‘My life, I smash it all to pieces’ Andrea Corr by Barry Egan for independent ireland
‘My life, I smash it all to pieces’
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She may have wealth, beauty and fame, but like all of us, Andrea Corr knows the pain and despair of loss. Unlike the rest of us, however, the Dundalk diva makes beautiful music out of her grief. The raven-haired chanteuse talks to Barry Egan about her music and her life
ANDREA Corr’s South Dublin home, like the owner, is small and beautiful in equal measure. It could pass for a doll’s house. “The most beautiful light”, she says, floods into every room.
In the living-room, a Ronnie Wood painting of Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald hangs on the wall. A piano dominates the conservatory. It is at this very piano that Andrea wrote all the songs on Ten Feet High, her debut solo album.
One song is perhaps the touchstone of the record, executive-produced by her close friends and confidantes, Bono and Gavin Friday. “My life, just when it’s going well, I smash it all to pieces,” she melancholises like a Gaelic Bessie Smith on The Stupidest Girl In The World, a song she wrote three years ago. “It is what everybody does,” the vibrant young chanteuse ventures an explanation.
Self-destruction?
“Kind of,” she hesitates. “As soon as things are smooth, you do something to mess it up yourself.”
Is that a fear of a relationship not working so you destroy it?
“I don’t know because I don’t analyse it too much,” she says, playing with her famous raven hair, “but I think everybody has ended up in situations where they’ve thought, ‘Jesus, how am I possibly back here again?’ As soon as you’ve got complacent or nonchalant about something, you’ve actually messed it all up.
“You end up in something that’s not good for you but you keep ending up back there.” She adds, when I press her on it, that there is “always something specific. It is a personal thing at the time, obviously.”
Do your sisters ever say to you — as sisters do — “You should have stayed with him?”
“No, it’s more like,” she laughs, “‘You should never have been with him.’”
“The Stupidest Girl In The World is about putting yourself back in a situation that is not good for you. Everybody has their patterns. We have to try and learn and evolve, I think. That’s called maturing. Do I think I have? I hope I’m always learning [bit] I’m certainly not finished”
What’s your pattern, Andrea Corr?
“God!” she shrieks as if I’ve asked what’s she like in bed. I protest that she has put her soul into this record’s lyrics and surely that the singer and the song are one and the same. Writing and music is, she says, an insight into your own character, but “often the way I have put it within the songs is the only way. I have put it in a concise way and if I have said it that way, that is all I have wanted to say. I didn’t write sleeve notes. It is like a poem. It is all I have wanted to say.”
If I was interviewing Sylvia Plath, I tell Andrea, I would ask her why she wrote The Bell Jar in the same way I am asking her why she wrote The Stupidest Girl In The World.
“Often I learn more about myself than people do. Maybe it is just the human condition. Maybe we are all . . . you know,” she laughs, “f****d”.
Her high spirits and humour are contagious. Then, they always were. I remember meeting her and Guggi and Bono in Lillie’s Bordello one drunken night last summer.
The alcohol creating a haze around us, I vaguely recall swinging her around the dance floor and kicking her in the arse to the music. It was reciprocated — as Gugs and Bono refused to go gently into that good night beside us. It was a grand performance by one of our national treasures.
Andrea Jane Corr was seven years of age when she gave her first public performance: in a school production of The Princess . Naturally, she got the part of the princess. In rehearsal, Andrea's teacher, Elizabeth O'Donoghue, took her aside because the little girl who would one day be one of the biggest stars in global pop was scared.
“She told me I could do it and I did it,” she recalls. She remembers the first time she ever heard singing. It was also the first time her mother Jean sang on stage. She was pregnant with the baby that would be born on May 17, 1974. “I was in there just listening,” Andrea says.
Religious in her own way, Andrea believes her mother is guarding her and looking after her, all these years after her death. “I feel she is watching over me.” After the interview she is driving up to Dundalk to see her father, Gerry.
The journey up to Co Louth should be an eventful one as she drives her Mercedes SLK 200 fast, with the music blaring out the windows. Her car has a device where the music decreases in volume when you slow down at the lights. Andrea would, she warns, be racing to get through the lights because it could go quiet on a “favourite bit of the song”, usually something by Fionn Regan.
As for when, or if, we will hear something new by the Corrs, she says her sisters Sharon and Caroline just needed to take time out to raise their babies. “No one said this is the end of the Corrs. If we feel inspired enough to make another record, or a tour, I’m sure we will.”
I tease her that she must be sitting up late at night going: when is it going to happen to me? Indeed on Anybody There she sings: “Could there be anybody there to love me, to hold me?” But seriously, is it difficult emotionally for you when your sisters get married and have babies and you don’t? “Yes, especially when they’re marrying the men I want to marry,” she laughs. “But no, I think it is like every family. They go: ‘Oh, you’re next.’ I see having children as the most amazing thing. Please God, I will do in my life. I have my own path. Just because we’re sisters never means we have the same path.”
Last year she broke up with her long-term (ish) boyfriend, actor Shaun Evans. “I don’t look back and think, ‘Oh God, I wasted four years.’ I do have faith. I would not step into marriage lightly. I am not married by my own choice, not because no one wanted to marry me. There is a song on the album about marriage, funnily enough, called I Do.” She laughs, before adding, with another laugh, “And no, I don’t sit up in the middle of the night going, ‘When will it happen to me?’”
Ask her to explain the lyrical concerns of the unflinchingly personal This Is What It’s All About, and she asks instead for you to read Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca's play Blood Wedding — a tale of a young bride who runs away with a previous lover, and is then killed by her husband.
“That song is about that moment between when you’re not quite awake in the morning but you’re lying beside the person you love and you’re just lingering there,” she says. “And that’s just the most beautiful thing. And their breath on your neck.”
I ask her does she miss that breathy intimacy with Shaun Evans. “Oh please,” the kohl-eyed singer visibly recoils. “That is the most personal question I have been asked.”
In a way, these are Andrea Corr’s most personal and revealing lyrics ever, her Blood On The Tracks.
The song Ten Feet High (the title song of the album that is possibly the best record released this year by any woman who isn’t Amy Winehouse) is about breaking up with Shaun. Andrea is not one for half measures.
“When [we] did make each other feel ten feet high, then suddenly you were claustrophobic within it and it was like, ten-feet-high walls around us. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you’re imprisoned. And it is not him doing it. He’s in prison too. It’s when you’re not inspiring each other anymore. It’s the really sad point of a relationship when you still love each other but it is over; but you have to admit it’s over. And you can’t blame the person. It would be easier if you could go ‘You did this’ or they could go ‘You did that’. It is almost sadder when a relationship ends when there is no blame. It ran its course.”
Sexy, radical and nocturnal — courtesy of the album’s main producer, the legendary Nellee Hooper — the song Hello Boys is about as different from the Corrs as Andrea could get without walking down Grafton Street naked except for Prada kitten heels, with a jaguar (and Gavin Friday) on a leash. “It made people nervous that I didn’t go Norah Jones or Karen Carpenter,” she says. “I would not have bothered making a record if I wasn’t going to be brave about it.”
Bono is executive producer on the album as is Gavin Friday, she says, “because, as you know, they are my friends. I am so lucky with them. As I wrote the songs I would play them to Gavin and Bono and they were so supportive. And, between the three of us, we said we needed to get Nellee Hopper to produce this,” Andrea says, referring to the Bristol-born genius who has produced everyone from Madonna to Massive Attack.
“So, Bono rang Nellee and said: ‘My friend has written what I think are great songs. You could make a great record.’ Bono set up that meeting, which I probably would not have got.”
Bono and Gavin, she adds, were crucial to her for the project. “Their belief in me and everything I did and the songs I wrote — I want to be worthy of that belief. They are two people that I massively respect and, obviously, great friends to support and encourage me in that way. I want to do right by them.”
If anything is going to liberate Andrea from being yer wan in the Corrs, it is tracks like Champagne From A Straw. It is about a girl who “looks like it she did everything right. On the surface she has got everything: the rich famous husband; all the clothes; the silly dog in the bag. In reality, she is desperately alone, half drunk in the afternoon and her husband is having an affair.”
Is it anyone we know?
“I could not presume to know that that’s anybody I know. It is a fictional character, obviously, but I take excerpts of certain things I see in celebrity magazines.”
And would you put up with it for the sake of your children, if your husband was being unfaithful?
“I couldn’t judge it. I’m not in it. Like a lot of relationships can become partnerships, and that can be as good as anything. So I’m not at that point in my life. I hope . . . I do believe in love and I do believe in fidelity and I hope that I achieve that some day if I do get married. It is not my dream, but I certainly am not going to judge people dealing with that.”
One thing she has to deal with is moi asking about her new fella, Brett Desmond. The fact that Brett, by a quirk of fate, just so happens to be Dermot Desmond’s son has thrown the tabloids into a feeding frenzy. Not least after they showed up at Robbie Fox’s 50th birthday soiree in February together. “There was nothing to hide. It is inevitable. We are doing nothing wrong. We were both unattached,” she says, adding that “I thought you didn’t know [about Brett], because you were asking so much about Shaun.”
Did your sisters give you any advice when you started seeing Brett? Take it slow?
“No. Pardon the wave of nausea you are feeling, but we are great friends and each of us just wants to see the others happy.”
What’s Brett like? (I’ve heard he’s one of the good guys, like his old man.)
“That’s a great one. Not ‘What size are his shoes?’ but ‘What’s he like?’ It is a huge question. What is anybody like? I cannot put in an answer that’s going in a newspaper what he is like. My perception of him is private. What did I think when I first met him? I have known him years but I didn’t really know him actually. He hung out with Jim.”
Give me some adjectives, please, Ms Corr.
“I’m not actually giving you any adjectives to describe him, because I’m not going to put him into one thing: ‘The Funny Guy’ or ‘The Something Guy’. He is a lot of things.”
She won’t answer my questions, so I punish her by asking the grand fromage of cheesy questions. Do you think he could be The One?
“I am not even telling him that, never mind telling a newspaper or myself that. But,” and here she roars with laughter, “I am waking up in the middle of the night going: ‘Is this it? This is it! At last! It’s finally happening to me!’”
Andrea Corr’s new album Ten Feet High is out now
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