Soft Corrs: even when trying to look tough the foursome radiate wholesomeness.
(Pic: Creston Funk)
By Mick Heaney
from=The Sunday Times, October 19, 1997
Soft Corrs: even when trying to look tough the foursome radiate wholesomeness.
(Pic: Creston Funk)
By Mick Heaney
What is it about the Corrs that causes so many people to regard them with an air of embarrassed derision? A harsh question, maybe, but surely a fair one. After all, here's a group who are young, good looking, talented and highly successful - all the qualities that are supposed to make our Celtic tiger roar - yet all too often reactions to them range from the cringy to the dismissive.
It's not as if people in Ireland have rejected or neglected the family outfit from Dundalk. the Corrs' 1995 debut album, Forgiven Not Forgotten, went multi-platinum in Ireland on it's way to selling 2m copies worldwide. Nor is the Corrs' music particularly objectionable - their well crafted, folk-infected pop may frequently be bland or pretty, but they can write catchy melodies, and even at their most sickly they're preferable to the cosiness of A Woman's Heart or the ludicrousness of The Cranberries.
Perhaps the answer lies with the Corrs themselves. The group is made up of sisters Andrea (lead vocals and tin whistle), Caroline (drums, bodhran and vocals), and Sharon (violin and vocals), and Jim (key boards, guitars and vocals), who collectively radiate a sweetness that is reflected in their music. There's a touch of the head girls (and boy) to them, too nice to be swimming with the sharks, and yet apparently effortlessly notching up incredible success.
On their second album, Talk On Corners, released this week on Warners, the Corrs appear to be reacting on one level at least, to the perception of them as being too good to be true. Their album marks a musical progression, with the trad influence that marked their debut less pervasive. It's no radical departure, but it does seem like an attempt to give their pop a more cosmopolitan flavour, with several international producers working on the album, and a variety of composers collaborating with the group on different songs.
"We have progressed in a way that was natural for us," says Andrea Corr. "When we recorded Forgiven Not Forgotten we hadn't had that live experience, but with this album we had been on the road for a year and a half, we'd had that whole live feel, and naturally we wanted to incorporate it on our second album. Playing live you become more free to express emotions, and you don't want to lose that on record. We got edgier!"
Certainly, Talk On Corners is a move away from the homespun innocence that was at the heart of their debut album. The lyrics have a bruised quality ("for me it was about getting the confidence to say things I wanted to say") and the production is more sophisticated - echoes of Burt Bacharach rubbing shoulders with a version of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing recorded with the Chieftains, those great Irish crossover artists.
So is the second album a conscious broadening of the Corrs' sound, appealing to a bigger market? And is there not a danger that their original fans might think that the new material lacks the charm of their folk flavoured debut?
"I understand how that would come into your mind," admits Andrea. "But there are so many things you can think about. How do you follow-up and surpass your debut? Everybody's much more interested in you because you sold so many of the first album, there's always that pressure, but you've just got to do what's natural to you. If you got bogged down and worried about things you never thought about on your first record, like how people would perceive your songs, it would only be a curtailing factor."
But for all the talk of doing what comes naturally to them, it's not as if the Corrs are unaware of the vagaries of fashion. It's just that, as they see it, they're not going to play that game by the rules.
"We have never tried to fit into a category. Music-wise there shouldn't be categories anyway, but there's a market and there are shelves where you are supposed to be able to put things. We never thought about what was fashionable before, so we didn't do it for Talk On Corners. I think it would be difficult for us to write like that. We emerged in America when grunge was still there, so we were really not cool. But we did alright coming out and not aiming for fashion, so we did the same for this album."
In fact the Corrs have largely achieved their current fame by taking a series of very uncool (if lucrative) routes, and working hard at them. They have appeared on numerous television shows, hosted by the likes of Des O'Connor, and Cilla Black; they have supported, with great success, such giants of MOR as Michael Bolton and Celine Dion. Is the conscious "edginess" of Talk On Corners perhaps an attempt to move out of the MOR sphere? This is clearly a sore point, because Andrea Corr bristles slightly at the question, for the first and only time during our meeting.
"That's actually not us, that whole Michael Bolton and Celine Dion scene," she insists. "It's good to expand your audience, but we were never in that bracket, so we're not getting out of it."
Maybe she's right. Certainly the Corrs don't have the mock passionate bombast of those other artists, and their songs, though sweet, rarely seem contrived. Indeed, as they run a folky, acoustic version of their new single, Only When I Sleep, for television (we met at the RTE studios in Dublin), I realise that there is, occasionally at least, an authenticity to their music that their glamorous image can obscure, and you remember that for all their ease in the spotlight, the Corrs are a musical family who were virtually unheard of two years ago. The wholesome image of good-looking siblings working for each other and being nice to others may be hard to take, but it also the mechanism that has allowed the Corrs to survive and prosper during their meteoric rise.
"We could never have anticipated what happened. It was our first experience recording and writing songs and went on to sell 2m copies - that is phenomenal. But being a family, we're from the same background, and that keeps us down to earth, I suppose. We feel very lucky that we can travel the world, get on stage and have success with that."