Corr blimey

INTERVIEW:Andrea Corr is back in the public eye with a new album, after a lengthy break in the wake of her debut solo release. She tells BRIAN BOYDabout her brother's new-world musings, tabloid attacks, her acting career and shows she's not too demure to use the F and C words

THE SETTING IS beautiful – silken furnishings, fresh flowers and the tranquil tinkle of a far-off piano. The company is resplendent – Andrea Corr looks as if she has been lovingly assembled by a crack team of Renaissance-era aestheticians. So when it happens, it’s as if there has been a violent break in the natural order; a shocking transgression that disturbs the early evening idyll. Andrea Corr has just leant in close and used the C word to describe someone. Your head jerks up to check if that word has indeed just come out of that mouth. She nods her head in affirmation and says, “You weren’t expecting that, were you?”

It’s not the only surprise today in a secluded corner of Dublin’s Four Seasons Hotel. The woman who was marketed as the pulchritudinous face of a trad-pop outfit displays a keen intelligence, no little level of astute political analysis, and a willingness to put the knife in and twist it around a bit when required.

She’s very tactile. She frequently moves her chair closer, places her hand on your arm and leaves it there until she has finished a story that invariably beings with, “Wait till I tell you . . .”

She is back in the public eye for the first time since the “battering” she took when her 2007 solo album didn’t “perform”, as the music-industry euphemism has it. “I was gutted by that,” she says. “I had written all but one of the songs myself. I had a really great producer in to work on it and Bono was on board as executive producer. It was important to me since I had being doing The Corrs since I was 15 – from 1990 to 2005 – and that’s a long time. There had been millions of records sold and there were expectations there for me.”

After being used to everything she touched with The Corrs turning to gold, the solo-album affair hardened her up a bit. “I was innocent and naive enough to think it would all go my way,” she says. “I was disillusioned because of the duplicity [of the record label]. They’d be there in the studio – the guys who wear runners under their suits – saying, ‘I love it. That’s a smash hit!’ but they didn’t like it and they were pushing other acts instead of me. There was no radio play, no TV play. They had no conviction in it. I had made a record they didn’t want. I just thought: ‘I’m not going to sing again.’ I was jaded and disappointed. I took up learning French so that whenever anyone asked me what I was doing I could say: ‘Me? Oh, I’m busy learning French.’ ”

But a phone call from Kevin Spacey got her out of her slump. He wanted her for an Old Vic production of Dancing at Lughnasa. "I had acted before, in The Commitmentsand Evitaand what I loved about being in the play at the Old Vic was the total lack of vanity, in contrast to the music world. Of the theatre world she says, "I love the fact that you can't revisit even what you think is your best performance on any one night. It's all instant and on the night, which is I think is better for the ego. And unlike being in The Corrs, it wasn't my responsibility to draw the audience in. I was just playing a character. And that got me thinking . . ."

Just before Dancing at Lughnasa, she had been approached by a music producer about doing an album of cover songs. "My first reaction was, 'I can't. I'm busy learning French.' But then I thought, if I do these songs by other people I won't have the responsibility of making them hits – and having hits rules everything in the music industry these days. This could in fact be very liberating. It would be like playing a character, singing these songs, and that appealed to me. So I gathered together a bunch of songs that all have a special significance for me and I decided to call the album Lifelinesbecause it was a musical lifeline to me. And also because of the lifelines on your hand, because these songs have been a big part of my life."

She suddenly pulls herself up and gasps, "Oh my God, I've just this second remembered something really weird that happened to me a few weeks ago. I was waiting for daddy in the garage at home, waiting for him to lock the door and come out. There's a shelf of books in the garage and I was looking at the titles. And one of them was called Lifelines. It was an Irish charity book in which people contributed their favourite poems and wrote about why they liked them. And this is after my album had been pressed up. I remember just standing there, staring at this book and thinking that sometimes things happen to you to indicate that what you're doing is right.

"You look like you don't believe in any of this stuff but I do. The other day I passed by a shop that was called Tinseltown and one of the songs on the album is called Tinseltown in the Rainso that's an indication also. I'm convinced of it."

Lifelinesis a recherché collection of songs that were originally recorded by acts such as The Blue Nile, Harry Nilsson, Nick Drake and The Velvet Underground. For the musically sanctimonious the pretty girl from the trad-pop band is messing with some pretty reverential material here. So, how do you want your kicking served?

"Hmm, the criticism could be debilitating," she says. "I know some people won't give it a fair hearing, I'm some sort of X Factorgirl in their eyes. There'll be prejudice and 'how dare she?' but there's nothing I can do about it. I don't really mind about the criticism and I really do mean that. It's beyond my control and even if I did care, what can I do to change someone's prejudice about me? All you can do is make something you're proud of. It's the person in the car who hears one of these songs on the radio – it's their opinion I'm interested in. Besides, I believe that if you do something honest, the truth transcends all.

“These songs really mean a lot to me. The Blue Nile song I used to listen to all the time on The Corrs tour bus. The Harry Nilsson song I remember vividly from my childhood.”

Her version of Daniel Johnston's classic Some Things Last a Long Timeis very beautiful indeed. She's already received strong letters of support from the musicians involved. "Nick Drake's manager got back to me to say he loved what I did with the song; he was so, so complimentary. Ron Sexsmith got on to me to say he loved it and Barbara Orbison – Roy's widow – was really nice to me about my version of Blue Bayou.

Andrea Corr was born on the day of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. “The weird thing is I shouldn’t have a husband because of the bombings,” she says. “My father-in-law [financier Dermot Desmond] was in the area at the time and would have been blown to bits if he hadn’t gone into a chemist to pick something up just before the bombs went off.”

Growing up in Dundalk, the Troubles introduced themselves early into her life. “There was a pivotal moment when I was very young – it was one of those moments where you actually see the complications of something,” she says.

“When you’re a young girl and things happen you think it’s as simple as ‘he’s bad’ and ‘he’s good’ but it’s not like that and that moment for me was at primary school. For some reason me and [her sister] Caroline would always be early for school and the caretaker would always be there. He was this really kind, lovely man who would play with us before classes began and we loved him – really loved him. Then there was this thing in the paper that the school had shut and that there were arms discovered there and it was him that did it.

“We had believed this was a good man and we were confused. But you can’t project yourself on somebody else. If somebody saw their loved one killed, or whatever, in front of them, how can I in any way say, ‘No, that’s wrong’. It’s just a mesh of things and it’s painful.

“The thing about Dundalk is that the people who were ‘sympathetic’ would all know each other – and obviously certain pubs had a certain type of leaning, but if you were just going around normally you wouldn’t run into anything like that.”

She’s fiercely proud of her home town. “Daddy has lived there all his life, we all grew up there. It’s a really lovely place with really lovely people but then some English person once referred to it as El Paso and that stuck.”

What were her feelings about Gerry Adams topping the poll in Louth at the last election? “That election result has been hard on Louth because it’s pressed the refresh button on actions that have sullied our town,” she says. “People are thinking Provos, and all of that again. You try to resurrect the truth about a town and its people and then this happens and it’s ‘there we are back there again’. It’s an insult to the really lovely and good people who have suffered. I think it’s very strange just to forget and have sudden amnesia of the horrors that went on.

“There was a woman on the radio the other day. Her sister had been killed in the past and she was challenging the Sinn Féin person who was talking about the recent killing, in Omagh, of the policeman. Her point was that now they were saying the recent killing shouldn’t have happened but in the past they used the line ‘regrettable but understandable’. She just wanted recognition of that, she wanted it for her dead sister. ‘Regrettable but understandable,’ they used to say but it’s like, my whole life is ruined. It’s somebody I love. It’s somebody’s father, it’s somebody’s son. It’s somebody’s sister who has been killed.”

She remembers the anti-Irish feelings she encountered in the UK when The Corrs were starting off. “We were doing some radio gig and there were free drinks for everyone so no one was listening to us. The show was just a farce – someone puked up on Sharon. Afterwards, we were sitting in the van and some people who were at the gig came over to us. They started kicking the car and calling us ‘Irish pigs’ and stronger stuff than that.”

When The Corrs were awarded MBEs by Queen Elizabeth in 2005 her first thought was that, “Coming from where we come from, it is interesting to be asked”.

“Ours were after Geldof but before Bono but they’re much higher up, they’re knights. I did think about not accepting it but then would I refuse France if they decided to honour me? We sold so many records in Britain alone – ridiculous amounts of records. Would I snub all these people who bought our records? Because it’s not just an honour from the monarch, it’s an honour from the people I think. It would have been regressive not to accept it. There was something in a republican newspaper criticising us but there was very little debris from it.”

Has there been much debris from brother Jim’s new world order theories? “We got a shock. We did not know he would come out with this,” she says. “It does hurt me when he’s held up to ridicule. It hurts me for him. I don’t agree with what he says but I have respect for him going after it and what he believes in. He has this genuine belief that there is this massive cloud over the world. And he isn’t alone in these times with there being so many mysteries. He’s resilient – that’s the strength of his conviction.”

Does it necessarily rule out a Corrs reformation? “The thing is, Sharon and Caroline are bringing up their children. We might get back together, it’s not that we broke up because we’re a family and that makes it a different thing. We’re still together, just doing different things. If we get excited about something it will happen.”

Her time acting in Dancing at Lughnasaand, more recently, Jane Eyreat the Gate fundamentally changed her and made her realise just how important live performance is to her well-being.

“It’s like this shared experience and only the people there really know it. And if something shifts that night – if it’s been a really good performance – then the audience and the people on stage go back out into the world a little altered. “You feel very much alive, very much in the moment. And that’s why I feel I have to go back out on tour again with this album. The live experience is the only time these days when people feel all together – really together. It’s a magnificent thing. And it’s just like love, sometimes you’ve got to walk away from it to know that you need it.”

Lifelines

is out on May 27th. She plays Vicar Street on June 5th. andreacorr.com

* This article was amended on June 20th, 2011