‘Our family will never be the same’

The Nolan sisters have lived through a lot – sexual abuse, cancer and a series of fall-outs – all in the glare of the media. We meet four (but not all) of them It is difficult, frankly, to know where to begin. In the 32 years since the release of their career-defining song, I’m in the Mood For Dancing, the Nolans, Ireland’s most famous singing siblings, have endured everything from musical ridicule to philandering husbands, breech births to bereavements, the early onset of Alzheimer’s in one parent, the revelation that the other was once a sexual abuser and no fewer than three cancer scares. There have been suicidal lows, unlikely rescues by daytime television, an awful lot of panto and the kind of family fallouts that should perhaps have remained private rather than played out within the pages of the tabloids. One way or another, the Nolans have made very heavy weather out of light entertainment. It is a Monday afternoon in central London and the four most instantly recognisable Nolans – Maureen, 56, Linda, 52, Bernie, 50, and Coleen, 47 – are gathered together in the boardroom of their publisher’s office. Up close, they are coiffed, rouged and perfumed, as vivid as Technicolor on the biggest of cinema screens, and similarly loud. Two years ago, they were offered the chance of a reunion tour. The tour went well – “Better than we could have ever imagined,” says Linda – and so began a revival of sorts. A publisher contacted them shortly afterwards, asking if they would like to tell their soap-operatic story in book form. Anne and Coleen have published individual biographies before, but they had never done so as a group. They tried to make it as candid as possible. “What’s the point otherwise?” argues Coleen. This, she confesses, meant it was often painful. “Admitting I cheated on my husband before he cheated on me wasn’t easy, but it was the truth, you know?” Survivors reads less like a typically ghosted celebrity memoir than a series of breathlessly delivered monologues, and the exhausting rollercoaster ride they describe would surely have seen off many lesser mortals. “Life has certainly been eventful,” says Linda, beaming with something resembling a soldier’s pride. They were born in Ireland to Tommy and Maureen Nolan, a husband-and-wife singing duo who would have eight children altogether – six girls and two boys. “It got to the stage,” Bernie says, “where they didn’t talk about whether the new baby was going to be a boy or a girl, but whether they could sing.” The majority of them could and did so professionally from an early age. Like the Jacksons and the Osmonds, they were a family troupe who performed endlessly on back-to-back tours and on television, and to hell with the requirements of a normal upbringing. “Oh, but it was a fantastic childhood, really,” says Maureen, by far the most serene of the sisters. “Yes,” interrupts Bernie, easily the sharpest, who chops out words the way a bad-tempered chef does a carrot, “but it was also abnormal. You look back on our childhood, and that’s what you have to say about it: it was abnormal.” They would regularly play nightclubs during the week, she says, while their father/manager would wait for them at the bar, drinking himself drunk. Then, at 3am, he would drive them home, and leave it to their mother to wake them the morning after for school. “As a parent now,” Coleen says, “you do think, ‘How on earth did they do that to us?’” “It was totally wrong,” says Bernie. “No wonder the child working laws are so much stricter now.” Throughout much of this time, though none of them knew it, their father was also sexually abusing his eldest daughter, Anne. He was frequently violent, too. Anne and his wife – his preferred victims – elected to suffer in stoical silence. Tommy Nolan died, aged 78, in 1998. A year later, Anne unloaded her secret on her sisters, and in 2008 wrote a book about it. “Until that point, we were the kind of family that always swept everything under the carpet,” says Coleen. “But you realise after a while that, actually, you don’t want to sweep everything under the carpet. You want to be able to stand up and speak out, you know?” While three of her sisters nod in agreement, Bernie, lips pursed, doesn’t. “I personally wouldn’t have made that public,” she argues. “I’d have kept it private.” Linda: “It must have been difficult for Anne all those years, because everybody loved our father, absolutely loved him. She must have been seething. People say it was probably cathartic for her to write the book, and I’m sure it was …” If the publication of their elder sister’s book caused a rift within the family, then resentments had already been festering, they suggest, for some time. The rift promptly widened, to include the second oldest sister, Denise, when a record company requested that their reunion tour comprise only the four most successful Nolans. Denise had long since retired, claiming a life of showbiz was not for her, but Anne was actually the longest serving Nolan, singing with the band for a full 40 years. But in 1980, she took two years off in order to have children. It was during that time that the four of them made their biggest splash, particularly in Japan, where they quickly sold more records than the Beatles. The quartet’s late reunion turned into an excuse for all manner of ill feeling to bubble to the surface. “One too many glasses of wine were drunk,” is how Coleen puts it. “Things were said.” The result was a family meltdown. “Anne went to the press after we announced our tour and said all these horrible things about us,” says Linda, looking pained. “That was a shame, but then I suppose I’d have been devastated if I hadn’t been asked.” “Yes,” says Bernie, “but how do I put this politely? I think she would have retained more self-esteem if she hadn’t done it quite so publicly. OK, she may have been dying inside, but she could have done it privately.” But the Nolans never really did anything in private. When one of them went bankrupt, for example, they sold their bankruptcy story to the red tops in order to cover their debts. When Maureen got married, OK! Magazine offered to pay for it. “It seemed a good opportunity,” she writes in the book. “We decided to get married in Spain.” This latest souring made the rift a seemingly irrevocable, but last year it was Bernie who capitulated. “That kind of thing happens when you get cancer,” she deadpans. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, though she looks indomitable today. She explains that the two older sisters sent the four younger ones a letter saying that they should all be friends again, if not for one another then for the sake of the wider family. “But the letter was typed and not signed,” Bernie says. “Typed, and not signed! Can you believe it?” Nevertheless, she and Maureen responded affirmatively, while Coleen and Linda chose not to. Family get-togethers, then, remain awkward affairs, their poor brothers desperately attempting to establish a lasting peace, or at least a temporary ceasefire. “Oh, relations will never be the same again,” Linda says. “Not now.” The conversation then goes full circle, and the sisters talk among themselves about their father again, his drinking, his violent tendencies. “Why didn’t our mother just leave him?” Coleen wonders. “You didn’t, back then,” Bernie states. Maureen, looking sad, sighs. “All this bad talk about him makes me feel sorry for him,” she says. “It’s difficult. You don’t forgive a parent when they do the things he did, but you do continue to love them regardless. And for three quarters of the time, he really was a fantastic father. The good memories,” she decides, “stay with me far more than the bad ones.” Linda aside, the Nolans all have children themselves now, which means that the prospect of future Nolan entertainers looms large. Bernie is already trying to rein in her 11-year-old daughter, who daily demands an agent, and her own moment on the stage. Have the women learned from the mistakes of their parents and will they exercise excessive caution with their own offspring? “Have we learned from our parents’ mistakes?” Coleen says. “I’ll say. My mother had eight children. I stopped at three.” Survivors: Our Story is published by Pan Macmillan for £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 Family guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 8, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.