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NME Magazine, June 2000
Article transcribed by Hazel Nelson
The Corrs
London Finsbury Park Fleadh
They come to us with a poor track record in crowd-surfing, The Corrs. Festival-centric judgement would have it that they’re too prim, too pretty and too pop to muddy that Prada in an outdoors moshpit. But the Fleadh is not Glastonbury. Pushchairs form wagon train circles, there are grown men patting police horses and none of the massed Irish seem to object to the outrage that The Undertones are ‘back’ without Feargal.
So heralded by trumpet flutes, The Corrs catwalk out into the cauldron of conviviality, and proceed to destroy any notion that they’re a mere stylist’s dream of namby-pop girlishness, with fiddle solos. How so? Well, sure, the opening gilded ballad ‘Only When I Sleep’ is not ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’. Hyper-ingratiating hit ‘What Can I Do?’ ain’t Eminem. And the new ‘reggae’-tinted whistle-along ‘Irresistible’ is not King Tubby. But there’s a deadly focus to their saturated pop, more hardcore than anything you’d encounter in supposedly edgier genres.
In a wind-chilled field, with half the crowd stumbling drunk, The Corrs’ power blasts through. ‘Industry people’ dance ironically (sheepishly). Six-year-olds twirl with their parents. The Barbie-Celt-Tressed Sharon sums up the Galway sunset violin intro for the mercilessly haunting ‘Forgiven, Not Forgotten’. And rock journeyman bro Jim guitars forth into the kind of schmaltz rock which Bono’s been getting away with for years – because it works.
Everything works for them tonight. It’s not just the NASA-processed, ear-sex harmonies. It isn’t merely the hit parade of blatant, blinding, airplay-kissing tunes, ‘Radio’, ‘So Young’, and irradiated next single ‘Breathless’. It isn’t simply the chutzpah of covering Fleetwood Mac’s uncoverable ‘Dreams’ and Thin Lizzy’s ‘Old Town’. They transcend their conservatism on all levels, nowhere more so than in the ruthless coquetry of their singer.
That Andrea knows how to play a crowd. She may look like someone who’s genetically modified herself for a Friends audition, but she holds Finsbury Park in her manicured palm. Her arms go aloft at peak moments. She gets her penny whistle out for the folk interludes. She twirls, skips and, vitally holds back from the Irish country dancing that’s marred many a Cranberries show.
In her own way, within the bounds of decency and, while communicating that she (they) are decent girls and in no way drug-guzzling, maladjusted, art-weirdo delinquents, Andrea rocks. It may not be a sawn dive into a blood’n’mud moshpit, but after a convincingly wild ‘So Young’ she turns around, puts both hands together and bows to her sibling drummer, and then wilfully lewdly shakes her arse at the crowd.
“I remember why we do this…it’s a good feeling,” she says. Phew, catharsis! Eminem should try it in a pair of strappy three-inch Prada T-bar wedges.
Roger Morton