from=RTE GUIDE,MARCH 13, 1998
By Alan Corr
From naive siblings from Dundalk to sheened members of the pop elite, The Corrs have well and truly made it. On St Patricks night RTE screens a one-hour documentary about the band, while BBC broadcasts their concert from The Albert Hall. Alan Corr (no relation as far as he knows) meets Andrea and Caroline Corr
Andrea Corr is embarrassed. A one hour documentary on the development of The Corrs from photogenic siblings living in the border town of Dundalk to members of the pop elite is nearing completion in an RTE editing suite, and Andrea is quaking at the prospect of watching it.
Luckily for her she probably won't have to. The Corrs will be busy playing The Albert Hall on St. Patricks night. "Have you seen Spinal Tap?" she asks. "This film is about us is probably going to be a serious cringe factor because it goes back all those years to when we were kids, you know. So our manager said to me that maybe the best thing would be if we didn't watch it!"
Pity, because The Corrs - The Right Time is compelling stuff. The most interesting scenes have to be footage of the frighteningly young looking Corrs singing their hearts out and tinkering with keyboards and guitars in the dank-looking back bedroom of a house in Dundalk. Andrea was the ripe old age of fifteen and everybody else was only a little older. Older brother Jim was renting the house, which was situated just around the corner from their family home, and it was here that the fab four, who would come to be known as gorgeous and tuneful the world over, began hatching their plans for world domination.
Jim (whose 'rock star' age is markedly different from his real age) had just decided to form his own band after putting in time playing for Dolores Keane, '80's couldabeens The Fountainheads and er, Linda Martin. "He had a little portastudio e set up in the bedroom of his rented house," remembers the bands father, Gerry. "The girls were very young, Andrea was only fifteen, Caroline would have been sixteen and they all just got involved by degrees. Jim would have an idea, a melody line, then the girls would come up with words."
There in low-resolution camcorder verite are Jim, Andrea, Caroline and Sharon, dressed in what looks like hand-me-downs and earnestly beavering late into the night. "Now that we have success you can see how difficult it is to do it and how rarely it happens," says Andrea. "But right back then we really believed we could do it and that was just gonna happen because it had to. I think that really stood to us, but that's not really how it goes in this business at all.
None of the Corrs has actually seen any of this footage and both Caroline and Andrea seem a tad uncomfortable with the whole idea of having their first stumbles into the limelight documented in this way. "God!" is drummer Caroline Corrs' measured reaction to the idea of watching herself from the old days. "I'm sure when I see myself, I'll go Oh god!" she says in the half giggle, half reproving Louth accent that is common to the sisters. "I used to play the piano in the band so there's some horrendous scenes of me playing the keyboard. We used to rehearse together constantly as if we were about to do some major show even though we weren't. I don't know what it was. I think I'll look at it and say, 'Oh god! I look so young or my hair is really long down my back.' I look really stupid."
Methinks they are being overly harsh on themselves. The real story of the Corrs development is not about dodgy haircuts and bad clothes. Looking back, it seems as though the band arrived fully formed. After the incubation period where hair was modified, clothes tailored and uh, music polished, they landed the big record deal with the big producer.
"I think you're right," says Caroline. "We had to take it in leaps and bounds as a band. I think that because of all the rehearsals, we used to spend days in that bedroom and in the winter time, it got pretty cold, we'd be doing it till three or four in the morning just to get it right. That helped give us the stamina to keep it going. It was a crazy time. Half the time we didn't know what we were doing and the songs were so pop and so...God! Listening back, it was horrendous."
With the Corrs it always seemed as though they got the gladhanding out of the way before getting down to the business of making music. The band's cornering of every Irish international occasion has been mighty impressive. From playing to the Pope, providing half-time entertainment at NFL games in Croke Park, gigging on a big and ugly aircraft carrier docked off Dublin, to schmoozing the Clintons and the Kennedys.
The upshot of this high-profile publicity has been confirmation of the band's worldwide appeal - being gorgeous is after all, an international language. The band's sales figures also throw up some very attractive figures. Among their total of two million albums sold, Spain has snapped up 500,000 units and the Corrs have gone nine times platinum in Australia with their second album Talk On Corners and a staggering seven times platinum in Ireland.
It's not all hairspray, powder, lip gloss and playing the perfect colleens, however. The Corrs haven't been slackers in the studio. On their first album they worked with Glen Ballard, the man who crafted Alanis Morisette's Bitter Little Pill, and for Talk On Corners they hooked up with one David Foster, a man who has been nominated for forty Grammies and collected twenty.
Just back from tapping into the ex-Pat communities in Australia and New Zealand, Andrea and Caroline are clearly exhausted. When I ask them how did they go from being a small-time trad band to international big hitters, they seem mystified. But one man who was certain of success from day one was their manager John Hughes. He made sure The Corrs' every move was documented, and it's footage(161 hours was hacked down to one) which is the basis of The Corrs - The Right Time.
Way back in 1990 their sound was very pop. A dancey melange with what sounds, today at least, like thoroughly dated brass stabs and the kind of clinky keyboards that made Curiosity Killed The Cat so unlovable. "It was pretty poppy," muses Andrea " And we danced like hyenas and we looked really silly, but I thought I was cool. It was terrible. I agree with John, we shouldn't really watch it. When I look back I get embarrassed."
Classifying the Corrs sound has been a critical bugbear for the band. For ones so young it must be strange to be classed alongside the likes of Sting and Fleetwood Mac on MOR playlists. Their upcoming contribution to Legacy: A tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours reveals exactly where The Corrs hearts lie musically. On the album which also includes The Cranberries (Go Your Own Way), Elton John (Don't Stop) and Jewel (You Make Loving Fun), they take on Stevie Nicks' resigned love song, Dreams.
The Rumours project should up the ante even further for the band. But with increased success and the probable mainstream breakthrough in America on the cards, other issues emerge. Like the fresh blitzkrieg of media that they will be facing soon. John Hughes has already said that talk about those three taboo's - sex, politics and religion - are strictly out of bounds when it comes to his band, but are the Corrs prepared to be more open as they get even more successful?
"It's not in our way and it never has been," Andrea says. "We essentially are private people like our parents. I really don't think our private lives would be interesting enough to talk about. Madonna does that and so does Paula Yates, with us it would be all too boring, it wouldn't make titillating reading. We're musicians so I think why do people want to know all the personal stuff? You can read controversial interviews about people's sex lives but that's how the interviewee wants it to go."
But more than any other band ever to emerge from Ireland, The Corrs have been examined, held up to the light and otherwise drooled over for their obvious good looks. The reality is far more boring. When she's not working, Andrea 'the sexiest woman in Ireland', says she likes to do housework, a passion she shares with Celine Dion. "I dream of the domestic side of life. I love what I do but I dream of mundane, domestic things and fights with husbands in the future."
Andrea and Caroline are coy and innocent and it's hard to tell how much of it is actually down to careful image management, something the Corrs acknowledge as a vital part of their success. "We don't laugh about it because I think we understand that if you're a high profile person, you end up being called things like that," says Caroline. "They probably call the lead singer of the Verve the sexiest man on earth." And do you think he is? "No!" Caroline exclaims. The lead singer of the Verve? Oh my God! I think they're great musicians but that's where it gets very distorted. You can see someone on the screen, you see someone in the newspapers and you think suddenly they're like sex icons for some reason. Not to say that's not true of Andrea."
With three million albums sold, financial security almost certain ("We're not paupers") and a keen nose for good business as well as an ear for a decent melody, The Corrs can only get bigger. "They haven't changed at all, not a bit," insists father, Gerry on the phone from Dundalk. "But they're never quite happy with what they're doing themselves. They're hypercritical, especially Andrea.
She'll listen to herself singing and it's only rarely that she'll say: that's OK, I like that. They haven't arrived at a stage when suddenly they can say: this is it, we're pop stars, we can relax."
One scene in The Corrs - The Right Time provides a real insight into the inner workings of the reality of being in a successful band. Holed up in a hotel on the far side of the world, things are going perilously wrong. Sharon is sick in bed, there's a model agency in the foyer waiting to foist their latest designs on pops new darlings, the band have got two new songs to record, and Italian and Japanese journalists are badgering them for interviews.
And to think it all began with a battered portastudio in a bedroom in Dundalk.