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By any standards, The Corrs are an extraordinary phenomenon. It won't be long before the combined global sales of their albums to date top the 20 million mark. In Ireland alone by the end of the year they will have sold over a million records - at which point they may well have established themselves as the biggest selling Irish act of all time on home turf.
But the colossal sales figures don't begin to tell even half the story because while their remarkable rise and rise is undoubtedly driven by the group's uncanny ability to craft catchy, winning and wonderfully accessible pop music, there is another dimension to it which is harder to pin down but no less important in the grand scheme of things.
There has been a tendency in Ireland in particular to dismiss The Corrs as lightweight. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact they only got to be where they are right up there amongst the bare-knuckle boys, battling it out for the top spot because there is a backbone of steel in the group - a willingness to lay themselves on the line, to work, to work some more and then to work again, that distinguishes them from a lot of swaggering and self-important rock bands that think of themselves as hard men.
Nor, however, are they pop fodder - four suggestible kids, doing what they're told and being run ragged in the process. On the contrary, there is a level of thought, intelligence and adaptability within the Corrs' camp which has been essential to their growth and to their success. Some of this without a doubt derives from their manager, John Hughes, a man of quite extraordinary vision and resilience, who has guided the band to their current status, winning all - or almost all, at any rate of the key battles with the industry along the way.
And then there's the group themselves. For a band who have been astonishingly successful, we know very little about them as individuals - what they think and feel and how, in the midst of their stunning achievements, they relate to the world. And because we do know so little, there has perhaps been an assumption that they have little to say and besides, they probably aren't very good at saying it anyway. Talking to all four members and to John Hughes, separately, this was something I wanted to explore.
What you do to discover, getting any way close to The Corrs is that they are unusually decent and straightforward people, genuinely nice and unaffected in the best possible meaning of both words. Beyond that, when there is the space and opportunity to be reflective, it becomes evident that there are depths to these brothers and sisters that deserve to be more fully explored. It becomes evident above all that these are people with a real heart.
But that is for you to decide.
This, I thought, on this occasion at least, it would be best to leave the
grand theorising at the door and to let the band to speak for themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome Andrea, Caroline, Jim and
Sharon, collectively know as The Corrs…..