Andrea Corr
Barefoot Pilgrimage

Book in English/One

'I go to a picture with words.

I click.

The little tanned ones, their nails the same color as the pool in front, my three-year-olds (the naked children I once dreamed of) singing as they make muddy puddles (oh Peppa Pig and her silly daddy, the “expert”) with this garden hose borrowed during vacation in Portugal.

I'm on my third book and in my head my own story is starting. Maybe. Or maybe it will be more than just a few minutes of a song, leaving you to imagine the melody. A catchy Pop with more reasons than a “what if...?”. But fair warning: my weakness is vanity. I want you to appreciate me. So I have to show this “unread”.

I'm not proud of everything I remember, but when it comes to childhood, I think all you can do is ask why, never blame yourself, and that there is a thread that might explain it to me, but I still don’t understand. And, oh God, could we stop analyzing ourselves. The first vocation in the world. People in Ireland say: “É il problema cattolico”.

The thread: I am seven years old, on top of a pile of old mattresses. I can’t even lie down without touching the ceiling, while I’m reading a book I really like: The Wild Swans. É a chalet in Skerries, all blue and pink like a playhouse, and a constant Fisher Price family sound.

Here there’s only dust and everything’s hidden: I hear Mom in the kitchen and what I felt to get here, Caroline’s voice asking Mom if she’s seen me.

She calls me down into the wooden playroom, but I stay quiet and standing. She doesn’t know about this place, at least I don’t think so; so I stay hidden.

Silent as the breath I won’t take. This makes me sad, but it is what it is, and it’s just a story: she runs outside yelling my name, the cardboard door moving, looking for me.

This with life and a lot more at 26, for the first time watching a videotape of Mom, who has died, Jean, on a boat in California... her voice in my ear so sudden it wakes me from sleep:

“Where’s Pandy?”

My heart is tight.

To hear the voice of the dead searching. Missing a voice. Missing being sought. That means something, but I don’t know what.

If this is the beginning of the book, I warn you that I have to leave many things aside, and maybe you’ll say: “Ah, but I don’t want to read a book she hasn’t written.” Or maybe not. Maybe: “I don’t even want to read the other one, thanks just the same.” Now the voice of a girl from Dundalk comes out with a thousand “Who do you think you are?”s.

And yet, I have to write it. I am afraid of people dying. Not everyone though: I am afraid Johnny will die, the one who has to read, recommend, manage and sell, whether he likes it or not. Oh, there’s that heart-shaped dish rag near the throat where the cries and screams pool, considering escape.

But not now.'

(from the book – my own translation)

One night alone in the kitchen of my grandmother’s house by the sea in Calabria, in the dark in front of the TV, as I flipped through channels I stopped on Italia Uno.

'Festivalbar' was on.

That outdoor show set in many important places in Italy, where artists sang their summer hit songs.

It was then that I saw the Corrs for the first time, singing their new song:

'Go ooh ooh on... Go ooh on... Leave me breathless...'

The last word in the title of the song and the lovely faces of Andrea (the singer) and Sharon (the violinist and second voice) (many years later Caroline, the drummer and second voice) (as for Jim, guitarist and another backup singer, I was never really interested in him).

(25 years later I found the video of that performance on Youtube and noticed that the location of that episode was Florence, in Piazza Santa Croce.

After the Christmas holidays, when I returned to Florence to resume a vacation I had interrupted for work, I went to the same spot and made a video and two selfies, using an image from the CD booklet where the song appears.)

It was August, and a month or two later I bought the album, 'In Blue', at a record store in downtown Genoa (today it’s a museum and a shop about Genoese singer-songwriters), paying 42,000 Lire (21€ now—a little less than a year and a half before our current currency was introduced—how much was 1€ worth? Almost 2,000 Lire, those famous ‘1936, 27 [Lire]’ for a while).

I had started the fourth year of hotel management school, School Year 2000-2001, and my passion for the group began (and the end of a certain sadness I had felt, which I had worked through thanks to the songs of Fabrizio De André and the Cranberries), even going as far as to buy their calendar (at the newsstand) and the year after all their earlier albums at a special price (5900-6000 Lire, now about 3€).

But even then, they weren’t the only ones—I didn’t avoid listening to other music (compared to the previous year) and at the start of my repeated fourth year, as I was discovering Blur and Oasis, my attention to them lingered only for the video of 'Would You Be Happier?' (from the 'The Best Of' album), which I often saw on MTV, the music-only channel that a few months earlier had moved to a nationwide network, TMC2.

Many years later, nothing really special happened until, by chance in 2019, I stopped on a Rai channel (perhaps Rai Movie) where I saw Andrea in a film, 'The Boys from County Clare', and enjoyed it so much that I tried (unsuccessfully) to download it from RaiPlay.

So I bought the DVD of the movie from Amazon, but after receiving it and putting it in the player I noticed it didn’t have Italian as a language option.

Perhaps even that year I’d already heard of this memoir book and, wanting to know more about Andrea and her family’s story, I decided to buy it, which I did in 2022, on Amazon.

To introduce the book, I’ve chosen some passages that I found essential:

Andrea’s parents were from Dundalk, a border town between Ireland and Northern Ireland ndr/reviewer's note, and all the group members (plus a child who died at a young age on the same day Sharon was born) are from there.

We’re in a period between the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, when in Northern Ireland there was conflict between Catholics and Protestants (Andrea recounts that after a particular episode many Catholics took refuge in Dundalk, having lost their homes, burned by the police) (do any of you know about ‘Bloody Sunday’ [‘Bloody Sunday’] in ’72 in Londonderry, which inspired U2’s classic ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’? – already John Lennon and Paul McCartney had each written a song in the ‘70s [‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Give Back Ireland to the Irish’]) and the attacks by the IRA, the terrorist group that wanted Northern Ireland joined to Ireland, both in Ireland and the UK (Andrea was born on a May day in ’74/ndr, the same day as two major bombings in Ireland).

As she grew up with the other siblings, Andrea developed a special bond with Caroline, considering her her best friend, partly because Caroline was born soon before Andrea, compared to the others.

If the four Corrs would one day take the stage, this came from the family’s tradition of cultivating a passion for music, so much so that one of the father’s jobs was playing piano bars, alongside his wife—a woman emancipated compared to the town’s male-oriented mentality.

Andrea’s first important stage experience was as a girl, with her siblings as extras in a famous 1990s film/ndr, 'The Commitments', where on set they met their future manager as a group, John Hughes.

With him, a few years later, they set off to America where they recorded their first album and saw growing worldwide success, up to the “The Best Of” period, including a famous concert (at Lansdowne Road, Dublin/ndr), the recording of 'MTV Unplugged' (see my two reviews as ‘Boop7’ and ‘Boop07’) and 'In Blue'.

Unfortunately, in recent years their mother passed away, something that deeply affected their father; and in the same period the group began their social activism (participating in a concert for the victims of an IRA attack in Omagh, Ireland, in ’98/ndr), meeting many well-known figures (like Nelson Mandela—the South African leader who spent many years in prison fighting racial segregation in that country/ndr—and Luciano Pavarotti, for example) and for the greatness of their commitment, received an honor from the Queen of England, who died in 2022/ndr.

After this, still very interesting, more albums recorded by the group before breaking up; Andrea’s own experiences as a solo singer and as a film and theater actress, her move to America with her husband and the difficult birth of her first child, her father’s peaceful passing, and the group’s own serenity recording a new album.

Approaching the period before the book’s publication, Andrea’s feelings about the world after the terrorist attacks from 2015 onward/ndr in England and France (Paris, Nice, Brussels—that’s in Belgium, but I’ll mention it—and Manchester) after the group had played concerts in those places, and her experiences inside and outside of recording the latest album at that time, 'Jupiter Calling'.

The book is a story interspersed with the group’s known and unpublished song lyrics and poems, most of them written by Andrea.

Almost right away, I found the book simple and pleasant to read, and after a few years I also felt the intensity, the heart and the humor of Andrea.

But strangely, it didn’t leave a strong mark on me, like many well-crafted Corrs songs (the ones I listened to back in high school), except for the cover, which is well done, and the back image, a beautiful photo of Andrea as a woman, still fascinating to me, even if she’s no longer young and sensual as in the wonderful years when I discovered the group.

Now that I’ve published this review, I’ll look to part with this book: I’d love to see it in the hands of a young and very beautiful English colleague at the high school where I work.

If she accepted it...and allowed me a hug...I’d be in Heaven

('Borrowed...Heaven...' 2004)