The lady vanishes

We’d never met in the formal roles of interviewer and interviewee before, although we’d spoken, sometimes tipsily and at length, a handful of times at various envelope openings in nocturnal Dublin. Behind the rather neutral public persona, she could be a primary school arts teacher with a curiosity for the dark stuff. I recall one night after the IRMAs a couple of years ago when the singer discoursed at length about Magnolia, Requiem For A Dream, Irréversible and JT LeRoy – when she wasn’t soliciting opinions on Fellini films. Not the kind of references usually associated with The Corrs, but then, her siblings also exhibit a wry sensibility that often gets lost in the PR process.
Our latest meeting, in a suite in the Morrison hotel, is occasioned by the release of the singer’s debut solo album Ten Feet High. For reasons stated above, I half expected the record, executive-produced by Bono and Gavin Friday, to reference everything from Hans Christian Anderson gothic folk to gin-soaked Weimar torch songs. The reality is somewhat different. With the aid of producer Nellee Hooper (Bjork, Massive Attack) Corr has rejected expectations of soporific soft rock, taken a sheaf of songs composed at the piano in her conservatory, and decked them out in an eclectic selection of outfits, ranging from Bacharach pop (‘24 Hours’) to chamber folk (‘Ideal World’, ‘This Is What It’s All About’) to epic melancholia. There’s also a brace of oddities that fall on either side of whimsy (‘I Do’, ‘Champagne From A Straw’), a cover of Squeeze’s ‘Take Me I’m Yours’ that’s a ringer for Orbit-era Madonna, and a Goldfrappucinno electro come-on entitled ‘Hello Boys’. The latter is easily the most audacious move on the album, with Corr playing coquettish brothel madame over a lurid pink synth-pop bump and grind. The effect is akin to Soft Cell showing up in Tom Spanbauer’s bisexual injun fable The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon.
“We have to play,” Andrea says, curling up in her chair. “We have to be children and laugh and pretend and dress up, and that’s really what that song is. Look at Randy Newman, it’s always ironic, I love his lyrics because they’re always hilariously funny, and so cutting, and so, ‘Ouch! That’s so true, and it’s horrifying.’ And I love that in music.”
The Hewson half of her executive production team once remarked that fame gave him some inkling of what a beautiful woman feels like when she walks in a room and gets stared at.
“But that’s performance as well,” Andrea observes.
So she performs offstage on occasion too?
“Haven’t you seen me?!! (laughs) No, I don’t think so. That song is obviously fantasy driven, and I suppose it’s linked to loving theatre and spectacle in a way, in that you’ve created a character you can try on, but you don’t need to be responsible for her behaviour. There’s freedom there. I can try it on and it’s depraved, but I’m not going to say sorry about it. But obviously there is a kind of kick you get out of it. And there is a link between performing, exposing yourself, your words, your soul… that’s sales. And that’s what the madame of a brothel is engaged in, sales. You know what I mean?”
I do, but I’m not her A&R department. As Andrea admits, when she submitted the record to her label, a couple of the tunes caused a little latte spillage on Armani.
“There was, to say the least, nervousness,” she says. “And I remember being in the situation of trying to prove why one of my songs is great, and it’s the last time I’ll do it. This man wanted me to go Norah Jones or Karen Carpenter or, I dunno, to sleep. He wanted me to go to sleep and make a record of sleep sounds or something as far as I’m concerned. And this was not what I presented to him.”
Presumably the support of messrs Hewson and Friday emboldened her to some degree?
“Well, they were there before I made the record. I’d play the songs to them in my house on the piano. Their belief in the songs definitely gave me the courage to go and make this record, because I had to be brave being on my own. It was very comfortable within The Corrs, and whether people like it or hate it, it was very successful. And also, we were honest about what we were doing too, so you were going to bed with no demons. That’s a good life. So I certainly needed (to hear), ‘Go on go for it, it’s good what you’re doing.’ Especially from two people who were not only great friends but obviously deserve the height of respect artistically. That definitely emboldened me. I don’t love questioning myself, to be honest. I’m very Irish in the way that self-analysis gives me the chills.”
Freud famously said we’re the only race impervious to psychoanalysis.
“Really? I believe that. I’m fine with other people going for it, but I’m really quite allergic to it. So when I write something, I don’t sit down and know what I’m going to write about, I certainly don’t think I’m going to write about conscription and war or go, ‘I’m gonna write a love song’. It happens, and so generally by virtue of writing I find out what is upsetting me, but I kinda leave it there. I don’t go, ‘Why is that?’ I wrote quite a lot of the songs without knowing I was going to do a solo record, so…you’re just being honest, you know what I mean? You’re doing it because you have to write.”
Canongate boss Jamie Byng quoted WH Auden at me in a recent interview: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”
“That’s absolutely it.”
So what was she reading while the record was in the process of gestation?
“Seabastian Faulks’ Birdsong led to the single, ‘Shame On You’. Lorca’s Blood Wedding influenced ‘This Is What It’s All About’, there’s a scene within that play where the maid is talking about the marriage bed, I love it, that’s basically the whole breath on the neck kind of thing.”
“All that has black sounds has duende,” Lorca wrote. Has she read his lectures on music?
“Like ‘Deep Song’ and ‘Theory And Play Of The Duende’? Yeah. That’s what it’s all about, the glimpse of happiness, as a musician and a performer, one duende> moment in a lifetime could keep you doing it forever. It’s like a hit, duende in art, the same with writing, but particularly in performing. I’m crazy about Lorca, you’ve opened a box here. That’s what drives me. I’m not about perfect pitch or money notes, it’s all about truth and, ‘God, that hurts.’ Like listening to Nina Simone. You’re hearing her essence, and it’s painful.
“Singing’s so strange,” she continues, “the idea that we as creatures and animals sing. As a woman I obviously love women’s singing, but there’s something about a grown man singing that’s like: ‘He’s singing.’ You know what I mean? It’s boyish or something, it’s childlike, especially if a man sings falsetto. The idea of the big man, caveman, breadwinner – which still is there regardless of embracing femininity or not, there’s obviously an awful lot of pressure, more men commit suicide than women – so the idea of being vulnerable and singing like that is just very beautiful to me.”
Speaking of vulnerability, Andrea once mentioned how much she admired Monica Bellucci’s performance in Irréversible. That’s a pretty hardcore film.
“Yeah. Very tough, I found that very difficult to watch though. At a certain point I had to walk out, and I did walk out. I couldn’t watch the rape scene in that tunnel, it was just so horrific. Certain things stain your retina, and I don’t ask for it, but once it’s done it’s done, so you’ve got to try and in some way come to terms with it, because in art there’s always going to be things you look at that are harrowing and that you really are going, ‘Did I need to see that? Am I different from now on? Am I sullied?’ Because part of the way you exist in life is very much, I feel, based on your belief in humankind, so these kind of films…very dark. You’re watching films about the devil in action. And if I want to believe people are beautiful…but I suppose the thing is we’ve got to be moved.”
And it’s much harder to convey joy in a piece of art.
“Well then there’s Life Is Beautiful, which to me is so heartbreakingly beautiful, and at the same time obviously documented a horrific time, but basically this father’s love for his boy within the worst of situations, that’s a very, very beautiful story.”
One of the major influences on the songs from Ten Feet High, Andrea says, was the house they were written in, particularly the quality of the light.
“Beautiful light,” she says. “It’s my haven, and I don’t mean that in an arch way, it’s a very simple little doll house, I love it. But you know, when those doors close, that’s real truth isn’t it? For everybody. But particularly if you’re a person that’s out in the public eye, you cling to it. And also I feel, obviously I travel around a lot, but if ever I’m upset I want to go home to Ireland, down to Dundalk to Daddy, but also back to my house.”

Bringing it all back home. This listener always figured The Corrs were at their best when they sounded most like the sum of their personalities, before their songs were made over by whatever producer they’d hired to apply a radio-friendly polish. Their most affecting music has been induced by roots surgeons like Mitchell Froom. Contrast the difference between the live version of ‘Radio’ with the In Blue studio recording. The former has an abundance of feel and mood, the latter is a somewhat sterile attempt to improve on something they’d already captured. For me, the Unplugged record came closest to transmitting the melancholic essence of their melodies.
“MTV Unplugged, yeah I’m particularly proud of that one,” Andrea says. “It’s the one I’d like to listen to. We were very vulnerable as well when we made that record, our mother was sick. And I think that’s part of its magic in a way, as much as it was horrible for us. She was round the corner in the Beaumont Hospital when we recorded that, and it was the very first thing she didn’t come to see.”
So her absence was present.
“Very much so.”
How much of Ten Feet High was informed by that absence of her mother and the presence of her father?
“A lot. Particularly ‘Anybody There’, which is really about Daddy in the house that they built, and every tree they planted, after she had died. And the monotony of life, existing, not living. The deadness of it. And obviously (in the song) she visits him and tells him to move on, that life is beautiful, you’ve got to share it with somebody, it’s short. So obviously she’s now become a spirit in my albums that visits, and he’s here.”
As Roy Orbison sang in arguably the greatest pop opera ever written, “In dreams I walk with you.” Many people suffering bereavement experience remarkably vivid dreams in which they’re visited by their departed loved ones…
“They’re incredible, aren’t they? That’s an incredible thing. There was one dream I had about her one time, and she was back and we were at the dinner table and she was sitting there talking, and I’m crying and crying because she’s dead. Just guttural crying. She’s not back, but she is there, a weird dream. And she goes, ‘Look Andrea, it’s okay, stop crying, it’s okay.’ And mad as that sounds, that was huge to me, I still remember that dream and I kind of feel it was real in a way: ‘It’s time to stop crying now, I’m okay’. But in the most lovely way.”
The quality of those dreams is markedly different from the usual Jungian jumble. I’m not a particularly airy-fairy person…
“Neither am I.”
…but whether you consider them visitations from spirits entering the ether of the subconscious, or the mind’s attempt to construct a realistic simulacrum of a loved one from accumulated memories in order to heal itself of grief, the end result is the same. It doesn’t matter how you rationalise them.
“It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter that, y’know, both of us feel it necessary to say that we’re not airy-fairy. But airy-fairy or not, it is what it is to us. Whether you’re trying to cover up the scarring, or trying to heal yourself, if it is that type of thing, subconsciously through your dream you’re trying to get yourself over this, as it’s human nature to go on like we do, we don’t know and we don’t care.”
Consequently, ‘Anybody There’, plus the paean to self-sabotage ‘Stupidest Girl In The World’ and the death-of-love song ‘Ten Feet High’, are easily the best things Andrea Corr has ever done, and the most emotionally charged songs on the album. Sometimes when pop does heartbreak – The Ronettes’ ‘Walking In The Rain’, Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ – the emotional impact is as hardcore as Husker Du. That melodic ache seems to constitute the spine of Ten Feet High.
“Well, you know yourself, as you get older, you’re more accepting of your vulnerability. I mean, through your 20s you’re fighting it so hard, and then I think when you get to 30 you’re kind of going, ‘Okay, this is just it, I suppose I shouldn’t be fighting that and just accept it and write about it.’ Because really good music to me is about all the lonely people, we’re all interdependant and all so incredibly human, that’s what’s gonna resonate.”
Can she listen to these songs comfortably?
“Yes I can, because working on them in the studio you’ve heard them a lot, so you get less sensitive. ‘Ten Feet High’ I found very hard recording it, and also we did the orchestration, which was so beautiful, in Abbey Road. And it was the last song we recorded I think, so that was particularly emotional. But, as you said, does it take you to go that far in honesty and exposing vulnerability to do the best thing you’ve ever done? Maybe it does.”
Well, if you’re going to go through the end of an affair, you might as well get a song out of it as compensation.
“I know, at least there’s that. And the thing about love… It’s just really crap when love stops. I think it’s nearly easier with something to blame, but it’s just sad when things run their course. It’s incredibly sad loving somebody but having to say goodbye to them because it’s over, and having to accept it’s over. It’s probably the hardest thing.”
So what makes it stop? Neglect? Age? A chemical change in the body?
“Well, I suppose this is idealistic, but I think certain things have a lifespan of a certain time, some things are intense, some things are more chilled but last longer. I think – and this is obviously as a single person at 33 – I still believe in love and it takes an awful lot for a relationship to endure. I say single as ‘unmarried’. I take marriage as the ultimate plunge, and I haven’t done that yet, that’s why I say single.
“But sometimes it takes even more than love. Hopefully we will all find that, there will be one where it won’t stop, or at least it won’t stop for you both at the same time. Somebody said an amazing thing about love, I forget who it was, but they’d been married for so many years, it was not Elizabeth Taylor, it was an incredible marriage. And the answer to the question of how it lasted so long was, ‘We never fell out of love with each other at the same time.’ Which is really interesting. One carries the other.
“And the power struggle aspect is interesting. Sometimes somebody can know you too well, I think, if you’ve got your own pain, and you don’t like your reflection because you can see it in their eyes, and I think that can cause the demise of a lot of relationships. The person really wants to be somebody else and they can’t do it with you because you are the mirror.”
It’s the old joke about the guy at the bar bemoaning, “My wife understands me.”
“Yeah, she knows the truth. I think that’s probably why a lot of things fail, probably the biggest thing to accept and go through, although that can be a consolation too I think. We all want to think better of ourselves in some way, we don’t want to be reminded of our shortcomings. That’s why people start again, start again, start again. I think.”
Well, there are no saints in a marriage. The messy stuff of love renders us all too mortal.
“Very mortal. And very fallible.”
It ain’t nice.
“And then it is sometimes. The glimpses of happiness, that’s what it’s all about.”b

Ten Feet High is out now on Warners.