‘Fam was li
T ISN’T every day that the most beautiful woman in the world rings you at home. Andrea Corr received that unsettling accolade at the height of The Corrs’ success, when the much-loved Irish family band bombarded the charts with hit after Top 10 hit. With her deep brown eyes, elfin face and perfect cheekbones, the raven-haired singer turned heads quicker than Regan on The Exorcist. But she has always hated that tag.
“I was shocked by it,” she tells me. “I certainly wasn’t feeling like it deep down. I knew the people saying it hadn’t really seen me.”
Andrea found fame “a bit overwhelming, because of the aesthetics of it; people focused on what you look like and that’s not healthy. It felt like everywhere there were mirrors, it made me feel self-conscious”.
She adds: “God knows what it’s like now. We were lucky we were before social media.”
She was marketed as part-waif, part-siren. “I was very shy about that exposure. The music was the point.”
Andrea, 46, laughs easily – not least when she mishears my question about her late parents. I’d asked if they were strict. “What?” she says, appalled, adding with a chuckle. “Ah, strict! I thought you said stripped. That’s a totally different answer.
“My parents were quite strict but I got away with a lot because I was the baby.”
Family memories flooded back when
Andrea recorded her poignant new Christmas Songs EP. O Holy Night pushed her over the edge. “I used to sing it with my dad when I was younger,” she explains. “He played the organ at mass in church and when I was eight, he asked me to sing it at the Christmas Eve service.
“I practised and practised, but when the day came, I was crying with nerves. I couldn’t do it.” Andrea’s electrician father, Gerry, died five years ago. Her mother Jean died in 1999 aged 57.
Home was in Dundalk, an industrial town in Louth, southern Ireland. Her parents’ band, The Sound Affair, performed all over the county. “I saw them play a couple of times,” she says. “They did covers and they were really good, but as a child I was more interested in the peanuts and crisps.”
Family Christmases were always special. “My parents were on a budget but as far as we children were concerned it was perfect. We didn’t go without.
“Mum would cook – the whole house smelt of baking. She was so busy. She really made the Christmas spirit.”
The four siblings – Andrea, her elder sisters Sharon and Caroline, and their brother Jim – formed The Corrs in 1990 when she was 15, the same year that she filmed her part in The Commitments.
Nine years later they were playing to 45,000 people in Dublin’s Lansdowne Road stadium.
The Corrs’ fusion of Celtic folk and melodic pop had universal appeal. They had the bestselling album of 1998, and a string of global hits including Dreams, Runaway and the charttopping Breathless featuring Andrea’s sultry mini-yodel.
By the time they hit the pause button on their career in 2006, they had sold more than 30 millio albums – that figure has topped 40 mill since – and been appointed MBES for t charity work.
“It was a whirlwind,” says Andrea. “W you’re in it it’s hard to see anything. It’s a speeding train. Looking back now it w extraordinary… just non-stop amazing experiences. A bit crazy but none of the anecdotes are printable.”
At one point they played four contine three weeks. They toured America with Rolling Stones and U2 – Bono once said Corrs “could drink Oasis under the tabl
Yet despite – or maybe because of – t Andrea’s most vivid on-the-road memo the front windscreen of their tour bus g smothered in mating flies.
“We couldn’t see out of the front; the windscreen was covered with flies – it was the time they mate,” she says. “They mate and then they die happy.”
Now living in Dublin, after stints in London and Washington DC, she published her unorthodox autobiography
Barefoot Pilgrimage last year. It wove fragments of writing together with memories, lyrics and poetry – both her own and her father’s.
The book covers a lot of grief, including the tragic death of her threeyear-old brother Gerald
before she was born, and the traumatic five-miscarriage ordeal she suffered after marrying businessman Brett Desmond, son of Irish billionaire Dermot. She is now a happy mother of two – Jean, eight, and Brett Jr, six.
I wondered if she’d left much out. “I did,” she says. “I despair of the lack of dignity in the culture today. It wasn’t a ‘tell-all’ it was the antithesis of a tell-all. I said all I wanted to say.”
SO NO mentions of former boyfriends, such as Robbie Williams who famously sent her a note quoting the Corrs song, What Can I Do To Make You Love Me? Andrea replied, “Entertain me...” alluding to his biggest hit. In 2015, the Corrs performed at their father’s funeral and released their life-affirming comeback album White Light, followed in 2017 by Jupiter Calling.
While their career was on hold, they played for Nelson Mandela at a party in Dublin’s Trinity College, and then performed for him twice in South Africa.
Andrea has acted on the side all her life, playing a mistress in Evita, and notching up notable theatre roles including 2010’s Jane Eyre.
She released her debut solo album Ten Feet High in 2007, followed by covers album Lifelines in 2011. She had the idea for the new EP when she performed with a male choir at a Dublin hospice last Christmas. “It was a