Breath of an angel whispering white
It’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be all right
Say it’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be all right
There’s only a long road to Eden
A mountain to climb
But I’m gonna find my way back home
We’re not alone when we’re lonely
Alone when we cry
Together we’ll find a way back home
So here’s where you find me
In a rainy day
Doors are closed
Can’t come out to play
Tears on the pages
For all that is given
Is taken away
And what’s it all for
What’s it all for
When inside out
Begins with joy
And sadness a stranger
Till he overwhelms you
Leaving you raw
And here is where the unloved, unwanted and voiceless, in the back corner of the classroom, with a finger on the lips, found their moment.
A trad piece Caroline had written on the piano two years ago, at last liberated, and loved by each of us, to grow into ‘The Son of Solomon’. And what a moment. For the hands that were to so delicately touch it, like it was something sacred, were to be those of T Bone Burnett.
And all the while, I am people-watching because I love people-watching. I sit above on my balcony as they leave the football game. Three white-haired, bowed men. A woman pushing another in a wheelchair adorned in Chelsea blue. Two girls laughing at a text one is reading. Five boys on phones. Because there are always many more there than who we merely see. Those they are walking towards, those they have left, those they are missing, those who are virtually heard.
And every day, these days, there are moments when I really see that we are all one, and connected and never alone in our blood and beat. Walking down down down under Blade Runner London onto the Jubilee line train to St John’s Wood, and a tap on my shoulder from a stranger alerting me to the wonder of the white feather he had watched dancing on my hair the whole way down. And then, on the train, Tom Petty’s ‘It’s Good to Be King’ in my ears. Alone in a rattling carriage but for a black man who is looking elsewhere, opposite me. And then it gets overwhelmingly loud as the old train screeches through a tunnel, the song reaches that heavenly ending and we look at each other and we see. I cried watching him leave, and he stopped. He turned and he waved at me.
We recorded ‘Bulletproof Love’ that day.
And then another time ascending into the light of a brave new world to recognise Johnny’s back. At that moment I was his angel, the white feather dancing on his hair. For I came upon him disoriented, as if heaven sent.
‘Don’t play that again,’ T Bone said in a rehearsal studio in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Beneath the arch of another train line, where we rehearsed the record for two weeks before we went in to RAK Studios for another two, to record Jupiter Calling. Together, Robbie Malone taking Keith’s place on bass, and the right-hand pillar, Anto, still with us on lead guitar, we recorded as live, reel to reel, like an old Beatles record. Windowed, fairy-lit booths separating us. Anomalies and imperfection revered. Capturing the unrehearsed truth. Ritualistic with the scent of the burning Peruvian wood.
And I like to close my eyes to see now, like Daddy towards his end. Till they’ll close at last and see forever. And maybe they see me, a dark-haired girl standing small on a chair, trying to see through the sepia. The gauzed and clouded veil into them. Gerry and Jean with Gerard in between them. But I find I can’t help living, as they couldn’t help dying, and the living don’t belong with the dead.
I bring Jeanie and Brett to Sunday Mass, too, like Daddy did us. I am not quite as gothic nor as troubled. And my head is held high because I can’t blame God for human fallibility, and if I lost Him, would that not be the greatest casualty? I am afraid it would be for me. Because the truth is, I feel something in churches. A sense of being lovingly watched and an away far beyond where they are, which I just might reach if I listen and believe enough. The heartfelt prayers hang in the frankincense still. I breathe them. They are still in the puff of the once-flamed candle. I breathe out the tears. Breathe out the begging, the forgiveness, the acceptance, the gratitude, the end … The beginning … And they form as ghostly spectres once more, only to dissolve as they rise up and disappear.
I feel it. I feel them. I am them.
‘And in her sleep that night, in her lost old home, her own mama smiled radiantly upon the hope and blessed it …’
Dreaming me …
And the children? Well … Booboy this morning lit a candle and I watched his little mouth as it said:
‘Holy God, I pray that Michael Jackson is alive.’
The hiccups must have got him in the end …
Right now they are playing football in the living room and talking about some guy called Mr Fartbottom. And they are naked. I won’t see this forever. Naked babies I dreamed of.
And what of our own house of God now? Where we were babies and toddlers and children and teenagers and … a band? Caroline was born in their bedroom upstairs while Daddy played the organ below. But our once-home feels like it remains ever in the respectful and solemn gloaming. Even when I turn the lights on and Daddy’s RTÉ Radio 1 (ah, that’s what he was trying to do, too) … As though the life that buzzed in its rooms had all the time been what had lit them up. Had always been its music. It would take a new family to light it up again. Not necessarily to the soundtrack of a family band.
As I write, I know Jaws the organ yawns open in the back of the living room, ever awaiting the touch of young fingers on its cha-cha-cha button. Gaping eager to watch just one more giddy giggle dance. I see the spectre of a grey-socked foot tap-dancing the bass pedals. Left black shoe dismissed for the present, but there it waits … A garda síochána off duty. At ease.
There’s no chicken on the tap, nor peeled potatoes in the water, nor the echo of voices in the hall. No tinkling piano, no scales, nor keys demented. No confiscated records between the dresser and the wall. There’s no odd socks in the hot press, made even under the beds. There’s no lost scissors, no everything drawer, no Blu-Tack on the walls, no school bags dumped in the hall, no burning toast, no bumping chair. There’s no open-closing doors, no footprints on the floors, no clothes on the radiators … All is sad and silent beneath a grieving ephemeral dust sheet.
Imagine, though, it happened. A new family moved in (I feel baa sad for the poor house if it doesn’t) and the walls recognised a song someone played. ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. And they contracted as if to hug themselves in memory of Jean, who danced to that song on repeat one night, about a year before she … said goodbye. And of the family that had grown together between and before them. In dignified mourning the house put a light out forever the day we came home without her. Its first surrender.
No … Not its first …
I had a vivid dream of her about a year after she died. We were seated, all of us, around the kitchen table … rectangular oak then, and our school uniforms were drying on the radiator behind Caroline and Sharon. I was at one end, facing Daddy, and Mammy was to my right in her seat. I was crying because I knew in the dream that she had died and that she was really gone from us. She hushed me so gently and said, ‘Don’t cry, Andrea. There’s no need to cry any more.’
Don’t let it drop. We all held this cup together, from the son of Solomon, chasing shadows down the road to Eden and a love divine, to finish …
free-falling with …
the sun and the moon.
For pop can be like a too-tight dress.
You can’t really breathe.
Or maybe you outgrow it …
I woke this morning,
the day we leave,
sat up in my bed,
with the memory of a last breakfast
and hands, his bitten nails,
on an orange being peeled for me.
Oh Daddy
You are the previous pilgrim
‘Water into Wine’
He travels without moving
Under raven skies
And a voice like a viola
I love to madness
You don’t meet him
But he happens
Like a storm in the night
On a full-moon Tuesday
In September
I feel feel you
In the corner of my room
You turn water into wine
I feel feel you
Tonight
Dust sheet on the piano
And the curtains drawn
And the emptiness present
Like a rain cloud
Am I baptised or do I drown
It’s a curious line
But I miss you to madness
To imagined …
Swan-song d’Amour
Has the little bird found her voice in a swan-song? The echo of a lead scrawl on the flutter-wings of paper. Born to sing. To fly cry die in a London kitchen cupboard.
‘Please Release Me, Let Me Go …’
A lament today, as the sacred wasn’t heard because it too was locked dark, too close and elbowing in a cupboard. Or did it ever make it there at all? To the ‘Ah, well, tell me mister, where do we put the write-offs?’ closet?
Isn’t that a striking colour of red on your one in the middle?
Which one is that?
Don’t ask me sure I can only tell who Jim is.
There’s a brother?!
Haha, you! SLTH.
Was it even real? Was it a pretend record like I thought our very first was when I held it in these same hands, then palm-lined twenty-one years. Fingers leafed through to find it and look, ah, it has its own proper place with its own legitimate file name.
The Corrs.
Corrus, Corr by 4, 4 by Corr (ideal for those cross-country journeys), Corrnucopia (come on now, close that encyclopaedia), Corrupt, Rotten to the Corr (haha, Johnny, will ye stop, for 4 Corrs’ sake) … How do ye like them apple … corrs …
We need a name that says who we are …
I suppose that’s it so.
That was easy, smiles Gerry Corr, born of the late James and Alice, and a celestial ‘Alleluia’ descends from the church of the latter-day Corrs in an unholy boast, and a big resounding pro for the family band pros and cons question reveals itself.
Or is it a dream? Will I wake up in a bed in Georgetown, Washington DC, with a prince for a president? Baby-pink marshmallow breath cooing ‘Oidle oidle’ in a hand-me-down bassinet beside me, and act two has yet to play?
It’s January now and it’s over.
I’ll hold the vinyl of Jupiter Calling in my hands (palm-lined forty-three) when I get home, I’ve decided.
Is this a lament?
No.
This is our triumph.
Radadadada swan-song swan-song d’amour
‘Fair play to yiz now … I always thought yizzerzer music was crap, no harm to yiz, but yizzers have done well for yourselves so yiz have.’
And her discovered wonder whispers on, in a car pulling a trailer towards home.
If this is a song
It’s a love song
It’s a song of praise
For Jean Bell and Gerry Corr
My brothers Jim and Gerard
My sisters Sharon and Caroline
John ‘Johnny’ Hughes
And of course
You …
More hooks than a Russian fishing trawler!!
Acknowledgements
My love and thanks to all those who made this book possible.
Thanks to my manager John Hughes and my publisher Eoin McHugh who believed from the start.
Thanks to Brian Brady and Emmet J. Driver at Dubray.
And thanks to Ann Harrison, Liam Collins and Anna Lucy Hughes.
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