How personal trials may set the stage for a Corrs comeback
The famous family have been in the headlines, but not for their music. Dónal Lynch looks at how the siblings have faced up to the challenges of middle age and set the stage for a post-Covid comeback
When Sharon Corr turned fifty on March 24 this year her daughter baked for her, they had a tea party and she chatted online with her brother and sisters. Her marriage had broken down after eighteen years, the city she lived in — Madrid — was in the midst of the first Covid restrictions, and the onstage reunion of the siblings, which had been mentioned by Andrea the previous winter and rumoured by fans for even longer, must have seemed very far away. And yet, through this personal and collective hardship, the instinct to make music persisted for Sharon. In Madrid she left her apartment and passed a man on the street who had a guitar. She sat on the grass and sang with him. “Just two human beings in harmony”, she later said. And, given the circumstances, and the long months to come, it was probably more of a rush than any stadium crowd.
Yet, when the hell of lockdown is over, there probably would be no more fitting group to sound the first note of live music in Ireland than the Corrs. Twenty years after they first appeared the sneering about their safe pop harmonies, trad add-ons, and squeaky clean image has ossified into respect, as an array of artists and groups cite them as influences. Taylor Swift recently put the band’s song ‘Breathless’ at the top of her list of best-ever feminist tracks, and called the Corrs “female professors”. Ed Sheeran has said they inspired ‘Galway Girl’. While once they were the ones doing the covers — notably ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac — now artists like Caroline Polachak cover them and pay tribute to the greatest Irish family act of them all.
While they would be undoubtedly buoyed on a wave of nostalgia on any future gigs, it was thought that their shifting priorities, and the spotlight that Covid has thrown on Jim Corr’s views, might complicate a fully fledged reunion. None of them seem to look back on the fame they enjoyed with particular fondness. Andrea last year told The Guardian that fame “made me more self-conscious and shy. You always want it to last, but I don’t think we could have taken the intensity”.
‘’Sometimes I feel like I’m watching somebody that isn’t me anymore, which it isn’t, I suppose,” she added. “We lived and breathed that life. Now I live and breathe another life.” That life has put her through the ringer somewhat. In her memoir Barefoot Pilgrimage, which was published last year, she revealed that she had suffered several miscarriages either side of having her two children, Jeannie and Brett. She has also spoken of being compared to her sisters, something that Jim, as the boy of the group was spared. Amid scrutiny of how all three sisters are ageing — one concert reviewer speculated that they had consumed some kind of ‘elixir of life’ — who could blame her if she didn’t want to put herself back under that particular microscope?
Caroline Corr, the drummer — once known to fans as ‘the chick with the stick’ — also appears to have entered a different chapter in her life. She lives in a period home in rural Somerset with her teenage children and this past week she publicly confirmed that her marriage to her long-time husband and property developer Frank Woods has ended. She posted a picture of the book, Conscious Uncoupling, 5 Steps To Living Happily Even After and underneath the picture she wrote: ‘This book has been around a long time and I’m certainly not the first or will be the last to mention it… I only started to really understand and like the term conscious uncoupling when going through my own separation some months ago after many, many years of marriage.’ And yet, as with her sister Sharon, personal trauma has not dimmed her desire So young (from top): The Corrs at the 1999 MTV Europe Awareds in Dublin; at the My VH-1 Music Awards in LA in 2000; at the 2004 Meteor Ireland Music Awards in Dublin; and performing at the London Palladium in 2015 to make music. Even in lockdown she has joined with other artists to record a version of ‘Dreams’ by the Cranberries, in aid of SafeIreland, a charity which helps domestic abuse victims.
If Caroline has been a balm for the collective pain of Covid, Jim has been something like salt in the wound. He has long been something of a lightning rod for controversy, endorsing conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks and claiming that climate change is a ‘hoax’, but recently his views on lockdown have propelled him back into the headlines. Jim recently said that he had no regrets about attending an anti-mask rally in Dublin and subsequently got into a Twitter spat with Jedward who wrote ‘G’wan leave the whole country “breathless” from Covid because of your idiotic behaviour’, on the site. Jim returned fire, writing ‘shut up you fools and grow a brain between you’. He later dubbed them ‘Ireland’s Milli Vanilli’ — a reference to the Grammy-winning duo later revealed to have mimed all their songs.
Jim shared footage of the anti-lockdown protesters listening to Sinéad O’Connor’s version of folk standard, ‘The Foggy Dew’, prompting the ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ singer to ask that protesters not play her songs ‘as if to suggest I support you in any way’, she wrote on the social media platform. ‘I do not.’
‘I admire the way you spoke out bravely in the past, Sinéad, to much scorn at the time, only to be proven right,’ he responded. ‘I’m surprised, however, you’re not yet awake to the Plandemic but you will be, knowing that great mind of yours x.’ ‘Get a life’, her response began, and she went on to point out that two people she knows have died from Covid-19.
Pop music doesn’t lack for iconoclastic controversialists — Van Morrison and
Ian Brown have been amongst the other artists who have spoken out against Covid restrictions — but Jim’s views perhaps stand out more because the Corrs could never have
been said to have worked in the tradition of protest singers. And yet his pot-stirring comments have also never really seemed to tarnish the Corrs brand, particularly since the other members have so deftly side-stepped them. The late Gay Byrne once observed that most people understood that the sisters did not hold the same views as him and in an interview with the Belfast Telegraph in 2015, Sharon said: “We love him so dearly and also respect his right to not be censored and to have his own opinions. Also, I think people should know they’re not opinions held by each member of the band.”
Caroline added: “Jim is entitled to have his opinions about stuff, and if you put (controversial) stuff out there, you have to be willing to put up with the criticism. If I put myself out there, I have to be willing to take the criticism.”
Jedward may have goaded Jim that his sisters ‘never needed him’, but a source close to the band tells the Irish Independent that, “It’s not about needing, they all need each other. Jim’s views would never deter the sisters from performing with him. He’s an integral part of the band and, if and when they do perform again, he will be there. Blood is thicker than water.”
Certainly their fans do not seem to be bothered by his conspiracy theories. The last time the Corrs reformed, in 2016, they quickly packed the 20,000 capacity O2 Arena in London. The responses to Sharon and Caroline’s admittedly excellent solo albums, suggest that the siblings pack more of a commercial punch as a group than individuals. With the enforced Covid hiatus showing no sign of ending, concrete plans for touring are on hold. But if and when the Corrs do reform they will bring the knocks and travails that life has thrown at them to their art. And 20 years after they first lit up the charts, they will be a reminder that, if we wait long enough, good things will return.