Andrea Corr

Andrea Corr: Yes. I think every album has different strains and that probably was the particular strain. Yet ironically with that the greatest joy of it, too. The album started without us really knowing it. John said there s this movie looking for a song . And I said me and Caroline wrote this song the other day and I played it immediately on the piano to him. And he said let s go into the studio and record it . That s how the album started. Production-wise we started by Caroline playing the piano, I d sing into a little mike and we d build around it. Then every time somebody wrote a song we d go into the studio and do that same thing. There was great magic in that. And we d great fun. It was very liberating no quests for hits, that kind of ludicrous stuff that bands have to deal with these days. Ours was a haven without that. It was just music-making.
Presumably, it wasn t idyllic all the way?
It did get quite hairy when we had everything brought up to a level where we felt it was as good as we could get it. We listened and we got cold feet. Because producers exist for a reason. We got scared because we thought we might have written the best songs of our lives, yet they mightn t sound like the best songs of our lives because of us trying our hands at producing them. So at the end we got in Mitchell Froom and said We re doubting ourselves here. Will you come in and clean it and do some scrubbing here? . So he did.
Is there rivalry between the different guys in the band in terms of getting songs on a record?
No. Of course, you love your song, but at the end of the day there s a sound to a record and it s almost like blind faith, because you just know if it fits with what makes a complete, great album that has every element you want in there. You d know if your song wasn t as good or didn t fit.
Is there a song on In Blue that you re particularly proud of?
There s something very frightening to me about writing because it is purely an inspiration. Sometimes it s happening and only I realise halfway through the verse what I m writing about. In that way it really is your gut coming out. It s the core of it. It s the absolute essence of your emotions. So I m proud of No More Cry . It s exactly what I felt after Mum s death. I m proud of them all though. I m proud of One Night . I really love that. I think it s a beautiful song that myself and Caroline wrote. Hurt Before . And Somebody For Someone which we wrote as well. I know that even in the best of bands, people look back on lyrics they re embarrassed about. And I certainly have them. But on this album, I don t think I have. Words are such an inadequate form of expression but along with music, they re magic. That s when it s almost like a scream. When the marriage of that happens it s really special. I really like All In A Day as well. It is about adolescence.
Were you a bit of a wild one in your adolescence?
To be honest I was, but I was very lucky in my positioning in the family. Because their wildness was looked at, but when it came to me, my parents were jaded with antics from the family, so I got away with an awful lot. I did work at school, and I did very well. But I had a great time also. I think Mummy and Daddy knew that I would take care of business. I wasn t being a bad girl.
Only half bad!
Only being naughty.
What was the baddest thing you did at that stage in your life?
I can t say because those things are very personal. There is one but I had to make that mistake and I don t want to talk about it because the family will read it. But I drank long before I was supposed to. That was fun. But we ve all been wild. Jim was very wild. We all had our moments. My hair was just wilder, I think. (laughs)
You went from school into the band. Do you ever regret that?
We started the band when we auditioned for The Commitments. I was 15 then. And then we started to write and record and we d do that at night while I was at school. I could have gone to university, but when I got my Leaving Cert results because the band was what I was doing, there was nothing to celebrate other than you did very, very well . But I never had that moving-out-of-home stage. I never had a life on my own. I moved with the band. It s only in the last year that I ve lived on my own. It would always have been music or drama or English for me. But I do think I missed that college time, moving out of your home and everything like that. Having said that I am aware that I have had a lot more of a dramatic education in this very weird world we live in, than I would have had elsewhere.
Is the fact that it is weird hard to deal with?
Everybody gets used to the situation they re in. And I m such a lucky person to be able to do this around the world, to sing to all these people who love our music, and to really feel it. Never to be dishonest in your music is a very gratifying thing. God knows why I got a chance to express my feelings. Everybody s got feelings. But I did and it s a very privileged situation to be in. But there s the other side that I m part of a family that are always together. I m 26 and I m still the baby.
That s an interesting and different thing about this group.
We often go Jesus, we re nuts aren t we? Is there something wrong with us? Is everybody else seeing the picture of this odd thing and we re not seeing it because we re engulfed in it? . But our magic is us, together, as musicians and we ve great strength together. We have strength to be able to deal with almost every situation. I found watching the Williams sisters playing tennis quite an insight into what we might look like.
Do you fight in a particular way?
I can be so defensive. All of us take our turns. We do fight. But we have great fun as well. We have learned through everything and particularly through the experience that happened last year, when our mother died, to really respect each other as individuals. We actually have a good time together now, but the first years were very hard. Forgiven Not Forgotten was released, all of a sudden we were constantly out on the road, doing promotions, soul-destroying tours, and, you know, we ve always been pushing our own trolley. And we still are. It does not come easy to us. We get blessed with a package of, Hey listen if David Foster produces your album it s goin to be Yeees! ," but no, we push that flippin trolley wherever we go, doing it our own way! All the plans that the record company d come up with like put this package together, it s gonna be it it never works. So now we re in a brilliant situation, where they leave it to us, because that s what works best. And, that s a good thing really, because it is actually defying the manufacturing, marketing, saturation thing that s happening at the moment, especially in pop music.
What was the low point in promoting that first album?
The thing is, the low point in retrospect is actually the high point, because if we hadda made it in America with Forgiven Not Forgotten, I don t think we d be together now. We wouldn t have been grown up enough or I certainly wouldn t have been grown up enough to deal with it. Mentally we wouldn t have felt worthy of it. And I think you meet musicians, or people in show business who have an attitude, who are egotistical, in your face an awful lot of it has to do with not feeling worthy. It happened too quickly, they didn t have to work enough for it, and so they don t feel they deserve it. And so they re going round everywhere going Fuck you! I deserve it , and I m awesome and inside they feel I m not worthy . So I think that we woulda lost it, you know.
In Ireland there was this myth that The Corrs were a manufactured group.
How do you manufacture a family? Does somebody get into the lab with some test tubes, and say I hope she plays the violin, and he plays the piano ? Everything that we do is honest. Everything I sing, and everything the band plays, is honest. It s us. It s not somebody else. It s not manufactured. What does it matter if people say that? Just listen to music.
At the same time, it must hurt.
I tell you it would hurt if it were true. If I knew deep down it was true, then I d be going Mmmm , you know. And sometimes things hurt if they are said about the others in the band, or if it would affect our parents. And sometimes I get hurt for the fact that I know how much we ve worked; I know how much Sharon and Caroline and Jim have worked, and I look at them, and I go how dare some journalist say that about people who have worked so hard!?!
You were quoted somewhere as saying you d give it all up for love.
That s complete crap. We fought that. We fought so many of them, you know. But that s not true. It s absolute pathetic. What would I be doing this for if that was the way I felt? God, what a pathetic character they sometimes portray.
There must be a point where you feel some kind of despair about the way in which the media operates.
It s the nature of it. There s been so much nonsense written about me that anybody with an ounce of intelligence would actually have deduced it s gotta be crap. But you know, I really don t mind. My friends get on the phone and they laugh, you know, and I get on with it. (laughs) A very, very funny thing happened, I was lying on my bed, and I have this skylight above my bed, and it was one of those special mornings, and all the windows were opened, and it was so beautiful, and I was just lying there, and the phone rings, and the answering machine was on, right. And it s my best friend, and she goes "Andrea, Andrea, pick up the phone!" And so I run downstairs and pick up the phone, and she says "Did you see The Sun?", and I said, "Yes, it s so beautiful." (laughs)
And the moral of that story is, once I know my friends and the people that care about me and love me know me and once I know deep in my heart when I go to bed at night what type of person I am then I m OK with that.
So tell me about working with Mutt Lange? Were you intimidated?
Yes, well, you see, we d met, and he really liked our music. And he suggested we might try and and write a song together. And so I went to Switzerland, and we wrote Breathless . And I remember the night I got in, he is such a gentle, lovely, lovely man but I just wanted to go to my room. Because, as I was telling you before, I don t know if I can write a song until it happens. And so I m kinda feeling empty, going what s going to happen here? Is it going to happen? Will I be remotely inspired by his chords, you know. I mightn t be! I don t know if I was as open as I probably should be but then you ve got to do what s natural to you.
How did the song come to you?
Well I had barely arrived when he started to play the chords, right. He s a serious worker and he wanted to get straight down to it! He was going you want to do this now? And I was going Think! , you know. And I m just petrified, I can t hear music, I m wondering, does he expect me to start going (sings) "Yeah!"? I m not that confident. I like to go away and write on my own, to be honest, rather than sit with a stranger, who is so confident. I felt very self-conscious and very shy. So he let me go to bed. "Maybe we ll start in the morning, OK?" And I went to bed thinking what am I doing here? Then the next day luckily, the sun came out, it was a lovely day, and we started again, and he hit the chords and he was humming melodies and stuff like that. Usually I let somebody do the chords and I would write the melody and lyrics, but he wrote the melody of Breathless . Then I changed it around. It was just an odd way for me to work. I don t want to ruin people s feelings for songs, though. It sounds kinda contrived, but people write that way.
Tell me where you ll be in 10 years time?
I don t know. I m a woman, so there is kinda of an obvious route. But it won t be obvious, I don t think anything s ever been obvious with me. But I ll probably have quite a different existence still. Cause I think this lifestyle has made me a little more bohemian than the average or what I would have been, if I hadda been just living in Dundalk. So I don t think I ll be able to be curtailed. I need somebody very liberated. Now I don t mean on a fidelity level, I completely believe in that. I suppose there s marriage and kids, but I ll still be doing something artistic. But I don t know. So many people end up on paths they never had an idea they d be on, you know. In10 years time, I ll be 36 I ll probably still be writing. I won t be performing, as in singing. Maybe I ll act, but only if I was good, because I despise the idea of singer-turned-actress I think it s an insult to people who learn it. At the same time I would like to scratch somebody else s feelings as well as my own. Getting up on stage takes so much out of me because I m expressing me, right? Expressing somebody else s thoughts would be so liberating, like climbing into somebody else s body and going through their emotions. I would like to do that. But who knows?
Might you stick with the life, because it s addictive?
Maybe. But I think the life takes an awful lot out of women, moreso than it does with men. I know that it takes an awful lot out of me. And so I should probably be chilling out a bit more, as an individual, and doing different things at that stage, maybe just writing and recording albums. If there are still songs in us to sing, we more than likely will. And writing, and having them sung by other people. But it s so intense, so intense. I don t know. I ve done this for 10 years. Another 10 years? I feel a little abnormal already, but another 10 years on? I don t know if I could do it.
What s the summit of your ambition then?
The summit of my ambition? I very much look to today, to be honest. And I certainly know now that I m not immortal, so I might as well just live for today. Every day has something very special to offer, and in that way, life is so wonderful and magic. Once your heart is open, you ll go along the right path. You ll have opportunities that you fall into naturally because you didn t do them selfishly, you did it because it felt right. I really believe I live for today.
A quick couple of other
I d like to have babies, that s for sure. I really don t want to go through my life without fulfilling that potential. It s probably not the summit of my ambition, it s not a tabloid thing, "Andrea Wants To Have Babies!!" But as a woman, and given that we re more developed than other animals, that s one thing I have to fulfil. A woman s body is set in a way that s absolutely miraculous, and I have to find out about it. And then, the combination of the brain and the heart and the body is just I ve got to explore that. I ve got to do that. At some stage.
How do you respond to being selected as the most beautiful woman in the world?
It s very flattering. It was nice when I heard about it because I felt so horrible that day. Because often you feel horrible, it s the most ridiculous thing. I don t see it myself that way, not at all, but I think it s very nice that it was said.
OK. Ridiculous last question. What do you cook for yourself, or if you re having people around for dinner?
I just got a new kitchen that s so beautiful. So I did loads of stuff, the week that I had off. I had dinner parties practically every night, like I had to christen the home with a roast chicken, try and do it like mammy did. And I cook sea bass really well. That d be my favourite.
Give us the recipe.
The recipe! (laughs) I do the sea bass whole. I like to include the head and tail, I m not squeamish at all, I just love it. It s probably not loving it in people s minds if I m eating it but there you go! You put olive oil on the bottom of the dish. Put the whole sea bass in, just score it along, put more olive oil over it and season with salt & pepper. It s really simple. For a change you can stuff some garlic or chillies inside the fish. Maybe put a whole bulb of garlic beside it. Cut the top off the garlic and pour olive oil on it and roast that. And then what do I do with that? I do these great roast potatoes, so they can be done at the same time only they go in earlier. Potatoes, which are peeled, olive oil, salt & pepper, thyme and loads of pepper, I love black pepper. Vegetables? I d probably do fennel with the fish but I do this great stir-fry my mother used to do this as well. So if I was doing the roast chicken, stir-fried cabbage with cumin is fantastic.