TV: Of Corrs it sounds easy for the Irish

By EWAN MCDONALD

'Tis the season to be Celtic. Hot on the brogues of last night's The Irish Tenors concert comes a special from the Irish family band the Corrs.

The three sisters and a brother play gentle traditional folk and easy-listening pop that is to music what Lord of the Dance and Riverdance is to ... well, enough to say that there are plenty of devotees out there to watch the band's contribution to MTV's Unplugged series (TV One, 10.35 tonight).

Hot off the satellite, it was recorded at Ardmore Studios just outside Dublin on October 5 and features the siblings on their traditional instruments accompanied by the 60-piece Irish Film Orchestra. The show coincides with release of the Unplugged CD in New Zealand.

That line about being recorded in a studio with an orchestra should tell you that this is not one of those spirited acoustic gigs at which performers like Eric Clapton and Nirvana shone, but a far more "produced" event.

The Corrs reprise material from their two albums with the occasional instru-mental, like the jig Toss The Feathers (too well-behaved), and covers of REM's Everybody Hurts (too pretty, lacks the ache of Michael Stipe's voice) and Jimi Hendrix' Little Wing (too nice, too sweet, too plastic).

There's irony, too, in their oh-so-mannered version of Phil Lynott's Old Town. If there was one Irish band that wouldn't sit comfortably alongside the Corrs' American-accented pop, it was Lynott's rough and unready Dublin rockers Thin Lizzy.

But that won't bother the Corrs' constituency. It's just as well for their record company that platinum is not a dwindling resource - if the family continues to sell CDs at the present rate they'll be needing plenty of the stuff for the commemorative discs.

Their first album, Forgiven, Not For-gotten (1995), made the English top 5. But it was Talk On Corners (1997) that established sisters Sharon, 29, Caroline, 26, Andrea, 25, and big brother Jim, 34, as middle-of-the-road heavyweights.

It captured the No 1 spot on the British chart six times and took a mortgage on the top 10 that only lapsed this year. At one stage Forgiven, Not Forgotten resurfaced and the group had the No 1 and No 2 albums in the same week.

Talk On Corners went 19-times platinum in their home country, six-times platinum in New Zealand and sold by the container-load around the world.

The Corrs are recording a third studio album in Dublin. Better tell the miners.