposed to the current peace
process. But although the conflict in the North is uncomfortably close to home, it has
never been a big issue for the Corrs. " To be honest, it didn't affect our lives to
any great extent," Jim says. "We were aware of it, growing up, more from the TV
and the newspapers than as a real-life experience. I'd prefer not to get involved in my
own views about the situation. We're musicians not politicians. I just wish that everybody
could live together peacefully. Who cares what religion we are? You don't see borders from
satellites. They're a figment of man's imagination."
"I live in hope, because I'm an eternal optimist," says
Sharon, now living with her boyfriend in Belfast. "It has its problems, but the
people in Belfast are probably the most down-to-earth anywhere – very natural, very
welcoming and very nice."
"Nice"
is a word that the Corrs use a lot, and one which is often used about them. While other
groups may aspire to be cool, moody, feisty, funky or in some other way loaded with
attitude, the Corrs are bright, polite, well-adjusted, and emphatically nice people, whose
musical tastes were informed by their parents' love of The Carpenters and Fleetwood Mac as
much as by their Irish heritage.
They do not moan about their record company or bitch about other groups
– although Caroline clearly has reservations about an encounter with the Spice Girls
("Two of them seemed OK," she judges pointedly). And after the Corrs have done
their bit at the Awards there is no abrupt disappearance or sulking in corners. At the
after-show drinks in a nearby hotel bar, all four are much in evidence. Jim chats with
poet Amy Foster, daughter of the Corrs' producer and 143 label owner David Foster. Sharon
chinwags with chairman of Warner Music UK, Rob Dickins. Andrea circulates with the easy
grace of a society hostess and Caroline hangs out with the group's backing musicians
Patrick Duffy (bass)(ERROR: it's actually Keith Duffy) and Anto
Drennan (guitar).
One after another, the sisters wander off to their rooms, and most of
the other freeloaders gradually drift away, but Jim, fuelled by a generous intake of
Belgian lager, hangs on in there until the end.
"We're not squeaky clean at all," he insists, increasingly
plausibly." We're normal human beings. We enjoy ourselves. But we're not into drugs.
This business is very demanding and you have to be able to give a hundred per cent of
yourself to do it."
But appearances can sometimes be deceptive, as the tragic story of MOR
icon and Corr family hero Karen Carpenter demonstrated. Do the Corrs not have any dark
secrets of their own?
"We wear our souls on our sleeves, so what you see is pretty much
what you get," declares Jim. "Who knows if, God forbid, something like that
might happen in the future? At the moment we're standing up to all this pretty well, being
as sensible as we can and enjoying it as much as we can, so hopefully it never will. But
as regards dark secrets, we don't have any. Sorry we're boring!"
"All it seemed to be was naked
women. What's the message?
What urge is it catering to?"
Caroline on The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up Video
THE MISTAKE PEOPLE regularly make about the Corrs is to assume that,
because their background is so untroubled and their music so gentle on the ear, they must
have courted success but taking the soft or easy option. Not so.
They first convened as a band in 1990 after auditioning for parts in
the Commitments, where they all met up with the film's musical director John Hughes.
Andrea, then 16, landed a small role in the movie as Jimmy Rabbitte's younger sister,
while the others made do with cameos.
Hughes then became their manager. So far, so good, yet he maintains
that the band was turned down by just about every record label in Ireland, the UK and
America, usually on the ground that they where "to folk" for labels looking for
a pop act and "too pop" for specialist folk labels. When they finally did get a
deal – a combined effort between fledgling American labels 143 and Lava, with
distribution through Atlantic – they toured worldwide to promote their 1995 debut
album, Forgiven Not Forgotten.
In Britain they had to wait until this year to realise the full extent
of their ambition. A favourably reviewed St Patrick's Day concert at London's Royal Albert
Hall in March was followed by the release in May of a Todd Terry remix of their version of
Fleetwood Mac's Dreams, the first Corrs song ever to be play-listed by Radio One. The
impetus was sufficient finally to send their second album, Talk on Corners, released in
October 1997, all the way to the top. Smart alecks who equate the Corrs to Caffrey's
frothy "ale" – i.e. nominally Irish yet bland enough to appeal to
unsophisticated foreign palates – forget how avidly consumed they are back home.
No they're not bitter. Neither are they stout. But they are themselves. "It's a
mistake to think we have no conviction in what we do," bridles Caroline. "There
are people who say, Three good-looking girls and their brother, nice family, writing nice
songs, it's not serious. But if we all had torn jeans and greasy hair and didn't look so
pretty, the expectations would be different, and perhaps we would be different people. We
can only be what we are. That is, after all, what integrity is all about."
The other Corrs cliché is to treat the sisters as interchangeable
units with no personalities of their own. They are all of similar height and impossibly
slender built and at first it is hard to fit the right name to the right face. After a
while, Jim and Sharon – the older two – emerge as the serious musos. Sharon was
taught violin from the age of six by a teacher who habitually sent pupils on to Vienna and
Berklee, and talks with enthusiasm about her favourite composer: Satie, Dvorak,
Tchaikovsky, and Benjamin Britten ("dark and unusual").
Separated by just 14 months, Caroline and Andrea were brought up as
twins. Unlike Jim and Sharon, who had a chance to make their own way in the world before
undertaking the Corrs, they have never known anything else. Caroline recalls recording
with the group when she and Andrea were still at school. The piano-playing Caroline took
up drums after a boyfriend showed her a few basic beats.
There is something frisky about Caroline, who seems as is she'd be most
fun on a night out with the boys. She adores Radiohead's The Bends and The Verve's Lucky
Man, but wasn't very taken with the video for The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, which she
happened to see the other night on German TV ("All it seemed to be was naked women.
What's the message? What urge is it catering to I wonder?")
Andrea is the dreamer, and more than any of them the one who has missed
out on the chance of a "normal" life. "I guess there's things I'm missing,
but I'm gaining so much more," she says. "Success can play strange tricks on
people, but I have to say that I have never felt content and so on a level in my life as I
do right now. I don't get severely uptight like I used to. Nothing phases me any
more."
Still very much single, she agrees that it must be quite hard for
people outside the group to get close to someone in such a tightly-knit unit. " So
maybe that's why nobody does," she says, quietly. " Although they're very
welcome to." The sisters' extraordinary beauty tends to obscure some of the mundane
aspects of a life spent constantly in the company of your family, and those who imagine
that Jim must be one of the luckiest human beings around are, of course, forgetting that
to him the other three are just his kid sisters. "I used to feel it was my role as
the older brother to look out for them," he says. "But I think now it's the
other way round and they look after me."
THE MORNING AFTER the sisters are all up bright and early for breakfast,
before setting off for their next stop in Cologne. But there is no sign of Jim.
Apparently, he is always the last to surface. Without their make-up on they look
miraculously younger and fairer.
But there is a problem. Andrea doesn't like the nuts in her cereal and
starts picking them out, prompting a series of jibes from the others about her
"neurotic" behaviour.
"Who's that group who used to insist on their rider that
they had to have M&Ms with all the brown ones removed?" Sharon asks.
"Van Halen? Right. Well, if Andrea carries on like this we'll have
to start demanding muesli with all the nuts removed in future."
Is there no end to this rock 'n' roll madness?