Post by cw on Sept 6, 2010 12:35:55 GMT 1
The beautiful melancholy of Sharon Corr
By Barry Egan Sunday Sep 5 2010
F Scott Fitzgerald introduces a character in The Great Gatsby as having an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering with feelings, emotions. And that description goes double for Sharon Helga Corr. We have only been talking for a few minutes and already she is in tears. She can't stop herself, although she's supposed to be here to talk up her debut solo album, Dream Of You.
Her beloved mother Jean passed away on November 24, 1999, in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she was being treated for cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis, a rare lung condition. I had asked Sharon if it had got any easier for her with time. "I think it just startles you every so often. Eventually you start to get on with your life. And then every so often . . ." she says, and then stops. "Something happened recently."
There is another pause -- one of which Harold Pinter would be proud. Then she says she can't remember the incident. Then, just as suddenly, it pops into her memory bank.
"It was recent enough, and I was going for a massage," she says slowly, getting increasingly emotional. "I was sitting in the room and there was another woman sitting there and she was the absolute image of my mother. The funny thing was, she looked at me like my mother would have looked at me. It immediately reminded me of her and immediately I was crying. You don't realise it is still that profoundly upsetting. It always will be, I suppose."
And how do you deal with it, the pain?
"I allow it to happen. I cry. I think, I feel very glad of her just being there. You have me crying already." She cries and cries.
I try to make her smile instead.
I remind her that the first time her husband-to-be, Gavin Bonnar, walked up the driveway in Dundalk to see Sharon in 1995, her mother looked out the window and said to Sharon: "I wouldn't mind him myself."
"Somebody reminded me of that recently," Sharon says, still crying.
I am now apologising.
"You're OK! It's normal! It's normal! And you'll have it your whole life -- your dad died. It's a beautiful thing actually, because it means she's still very strong and I still have a very strong sense of her; because you know sometimes when somebody dies you can't remember their face for the longest time. You find it hard to picture them. And yet they were the most important thing in your life. And yet you struggle to see their face in your own mind. I certainly did struggle with that. But now I feel the further I am away from her death, the closer I am to her.
"It's kind of strange -- especially having children," she says referring to her two kids. She has a son, Cathal Robert Gerard, born March 31, 2006, and daughter, Flori Jean Elizabeth, born July 18, 2007. She says every so often Cal or Flori will give her a look and she'll go: "Oh, my God. That's Mum."
"I don't think they look absolutely like her. But there are certainly mannerisms and a look. You can see the DNA. A smile, a look -- it is just a moment. It could be the way she flexes her hand or something like that. It is the most simple things that affect me. Somebody looks at me a certain way, it reminds me of her."
What did your mother teach you? "How to be a woman," Sharon says, without hesitation. "My mother taught me to be a woman from the minute I was born. Not that I struggled being a woman; it was just that she is a woman; she is a nurturer. She is a mother. She taught me how to be that."
Asked how her father has been getting on since his lovely wife died, she says: "My father is my hero. My father has suffered a lot. And I think he is incredible. He is very brave."
When Gerry Corr met Jean Bell at a dance in the Pavilion ballroom in Blackrock, Dundalk, in 1962 he was instantly smitten. He wrote a poem, Pavilion 62, about the impression that first meeting had on him:
Booze bored
Winter woed
Bed beckoning
Did angels convene
To bring me to Jean
Of wraparound eyes
In passion of pink
First dance
Last dance
We dance forever
The first time Sharon met Gavin was at the Gaiety's late-night Brazilian hooley in the long, hot summer of 1995. The bashful young barrister pondered how best to approach this vibrant vision of Dundalk womanhood. The hour was late and he eventually came up to the young musician, then virtually unknown, and said: "Could I ask you for some free advice? I was going to go and see if there was anywhere open afterwards, is there anywhere else to go?" They married in Clare on July 7, 2001.
"I felt I could trust him. I felt he appreciated me as a person," Sharon says now. "I felt I wouldn't be stereotyped. I felt I wouldn't be placed in any sort of traditional woman's role, which is not something I want to be placed in. I either choose it myself, or I don't. I felt safe. I felt secure. I felt independent. You can be independent and also be looked after."
She didn't lose her identity or individuality in the marriage. She wanted to be a mother, a wife, a musician, go on tour. "That wasn't a question for anybody to decide," she says. "That's my own decision."
So you're a tough woman, Sharon Corr?
"You see," she laughs at the question, "there's one of the things I learned from mother: never, ever give up your independence. Never, ever. Certainly rely on each other but rely on each other to love each other and be there for each other; to sort of struggle together."
She quotes a line from the song It's Not A Dream from her new album: "And at times I know it's hard to stay together/When I'm in your arms there's nowhere I feel better," she half sings to me.
"That is very much about that. There's also stuff like, 'Put your hand in mine, we'll face this world together'. Because the world is a difficult place. And it is a beautiful thing to have someone to share it, to walk through the world with, and to battle the world with, and to enjoy the world with. That's how I see marriage."
I ask her how she feels about the recession. Ireland feels as if it is battling a giant hangover after the giant piss-up of the boom. "There was a lot of drink and a lot of other substances," she says of my drink-and-hangover analogy of the economic downturn in this country.
"Someone said to me at one stage that it was like Indians with firewater. The Celtic Tiger was a very heady cocktail for all of us. None of us were unmoved by it. And if you were unchanged, I think, you're maybe lying," she says. "Ireland became a very different place. A place where people acquired things; where people showed off their wealth; children going around with Dior bags. Just really silly stuff."
The Corrs, to their credit, while not being dressed in rags, were never designer bling-bling. "It wasn't chosen. It was just the way we are. I don't like labels on the front of my T-shirt. I wear what I enjoy wearing and what I think suits me. But it really doesn't matter whether it's Dunnes Stores or Christian Dior. More often than not, I'll go for something much less expensive."
She thinks there is a message in the recession for the Irish nation. She feels that we have been, "reacquainted with our humility, with our welcoming, with our history, with our culture, with our own very deep-ingrained abilities as Irish people; not what we have ,but who we are and what type of people we are. I feel very much in the Celtic Tiger that we lost a massive part of our own identity. We lost it to purchases, to cars. We lost it to houses, to many houses," she says, adding that she never got seduced into buying property other than her home: "No, thank God. I have never been that interested in that sort of thing.
"The collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the bursting of the bubble, I think simplified life for people; or made them re-evaluate what was important," she says profoundly, "Especially their husbands, their wives, their families, their children. Brought us back to the important things in life. 'Are the children OK in school? Do we love each other?' Well, then, we can do anything we need if we have enough to survive, and we can try to make money by going back to what it is we are actually good at.
"The problem with the Celtic Tiger -- and right around the world -- is that people were spinning plates. They were spinning 20 plates at the same time. Everybody thought they were a property developer. Overnight, all of Ireland were property developers. But if you stick to what you know and what you are good at, if you are a really good lawyer or accountant or musician, hopefully you haven't sacrificed it by buying property," she says. "For me, what I choose to do in life, there are two things that I do. I do music and I do kids. That's it. That's all I do in life. Then I have fun with my friends and cook -- blah, blah, blah and whatever -- but I think if you keep it simple and you are true to what you are actually good at, then you know. Most people have a talent for one thing."
Sharon Corr is here in a suite on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons in Dublin to talk about that one talent, which has been superbly showcased on her new album Dream Of You. One of my favourite tracks on it, Buenos Aires, was inspired, she says, by James Joyce's short story, Evelyn. Possibly the stand-out song on this very good album is the cover of Smalltown Boy by Eighties' gay synth-pop trio Bronski Beat. The song was something of an emotive gay anthem. It became an anthem of Shazza's youth. "I remember that song being a huge part of my teenage years," she says. "You know, when you are exploring the world and you have a little more independence. I remember that being the song at every disco that I wanted to dance to. It was just incredible and I just always loved the song."
Then, last summer, she was on holiday in France and she was trying to sleep but was unable to because of the din from the nightclub downstairs. "It was absolutely driving me insane. I couldn't get a wink of sleep. The babies were there," she points, as if they were in their cots in front of her. "We were up the whole night. It was one of those awful nights." She says that she thinks it was about 5am because she was watching the hours go by, when on came Jimmy Somerville singing: "You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case, alone on a platform . . ."
"It just transformed me back to the Eighties," she says. "There is nothing that can do it as well as a piece of music to give you a taste of what you had before, to make you actually feel like you have moved back in time. Because words can't do it like music can, but the combination of them can do it more powerfully than anything. And as soon as I heard it I thought, 'I have to cover that song.'"
Months later she was playing the piano, as is her wont, at home, when she thought again of Smalltown Boy and she realised the song was "very, very soulful and quite bluesy in its approach, and the lyrics just broke my heart. I really got an immense sense of what it is like to be gay in a predominantly heterosexual society and not accepted. And to have what is totally natural to you considered an aberration must be the most awful thing in the world. To have what you do naturally considered in some way sexually deviant, it is insane stuff. I find it insane."
Some of her brother Jim's pronouncements have been considered similarly lacking in sanity. "I feel Jim has a right to his own beliefs and a right to express them, as we all do. They are not necessarily beliefs that I hold myself. But I love him, and he has a basic right to that [freedom of speech]," she says.
I point out that when the Corrs get back together -- as she says they quite possibly will next year -- and go to tour America, the greetings might be muted in places when the locals reflect upon what Jim has said. For instance, his opinion that there was overwhelming evidence that the 9/11 attacks in America were carried out by "rogue elements" of former US president George Bush's "neo-con administration".
"Without a doubt," Sharon seems to agree. "But it is another form of expression. Jim feels very strongly what he feels about. He wants to express it. Jim has been very vocal. Because he holds these opinions it doesn't mean that any of the rest of us do."
In fairness, what Jim says must make her feel awkward. I tell her I sat at Corrs shows in Radio City Music Hall in New York and in Miami in 2000 and the reaction was always appreciative in the extreme, but those same Corrs fans might now feel let down by Jim's comments.
I haven't seen her for a few years. She is still piercingly beautiful. Since the Corrs effectively stopped six years ago -- their last album, Home, came out in 2005 -- Sharon became a mother but she also, crucially, kept her hand in musically. Not that this should surprise anyone.
The uber-violinist and eldest Corr sister certainly knows her away around a tune: she composed possibly the Corrs' two most famous songs, So Young and Radio, she is never away from the piano in her home in Dublin, writing songs, and nor has she ever switched off her imagination in terms of writing killer violin riffs in her head. Indeed, her new album is full of the songs she wrote in her home while on hiatus from the family business, so to speak.
Is it that a musician never stops? "Absolutely. And why would you stop?" she laughs. "It is part of what I do. It is what I've always done."
She can remember the first time she played as a child; she wrote a song when she was six years of age. "It's in my distant memory. It was a little fairy tale. Of course, it was probably complete crap at that stage, but I do remember trying to perform it on the piano at home in Dundalk. It is what I do. You don't interpret it at that stage. You are it before you know you are it. We were immersed in music as children. Mum and Dad were constantly playing and learning songs and performing songs."
Do you think your mother was singing to you when she carried you in her womb? "Oh, there is no doubt. She always sang. There is no doubt. And I did the same with my children. If you sing, you sing." Jean Corr would have sung to her daughter what Sharon now sings to her own children: songs such as My Irish Molly-O and The Sally Gardens. "Oh, Molly, my Irish Molly, my sweet acushla dear," she sings, "You know, a lot of Irish stuff . . ."
I remember being with Sharon in the Factory Studios in Dublin eight or nine years ago listening to her and watching her spend hours and hours creating a violin riff for a track by French wizard Jean Michel Jarre. At the end of the night, I said to her that the melody she came up with was so hauntingly addictive that she should have kept it for the Corrs. She said: "A candle doesn't lose anything by lighting another candle."
I still wonder to this day about her selflessness. "It is not about selfishness or selflessness. It is totally about being in the environment of that piece of music. If I'm inspired by that, I can't take it out and put it into something else." She says the violin lines for her songs always start in her head; whereas the songs tend to come on the piano where she will work out the notes and the lyrics. "I am always close to a piano, especially at home where I am playing for the joy of it."
Sometimes she will sing the melody into the voice recorder on her mobile phone. "You have to get to it fast or you will lose it," she says.
Sharon Corr has never lost it. She is a gargantuanly successful musician. Her success runs contrary to the nun at school in Dundalk who told her she would never amount to anything in her life.
"She told me I'd be a failure. I honestly don't think she had thought it through that much. She was extremely irritated that I'd left an exam early. I finished the exam early because it was my music exam. I didn't have a problem with music exams."
I give her a look.
"Well, I didn't!"
Oh, stop showing off, Miss Musical Genius! Miss Piano Prodigy!
"But my Irish was a complete failure," she hoots. "Oh, dreadful! I got an F in my Leaving Cert. I got a D second time around! That was a hell of an accomplishment for me because my Irish was diabolical. But my music? Not a problem. But I'm sure the nun who said I'd be a failure wasn't very happy. I'm sure she saw my opportunities as her lack of opportunities. She probably had very little opportunity in her life to express herself."
Sharon, along with her sisters Andrea and Caroline, and brother Jim, has had plenty of opportunity to express herself artistically since the group formed in 1991. They have sold almost 30 million records across the globe and played sell-out shows in giant venues far and wide. "When I stopped in 2005. . . by the end of that summer I was pregnant."
You never stopped creating, producing. "Yes, it was just a different sort of production. I needed all my focus, of course, but it totally absorbs your whole body. It absorbs your mind. It is like you are brain-dead to everything else but the baby," she says referring to her baby boy, Cal. "I found that an incredible experience to just totally throw myself into. It was a lovely reprieve from the music industry. It was a very beautiful time. But within months I was really, really missing performing. Like missing a limb. It is so much a part of me that I am not a complete person without being able to be creative like that; without being able to perform and write."
Does the expectation because of The Corrs' success add an extra pressure to releasing your own solo album? "I don't tend to look at it in terms of, 'Oh, The Corrs did so well -- it's just little old me now.' I just go: you write, you play, you sing. That's what you do. I get on with doing that. And I try to do it better and better all the time."
I ask her what is the precise situation with the family business: The Corrs. "The Corrs will work again. We are on a break. We were incredibly successful. We were all hitting certain ages. I needed to have children. Caroline already had two at this stage."
Were you looking at her thinking, "I want to have children"?
"Absolutely. But it wasn't really that that determined it. It felt like a very natural time to stop because we had been on the road literally for 15 years; in each other's pockets very intensely for 15 years . . . It came to a natural pause. I think we may do something next year. It really depends on how everybody is feeling at the time. It is something we want to come back to because everyone feels the urge to do it. I have felt a massive sense of urgency within my own clock to be back out there. Everybody needs to come to it on their own."
When is the other sister going to have a baby? There is a sharp intake of breath. Hers. Not mine.
"That's for her to talk about and not me!" Sharon laughs.
Does she not get broody when she sees you and Caroline with babies? "Ain't gonna go there, Barry! I am respectful of her privacy. I have no idea when Andrea is going to have babies." She laughs so hard I think she is going to cry.
By Barry Egan Sunday Sep 5 2010
F Scott Fitzgerald introduces a character in The Great Gatsby as having an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering with feelings, emotions. And that description goes double for Sharon Helga Corr. We have only been talking for a few minutes and already she is in tears. She can't stop herself, although she's supposed to be here to talk up her debut solo album, Dream Of You.
Her beloved mother Jean passed away on November 24, 1999, in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she was being treated for cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis, a rare lung condition. I had asked Sharon if it had got any easier for her with time. "I think it just startles you every so often. Eventually you start to get on with your life. And then every so often . . ." she says, and then stops. "Something happened recently."
There is another pause -- one of which Harold Pinter would be proud. Then she says she can't remember the incident. Then, just as suddenly, it pops into her memory bank.
"It was recent enough, and I was going for a massage," she says slowly, getting increasingly emotional. "I was sitting in the room and there was another woman sitting there and she was the absolute image of my mother. The funny thing was, she looked at me like my mother would have looked at me. It immediately reminded me of her and immediately I was crying. You don't realise it is still that profoundly upsetting. It always will be, I suppose."
And how do you deal with it, the pain?
"I allow it to happen. I cry. I think, I feel very glad of her just being there. You have me crying already." She cries and cries.
I try to make her smile instead.
I remind her that the first time her husband-to-be, Gavin Bonnar, walked up the driveway in Dundalk to see Sharon in 1995, her mother looked out the window and said to Sharon: "I wouldn't mind him myself."
"Somebody reminded me of that recently," Sharon says, still crying.
I am now apologising.
"You're OK! It's normal! It's normal! And you'll have it your whole life -- your dad died. It's a beautiful thing actually, because it means she's still very strong and I still have a very strong sense of her; because you know sometimes when somebody dies you can't remember their face for the longest time. You find it hard to picture them. And yet they were the most important thing in your life. And yet you struggle to see their face in your own mind. I certainly did struggle with that. But now I feel the further I am away from her death, the closer I am to her.
"It's kind of strange -- especially having children," she says referring to her two kids. She has a son, Cathal Robert Gerard, born March 31, 2006, and daughter, Flori Jean Elizabeth, born July 18, 2007. She says every so often Cal or Flori will give her a look and she'll go: "Oh, my God. That's Mum."
"I don't think they look absolutely like her. But there are certainly mannerisms and a look. You can see the DNA. A smile, a look -- it is just a moment. It could be the way she flexes her hand or something like that. It is the most simple things that affect me. Somebody looks at me a certain way, it reminds me of her."
What did your mother teach you? "How to be a woman," Sharon says, without hesitation. "My mother taught me to be a woman from the minute I was born. Not that I struggled being a woman; it was just that she is a woman; she is a nurturer. She is a mother. She taught me how to be that."
Asked how her father has been getting on since his lovely wife died, she says: "My father is my hero. My father has suffered a lot. And I think he is incredible. He is very brave."
When Gerry Corr met Jean Bell at a dance in the Pavilion ballroom in Blackrock, Dundalk, in 1962 he was instantly smitten. He wrote a poem, Pavilion 62, about the impression that first meeting had on him:
Booze bored
Winter woed
Bed beckoning
Did angels convene
To bring me to Jean
Of wraparound eyes
In passion of pink
First dance
Last dance
We dance forever
The first time Sharon met Gavin was at the Gaiety's late-night Brazilian hooley in the long, hot summer of 1995. The bashful young barrister pondered how best to approach this vibrant vision of Dundalk womanhood. The hour was late and he eventually came up to the young musician, then virtually unknown, and said: "Could I ask you for some free advice? I was going to go and see if there was anywhere open afterwards, is there anywhere else to go?" They married in Clare on July 7, 2001.
"I felt I could trust him. I felt he appreciated me as a person," Sharon says now. "I felt I wouldn't be stereotyped. I felt I wouldn't be placed in any sort of traditional woman's role, which is not something I want to be placed in. I either choose it myself, or I don't. I felt safe. I felt secure. I felt independent. You can be independent and also be looked after."
She didn't lose her identity or individuality in the marriage. She wanted to be a mother, a wife, a musician, go on tour. "That wasn't a question for anybody to decide," she says. "That's my own decision."
So you're a tough woman, Sharon Corr?
"You see," she laughs at the question, "there's one of the things I learned from mother: never, ever give up your independence. Never, ever. Certainly rely on each other but rely on each other to love each other and be there for each other; to sort of struggle together."
She quotes a line from the song It's Not A Dream from her new album: "And at times I know it's hard to stay together/When I'm in your arms there's nowhere I feel better," she half sings to me.
"That is very much about that. There's also stuff like, 'Put your hand in mine, we'll face this world together'. Because the world is a difficult place. And it is a beautiful thing to have someone to share it, to walk through the world with, and to battle the world with, and to enjoy the world with. That's how I see marriage."
I ask her how she feels about the recession. Ireland feels as if it is battling a giant hangover after the giant piss-up of the boom. "There was a lot of drink and a lot of other substances," she says of my drink-and-hangover analogy of the economic downturn in this country.
"Someone said to me at one stage that it was like Indians with firewater. The Celtic Tiger was a very heady cocktail for all of us. None of us were unmoved by it. And if you were unchanged, I think, you're maybe lying," she says. "Ireland became a very different place. A place where people acquired things; where people showed off their wealth; children going around with Dior bags. Just really silly stuff."
The Corrs, to their credit, while not being dressed in rags, were never designer bling-bling. "It wasn't chosen. It was just the way we are. I don't like labels on the front of my T-shirt. I wear what I enjoy wearing and what I think suits me. But it really doesn't matter whether it's Dunnes Stores or Christian Dior. More often than not, I'll go for something much less expensive."
She thinks there is a message in the recession for the Irish nation. She feels that we have been, "reacquainted with our humility, with our welcoming, with our history, with our culture, with our own very deep-ingrained abilities as Irish people; not what we have ,but who we are and what type of people we are. I feel very much in the Celtic Tiger that we lost a massive part of our own identity. We lost it to purchases, to cars. We lost it to houses, to many houses," she says, adding that she never got seduced into buying property other than her home: "No, thank God. I have never been that interested in that sort of thing.
"The collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the bursting of the bubble, I think simplified life for people; or made them re-evaluate what was important," she says profoundly, "Especially their husbands, their wives, their families, their children. Brought us back to the important things in life. 'Are the children OK in school? Do we love each other?' Well, then, we can do anything we need if we have enough to survive, and we can try to make money by going back to what it is we are actually good at.
"The problem with the Celtic Tiger -- and right around the world -- is that people were spinning plates. They were spinning 20 plates at the same time. Everybody thought they were a property developer. Overnight, all of Ireland were property developers. But if you stick to what you know and what you are good at, if you are a really good lawyer or accountant or musician, hopefully you haven't sacrificed it by buying property," she says. "For me, what I choose to do in life, there are two things that I do. I do music and I do kids. That's it. That's all I do in life. Then I have fun with my friends and cook -- blah, blah, blah and whatever -- but I think if you keep it simple and you are true to what you are actually good at, then you know. Most people have a talent for one thing."
Sharon Corr is here in a suite on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons in Dublin to talk about that one talent, which has been superbly showcased on her new album Dream Of You. One of my favourite tracks on it, Buenos Aires, was inspired, she says, by James Joyce's short story, Evelyn. Possibly the stand-out song on this very good album is the cover of Smalltown Boy by Eighties' gay synth-pop trio Bronski Beat. The song was something of an emotive gay anthem. It became an anthem of Shazza's youth. "I remember that song being a huge part of my teenage years," she says. "You know, when you are exploring the world and you have a little more independence. I remember that being the song at every disco that I wanted to dance to. It was just incredible and I just always loved the song."
Then, last summer, she was on holiday in France and she was trying to sleep but was unable to because of the din from the nightclub downstairs. "It was absolutely driving me insane. I couldn't get a wink of sleep. The babies were there," she points, as if they were in their cots in front of her. "We were up the whole night. It was one of those awful nights." She says that she thinks it was about 5am because she was watching the hours go by, when on came Jimmy Somerville singing: "You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case, alone on a platform . . ."
"It just transformed me back to the Eighties," she says. "There is nothing that can do it as well as a piece of music to give you a taste of what you had before, to make you actually feel like you have moved back in time. Because words can't do it like music can, but the combination of them can do it more powerfully than anything. And as soon as I heard it I thought, 'I have to cover that song.'"
Months later she was playing the piano, as is her wont, at home, when she thought again of Smalltown Boy and she realised the song was "very, very soulful and quite bluesy in its approach, and the lyrics just broke my heart. I really got an immense sense of what it is like to be gay in a predominantly heterosexual society and not accepted. And to have what is totally natural to you considered an aberration must be the most awful thing in the world. To have what you do naturally considered in some way sexually deviant, it is insane stuff. I find it insane."
Some of her brother Jim's pronouncements have been considered similarly lacking in sanity. "I feel Jim has a right to his own beliefs and a right to express them, as we all do. They are not necessarily beliefs that I hold myself. But I love him, and he has a basic right to that [freedom of speech]," she says.
I point out that when the Corrs get back together -- as she says they quite possibly will next year -- and go to tour America, the greetings might be muted in places when the locals reflect upon what Jim has said. For instance, his opinion that there was overwhelming evidence that the 9/11 attacks in America were carried out by "rogue elements" of former US president George Bush's "neo-con administration".
"Without a doubt," Sharon seems to agree. "But it is another form of expression. Jim feels very strongly what he feels about. He wants to express it. Jim has been very vocal. Because he holds these opinions it doesn't mean that any of the rest of us do."
In fairness, what Jim says must make her feel awkward. I tell her I sat at Corrs shows in Radio City Music Hall in New York and in Miami in 2000 and the reaction was always appreciative in the extreme, but those same Corrs fans might now feel let down by Jim's comments.
I haven't seen her for a few years. She is still piercingly beautiful. Since the Corrs effectively stopped six years ago -- their last album, Home, came out in 2005 -- Sharon became a mother but she also, crucially, kept her hand in musically. Not that this should surprise anyone.
The uber-violinist and eldest Corr sister certainly knows her away around a tune: she composed possibly the Corrs' two most famous songs, So Young and Radio, she is never away from the piano in her home in Dublin, writing songs, and nor has she ever switched off her imagination in terms of writing killer violin riffs in her head. Indeed, her new album is full of the songs she wrote in her home while on hiatus from the family business, so to speak.
Is it that a musician never stops? "Absolutely. And why would you stop?" she laughs. "It is part of what I do. It is what I've always done."
She can remember the first time she played as a child; she wrote a song when she was six years of age. "It's in my distant memory. It was a little fairy tale. Of course, it was probably complete crap at that stage, but I do remember trying to perform it on the piano at home in Dundalk. It is what I do. You don't interpret it at that stage. You are it before you know you are it. We were immersed in music as children. Mum and Dad were constantly playing and learning songs and performing songs."
Do you think your mother was singing to you when she carried you in her womb? "Oh, there is no doubt. She always sang. There is no doubt. And I did the same with my children. If you sing, you sing." Jean Corr would have sung to her daughter what Sharon now sings to her own children: songs such as My Irish Molly-O and The Sally Gardens. "Oh, Molly, my Irish Molly, my sweet acushla dear," she sings, "You know, a lot of Irish stuff . . ."
I remember being with Sharon in the Factory Studios in Dublin eight or nine years ago listening to her and watching her spend hours and hours creating a violin riff for a track by French wizard Jean Michel Jarre. At the end of the night, I said to her that the melody she came up with was so hauntingly addictive that she should have kept it for the Corrs. She said: "A candle doesn't lose anything by lighting another candle."
I still wonder to this day about her selflessness. "It is not about selfishness or selflessness. It is totally about being in the environment of that piece of music. If I'm inspired by that, I can't take it out and put it into something else." She says the violin lines for her songs always start in her head; whereas the songs tend to come on the piano where she will work out the notes and the lyrics. "I am always close to a piano, especially at home where I am playing for the joy of it."
Sometimes she will sing the melody into the voice recorder on her mobile phone. "You have to get to it fast or you will lose it," she says.
Sharon Corr has never lost it. She is a gargantuanly successful musician. Her success runs contrary to the nun at school in Dundalk who told her she would never amount to anything in her life.
"She told me I'd be a failure. I honestly don't think she had thought it through that much. She was extremely irritated that I'd left an exam early. I finished the exam early because it was my music exam. I didn't have a problem with music exams."
I give her a look.
"Well, I didn't!"
Oh, stop showing off, Miss Musical Genius! Miss Piano Prodigy!
"But my Irish was a complete failure," she hoots. "Oh, dreadful! I got an F in my Leaving Cert. I got a D second time around! That was a hell of an accomplishment for me because my Irish was diabolical. But my music? Not a problem. But I'm sure the nun who said I'd be a failure wasn't very happy. I'm sure she saw my opportunities as her lack of opportunities. She probably had very little opportunity in her life to express herself."
Sharon, along with her sisters Andrea and Caroline, and brother Jim, has had plenty of opportunity to express herself artistically since the group formed in 1991. They have sold almost 30 million records across the globe and played sell-out shows in giant venues far and wide. "When I stopped in 2005. . . by the end of that summer I was pregnant."
You never stopped creating, producing. "Yes, it was just a different sort of production. I needed all my focus, of course, but it totally absorbs your whole body. It absorbs your mind. It is like you are brain-dead to everything else but the baby," she says referring to her baby boy, Cal. "I found that an incredible experience to just totally throw myself into. It was a lovely reprieve from the music industry. It was a very beautiful time. But within months I was really, really missing performing. Like missing a limb. It is so much a part of me that I am not a complete person without being able to be creative like that; without being able to perform and write."
Does the expectation because of The Corrs' success add an extra pressure to releasing your own solo album? "I don't tend to look at it in terms of, 'Oh, The Corrs did so well -- it's just little old me now.' I just go: you write, you play, you sing. That's what you do. I get on with doing that. And I try to do it better and better all the time."
I ask her what is the precise situation with the family business: The Corrs. "The Corrs will work again. We are on a break. We were incredibly successful. We were all hitting certain ages. I needed to have children. Caroline already had two at this stage."
Were you looking at her thinking, "I want to have children"?
"Absolutely. But it wasn't really that that determined it. It felt like a very natural time to stop because we had been on the road literally for 15 years; in each other's pockets very intensely for 15 years . . . It came to a natural pause. I think we may do something next year. It really depends on how everybody is feeling at the time. It is something we want to come back to because everyone feels the urge to do it. I have felt a massive sense of urgency within my own clock to be back out there. Everybody needs to come to it on their own."
When is the other sister going to have a baby? There is a sharp intake of breath. Hers. Not mine.
"That's for her to talk about and not me!" Sharon laughs.
Does she not get broody when she sees you and Caroline with babies? "Ain't gonna go there, Barry! I am respectful of her privacy. I have no idea when Andrea is going to have babies." She laughs so hard I think she is going to cry.
