All About My Mother

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Andrea may have been voted the third most beautiful girl in the world, and, along with her siblings, be part of the most successful band to come out of Ireland since U2, but the defining moment in the lives of the Corrs was the tragically premature death a year ago of their lively, lovely mother. Recently in Sweden the coal-haired, kohl-eyed divas had fans falling at their feet. Barry Egan travelled to Stockholm for a night on the town with the Corrs.

'I NEVER expected I would be a person whose mother would die," Andrea Corr says. But, on November 24 last year, that all changed ...
Jean Corr had a serious brain haemorrhage in the middle of the night. She was on full ventilation at that stage in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, being treated for a rare lung disease. Every day her condition seemed to worsen. The doctors did all they could, each day presenting the Corr family with a new option.
"Okay, okay, this is bad but now we'll do this." "And now we'll not bother looking for infection; we'll go for a double lung transplant."
And then Jean Corr's body gave up.
"The stroke just stopped the whole rigmarole and it let her go," explains Andrea. "There was no point in keeping her on ventilation. We had to turn off the machine. Y'know, because she was completely ... It was a massive stroke that nobody could be beyond a vegetable with. So she was spared. And we were spared as well. So I have a lot to give thanks to God for."
The Corr family knew their mother was very sick, but they didn't fully realise how aggressive her illness was. It was a shock how fast fibro alveolitis finally took their mother. This rare lung condition scars the holes where the lungs breathe. The doctors don't really know how to treat it, except with steroids. One medical theory, unproven, is that Jean Corr might have inhaled something as a child, or it could have been genetic. The truth is that they have no idea why Jean Corr got fibro alveolitis.
Andrea Corr knows that nobody not even pop stars with a number one album in 25 countries around the world gets away with a life that is blessed and content from beginning to end. This is why the sadness has not eaten her up whole, nor the grief enfeebled her.
When Jean died tragically young at 57 last year, her passing was mourned and considered irrevocable. Thirteen months on, her daughter Andrea is a young woman who has made sense of her mother's death.
"She could have gotten a lung transplant and that would be another struggle for five years," she says. "The expectancy is that only 50 per cent live for five years. Mammy wanted to live. She didn't want half a life. I didn't want it for her. As soon as she got this disease, there was worryin her life, and I hated that for her ... "
There is a very long pause. Andrea's mouth curls like a Michelangelo angel. She sighs.
"I wouldn't want Mammy to go around worrying: going over and back to Newcastle, you know, more steroids, more worrying, the rejection that happens, fighting and fighting and with half the quality of life that a woman like her wasn't about.
"Ask anyone who knew her Mammy loved ... loved life. And also with the worrying and the lack of breath and the whole lot and yet her fighting to get better and healthy I suppose it's an Irish guilt thing that we all have, but there was a slight part of her that would slightly blame herself.
"Like, initially she went, 'Oh, I'm just not fit.' It was just so unfair for her to ever think it was anything to do with her or to feel any guilt or to feel any, y'know ... 'Oh God, what happened?' By the last while, it was so tiring and wrecking her that she was worried and tired all the time; she didn't smile and Mammy always smiled and always laughed. And when she did smile it was for our sakes and for Dad's."
Andrea Corr realises that losing her mother is one of the most awful things that will happen in her life. But the pain has helped her grow. The poet Sylvia Plath once said she talked to God but the sky is empty. In her time of sorrow, Andrea Corr didn't find the sky empty at all. Her faith in God has helped turn that pain into something wonderful.
"I just think that I have got God to thank that he took her in the middle of the night before she even had a chance to get a lung transplant or go through all that and have half a life ... and have further worry."
Weren't you angry with God for taking your mother?
"No, because I don't get angry with God. I think of it in an awful lot of different ways. I am angry she got ill. I am angry she had pain. We don't have a reason for that. We're not supposed to. I just have to keep my faith, and I am. I really believe I'll see her again. I believe everything is for a reason and once we're good and we follow our hearts, some day we'll know."
In the end, the Corr family did not want their mother to suffer humiliation. Jean had suffered enough. Andrea can remember that during the whole deteriorating process, her own anger would rise inside if her mother was humiliated in any way. "Because death," Andrea says, "is quite humiliating.
"But it is something that we have to go through. I didn't want her to be humiliated. I didn't want her to struggle and struggle and in the end there was no point in her fighting because she was going to die. I didn't want that.
"At this time I have so much to be thankful to God for. On that level, sometimes I look at it and I have to look at it this way that Mammy was so fantastic that God wanted her so much that he really insisted: 'No, no, I'm having her.' That's flattering.
"I think there's so much I have got to be thankful to God for in that we weren't away. We weren't on the other side of the world. We had such love and I have nothing to be regretful of. I have nothing to be guilty of. I loved her. She loved me. We were together. I spent so much time with her and with Dad. So for that I'm thankful to God. And that also she was spared further struggle. I'm not angry. I'm just upset, really. Not
anger."
SHE knows she'll see her mother again one day. She'll open her eyes one morning and there Jean will be at the bottom of the valley, right before her eyes, hidden amid the golden trees a deluge of glittering rays falling upon her, defining every angle of her face. And together they'll watch the sunlight flash along the distant grasslands. And round the corner is Eden.
"Some day we'll be together again, and it will only be an instant until I see her again," she muses, "and she still is with me. I don't believe she's gone. I believe in another world and I believe it's just a different thing and it isn't physical and it's all goodness and love and happiness and warmth. Sometimes I have dreams that have indicated even further than my own belief: that that does exist."
She's with you now. Not just in dreams?
"I think she's constantly with me," Andrea smiles. "There are blessings bestowed on you and you don't know why, but it is your loved one looking after you. And I feel that. I feel now, instead of when she was alive when I had her physically when I could ring her up and be with her and smell her and touch her but now she doesn't leave me for a second and I don't leave her for a second. I walk around with her arms around me. And even though life will upset you and things will happen, I have got that extra help. I would prefer her to be alive, obviously,but that's the way it is now."
You don't have to be a Zen Buddhist to understand that death is an inevitable part of life. The beautiful pop star understands this now more than most. As such, her words here contain the ring of honest mourning, of acceptance. She realises that you can't suppress something as powerful as the grief of losing a mother and expect it not to have some kind of effect on you.
So Andrea Corr has embraced Jean's death. And, in the final analysis, Jean Corr's death has given her famous daughter a better perspective on living.
"I thought life was wonderful before," she says, "now I think it's really wonderful. I know that sounds ironic. Most people say, 'You should think it's crap now, surely?' But no. I just thought, 'It's so beautiful.' We're all walking around so in need of each other and so lonely in our own bodies yet so joined of people that are here now. I have this broader picture and it's fuller.
"I always had a lust for life, and now I don't want to miss a thing." Andrea smiles. "I just want to feel it as much as I can and move on. I have no fear of death. I don't really want to go through what she went through but I think there's a reason that she had to go through it and I surely couldn't cop out if she did it. I don't like that hospital scene even though everybody's so lovely. It has to have been for some reason and I don't know that yet. I am a lot more frightened of losing other people."
Unencumbered by any form of cynicism, Andrea seems to live entirely on instinct, on feeling. She is almost immediately trusting and giving. She doesn't see the point least of all now, after her mother's gone in wearing a mask, in putting up protective barriers against the world. Most of all, Andrea Corr has that rare spark within her that Carl Jung defined in his Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious as 'soul':
"Soul is a life-giving demon who plays his elfin game above and below existence."
"I don't care whether people think I'm spacey or whatever," she says, "or what they write about me. I just want to have truth in my life. I'm not scared of death. So why should I be scared of what anyone thinks of me?"
THE Dundalk anti-diva has other reasons to be philosophical about human existence. Andrea Corr nearly died a few months after her birth. She contracted a kidney infection and from there picked up gastro-enteritis. She was unable to keep any food down. "You vomit and vomit," she smiles. "They thought I was going to die. I nearly died. I was shifted around all the different hospitals. So for that reason I got an awful lot of love because I was brought back from the dead literally."
Because of the illness, she doesn't remember much about her very early childhood. She can recall her slightly older sister Caroline "we were kind of brought up as twins" looking after her, despite this new arrival usurping all the attention. "Mammy reckoned it was kind of harder on her because she was taken off the knee pretty quickly, but Caroline actually mothered me," says Andrea.
"I was baby and she looked after me. She had such a different personality. She used to cry when I did things wrong. If I was late for school, Caroline would cry, and I would laugh. Caroline cried all the time. So it would hurt her if I was messing up."
Andrea can remember being brought to school for the first time, the moment Jean let go of her hand that day 24 years ago and she was without her mother for the first day in her life. "I was screaming crying and she had to leave me. I felt lost and then eventually becoming intrigued with the straws and the marla and the different
things to play with it."
Was the sense of loss that day when you were four similar to the sense of loss you felt last November when Jean died?
"No. No. [Pause] That's ... different."
Spend any time with Andrea Corr and what emerges is this slightly out-of-kilter spirit with an almost surreal view of human existence. And her place in it.
Like a character from Angela's Ashes, Andrea remembers the churches of her youth as places where she found it "very hard not to laugh when growing up. It wasn't fear but the fact that I really wasn't supposed to laugh, put me in a situation. Put me in a situation where I can't laugh and I just roar laughing and that was always a problem with me in church. I would get a fit of the giggles because it would be wrong to be laughing in Mass. I was laughing because it was bold and people were tut-tutting me. The more they tut-tutted, the more I laughed. It's the same with funerals. Some people say it is discomfort. Sometimes the more serious things are, the funnier they are, ironically."
And did you think the idea of Mary mother of one being a virgin was funny?
"Yeah, I didn't get that. Y'see, our parents didn't say: this is all literal. They just said, that's just the way the story is told. Parables. I don't know what Mary was. The virgin part; it's the bit that men decided to put into it."
Only in two of the Gospels Matthew and Luke is the word 'virgin' used. The English Bible has 'virgin' but the Greek word can just as easily mean 'young woman'. And the original Aramaic word can also be translated as: 'Expecting a happy event.'
"It's just another thing that's supposed to send out the message that sex is wrong!" laughs Andrea.
"Right!" Caroline agrees: "Why does she have to be a virgin? It's strange. It's kind of baloney really. You take written word as written by man and it has mistakes and truths and that's how I take it. We have to decipher the truth for ourselves.
"I always thought about Mary in terms of this Immaculate Conception and I was, like, 'Wait a minute! How does that work?"'
They say women prefer Mary to Jesus. They worship God but they're also a bit afraid of him, whereas with Mary, she's more like a friend. It's as though the Blessed Virgin is a bit of themselves and a bit of their own mother at the same time. And men can never hope to understand that.
"Yeah," says Andrea, "she seems more compassionate. It's softer. It's a softer image, but I think Jesus's image is soft also. God is the image we don't really know; that was the image you could be scared of."
"I think women will identify with her because she is a woman and probably because she seems like the kind of person who didn't say much and got on with things," adds Caroline. "The men ruled the roost, basically. I never felt closer to either one. But I do think about the Immaculate Conception and how ridiculous that was that Mary still has to be a virgin."
I ASK Caroline about how she felt when her mother passed away.
"I did feel anger for a little while after Mammy died," she answers. "I think I felt, you know, 'Why her?' and, 'Why at this time in her life?'
"But then when I think about other people and when children die, I thought to myself that Mum had a very good life and I didn't feel so resentful. We have been given life but we also have have to accept that death is part of life," she continues,passionately.
"Of course, if someone starts to say something about God to you, you kind of don't want to know because the reality isn't about God, the reality is that you've just
lost somebody. God can be a help to a lot of people and I think he was to my father my father is quite religious and he got great comfort but for me it wasn't really like that. I think to know that's she's gone to a better place is where God comes in."
Their four images have circled the globe. And back again. The Corrs are on the cover of everything. Yet success cannot be imposed through weight of publicity alone. Their success springs from something unhyped, something timeless in their songwriting that has allowed the Corrs to pass from beautiful faces to lasting icons of the 21st century.
They have taken a bite out of our imaginations.
In six hours from now, the magic will connect when the Corrs switch on their instruments in front of 20,000 people in Sweden. Surely it must have dawned on even their most hostile and misogynist critics by now Earth calling Michael Ross at the Sunday Times! that the Corrs wouldn't be able to sell out stadia across the world if they weren't able to perform, if they weren't able to write perfect pop moments?
And so to Stockholm ...
The flight to Sweden is a nightmare. We bump about the clouds like dysfunctional angels on LSD. Valium and large vodkas, it transpires, don't mix terribly well. Still, I don't like the prospect of being conscious when the plane plummets, in pieces.
When we land, mystifyingly alive, the Dundalk anti-diva is trying to soothe my shredded nerve-endings. "When it's your time, it's your time. It's nicer up there."
Up where?
"In the next place."
At 30,000 feet?
"Much higher up than that."
Heaven?
"Yeah, it's good up there. So don't worry."
I'm now petrified.
Padding around her dressing room in Stockholm, wearing Bambi-chaste eyes, Andrea Corr is due onstage in 10 minutes.
Out there beyond the brick-outhouse bouncers with the walkie-talkies 20,000 ecstatic Swedes are patiently waiting for the Corrs. It is only when Andrea takes the stage with her siblings that I finally comprehend what's she talking about.
"One day soon we'll meet again," Andrea sings. "I wanna feel just like before/ Before the rain came in my door/ Shook me up, turned me around/ Made me cry 'til I would drown."
She sings with passion of the day the shadowed boatman came to ferry her beloved Mammy across the big river. From the intensity in her voice, you imagine that he took a little bit of Andrea with him. As she sings, Andrea is bathed in light; seems even to exude it, almost. Written on Jean's birthday, No More Cry addresses the subject of their mother's sad passing.
"One day soon we'll meet again," Andrea sings.
Two hours later in a limo on the way to a city-centre nightclub booked by the promoter, Andrea is peering into the night. In the dark, all the blondes of Stockholm blend into the background. The coal-haired Dundalk anti-diva in the seat beside me, however, seems to be floating over the ocean back to Ireland back to her mother. And then she began to talk.
The words came out in a torrent, as though some dam had burst deep within her. In the dressing-room after the show, we had again discussed the death of her mother. She had said the last thing she wanted was anyone's pity. "Probably one of my failings is pride," she says wistfully. "And I don't think I'm pitiful. I think it is sad. I understand people looking at me. I know because I've looked at other people who've lost their mum and I feel sorry for them. I don't know. I'm defensive. I'm strong. I know I'm vulnerable and everything like that, but I know with my faith I'm strong, and that I'm also lost, and I want her. But this is the way it is. So there you go. Do you know how I feel? Do you know how you feel when somebody close to you dies?"
I shake my head.
"I remember this feeling when Mammy died. You would walk into a room and you would bring darkness in, because people would look and go: 'Oh no, that's the girl who lost her mum. The poor family.' And it would scare them. They would suddenly look at their own mum, because it was like we brought death into the room. I didn't like that for people. I didn't like seeing it in their faces. I really understood it. But I would prefer to bring light into a room."
I think you're wrong about that, Andrea. People were just more concerned about your feelings than their own. When I met you last Christmas, I didn't know what to say.
"Yeah, I remember you saying that afterwards. And it was kind of surreal in Glendalough that day ... "
I didn't think, that day. I brought you to a graveyard to be photographed. And this only weeks after your mum died ...
"Graveyards are for people living, Barry," she laughs. "They're not for the dead. Graveyards are for us to go somewhere. It's nothing to do with the dead. So I wouldn't align the two in my mind. So it is sometimes uplifting and it is madly ridiculous and sometimes you feel guilt. There are times you'll walk into a room and you'll forget, and if people don't bring it up, then that forgetting is prolonged. It's quite a nice thing. So I didn't think it was weird that you didn't mention it."
WE arrive at the nightclub. It's just past midnight on a Saturday night/Sunday morning in Stockholm. It's the guts of winter, bitterly cold. And the Corr sisters pull their coats up around them as they get out of the limo. Outside the club, the crabbed, pinched, scrunch-shouldered, refrigerated, antiseptic security men suddenly stir, busying themselves around the band. Sharon, Andrea, Jim, Caroline and her boyfriend, Frank, are immediately, dramatically ushered in, past the hundreds on the door.
"I hate when they do that," Andrea says, as she grabs me by the hand and drags me through the heaving throng.
Andrea's patience is infinite. A famous Swedish international footballer is brought over to meet her. And then another. The proprietor sends over a magnum of champagne. It is one of those gigantic bottles they give you when you win the Formula One driving championship. And there are soon three of them on the table along with bottles of Absolut and gin. Andrea and I are just as swiftly deep in a conversation that will last all night oh, about life, love and just about everything in between.
There are also, just as suddenly, beautiful blonde women with strange accents swarming all over the table attempting something of a feeding frenzy focused on the famous Irish band in town for the night.
Ever the gentleman, Jim sits in the middle of the table like a general viewing the battlefield. It is 3am and we have all reached a plateau of relaxation. Locked, in other words. I could remember at some point Andrea tied my hair up with her scrunchie (this is in memory of the time she wore her underwear as a scrunchie on holidays and went out, forgetting she was still sporting aforesaid unorthodox hair-bobble).
The rest is hazy.
The men's toilet had a clear glass sheet against which you were required to answer the call of nature. At around 4am, I remember standing next to Jim in front of this bathroom grotesquerie, discussing mortality. "It's like Woody Allen said," he beams, zipping up his flies. "'I'm not frightened of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens."'
I remember asking Caroline whether she was first attracted to Frank because he reminded her of her father, Gerry. "That is something that's very subconscious with women," she answered. "My father and Frank get on very well but I wouldn't consider them very very alike. They do have a similar sense of humour. All those things are subconscious. I don't think women go out to look for that, but sometimes they do end up with someone who is quite similar to their father; especially if they've had an absent father, they will look for that. But I've had my father around all my life."
BEAUTIFUL nutter that she is, Andrea makes up a game on the spot. The rules are simple: you learn a line, given to you by Ms Corr, which identifies you to the other participants in this secret game. Whoever you are talking to, you must recite the line aloud if Andrea asks you the simple question: what's my name? There are three of us playing the game: Andrea, Frank and me.
Andrea's lines is: "What's my name? Little Bird! That's right!"
Frank's: "What's my name? Fly fly Frankie the Fly! That's right!"
Mine: "What's my name? Blue Blue Barney McGrue! That's right!"
Upon reflection, this does seem to bamboozle the slightly-bamboozled-already Swedes.
Then it all gets very hazy. The last thing I can remember is the Corrs' Business Affairs Manager, Barry Gaster, standing over my bed at six o'clock shouting, "The plane is leaving. Get up. We're going. See ya." Thirty seconds later, I meet the decidedly under-the-weather Corrs in the hotel lobby. It is like a very cool school trip.
"Good morning," says Andrea en route to the airplane.
What's my name?
"What's my name? Little Bird! That's right!" she laughs, miraculously. None of the band has been to bed. There are slits where their eyes should be. We all have hangovers from hell. Don't come near me, I tell Andrea. I'll poison you with the alcohol fumes.
"You'll die on the spot with my breath," Andrea laughs.
Give me a hug. I'm dying.
We hug.
Dawn is rising over Stockholm. Our hangovers are rising with them. Forty minutes later we are in the VIP area of Stockholm airport waiting for a plane to Dublin. Andrea, Sharon and their manager John Hughes are going to New York. "Come with us," John offers.
I decline. I'm going home. To clear our brains of cobwebs, Jim offers us a round of Absolut vodkas, mixed fresh from the bar by his own hand. It is not yet seven o'clock, but it is Sweden. Later, Jim will sleep like a baby in the seat beside me on the plane home. I, on the other hand, am currently cat-napping under the table in the departure lounge ...
"Where's Blue Blue Barney McGrue?" Andrea laughs.
"He's sleeping under the table," says Sharon, as if it's the most normal thing in the world.
"Sit up, Barry!" orders Little Bird.
I can't sit up, Andrea. I'll be ill.
"I can't sit, if living is without you," Andrea sings, updating that Seventies classic. Soon I'm duetting with Andrea Corr: "I can't sit any more! Any m-o-r-e!"(Don't rush to HMV all at once. It won't be a Christmas number one.)
Slumped in a seat in the corner, Caroline is still trying to sleep. She has Jackie O glasses securely glued to her eyes.
"Caroline, you look like bloody Peig with those glasses on!" teases Andrea.
Frank, just back from a trek to Kathmandu with his father, has lost his plane ticket. This unexpected news quickly rouses Caroline from her slit-eyed slumber.
"You've lost your what?" Peig berates beautifully. "I can't believe it! You trek all around the world and you lost your ticket to Dublin!" Suddenly Frank is frantically rustling in his pockets, desperately searching for the requisite document. There is only time for one last drink with Jim before we board. His youngest sister, Little Bird, has already boarded the plane to America.
And I don't doubt for one moment that Jean Corr is flying to New York with her.