We will also be completing the recording of a new studio album as previously announced, which we also started last year and for which Dolores had already recorded the vocals. All going well we hope to have this new album finished and out early next year.

'She was on a roll': the Cranberries on the last days of Dolores O'Riordan



The last time the Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan saw Dolores O’Riordan was in the Limerick hotel where we are now standing, in November 2017. He had agreed to do an interview with a Chinese journalist: the band are huge in China, apparently, and had a run of arena gigs booked there. O’Riordan was living in New York and she wanted distraction; she decided, in a typically whimsical move, to come to meet the journalist, too, taking the direct flight to Shannon airport. She was in good spirits, although ongoing back problems – a slipped disc, from picking up a guitar – had led to a cancelled tour that summer.

Christmas came and went, but the Cranberries were still recording. O’Riordan would send Hogan vocals by email. On 14 January, she emailed him new songs: she had flown to London to mix an album with her side project D.A.R.K. At 1.12am on 15 January, calling from the Park Lane Hilton, she left a friend an excited voicemail in which she said a new recording was sounding “fucking terribly good”. At 2am, she spoke to her mother. Later that night, she died. I meet the band four days before an inquest ruled that the 46-year-old had drowned accidentally in the bath, with high levels of alcohol in her blood. Hogan looks around the lobby and says it is hard to believe that the last time he saw her it was somewhere so mundane.

On the top floor, with its views out over the Shannon river, three Cranberries bear the mark of men still coming to terms with bereavement. Like many bands who lose a member, they threw themselves into activity. Their new album was nearly finished, so they completed it; April and May passed by in a blur. The strangest thing, they tell me, was that working in the studio was not all that different. The three of them would always record by day and Dolores would come in to sing at night, alone, with producer Stephen Street.

“We’d pass each other in the corridor,” says bassist Mike Hogan, Noel’s brother, who was only 20 when the band achieved international fame. “Dolores would say: ‘You know that thing you recorded?’ I’d say: ‘You mean the thing that took me five hours to get right?’ She’d say: ‘Yeah, it’s not working!’ This time around, there were nights when we were waiting, looking for her to come in the door.”

“Waiting for her to come in, like,” echoes his brother. “I found that, at night, I was so exhausted. Not physically, but mentally; those months from when Dolores passed away were intense.”

The pair, along with drummer Fergal Lawler, are a close-knit circle, managed by one of O’Riordan’s five brothers. She grew up 10 miles out of Limerick in Ballybricken, but they are from the town and met when breakdancing in their teens in the mid-80s. They first saw Dolores when she was 19 and tried out for their band; she was painfully shy and quiet, they all agree, but “when she sang”, says Noel, “I wondered how and why she wasn’t already in a band. I didn’t want to question it. We were lucky enough that she had come into this room.”

While the four of them shared a love for the Smiths and the Cure, O’Riordan’s vocal style stood alone: it was described by a Melody Maker journalist in 1991 as “the voice of a saint trapped in a glass harp”. She learned her yodel from her dad, a country music fan, and there were church influences, too. The music mag went to her family home to meet the band and painted an intriguing, kitsch picture: a Jesus clock and holy water from Lourdes, with Christmas turkeys being bred in a shed in the dark. She adored her father, a farm labourer who was injured in a motorbike accident that left him unable to work; she is buried alongside him in St Ailbe’s Church, Ballybricken.

O’Riordan recalled an idyllic childhood – warm beds, hearty dinners, a fair dose of spirituality – but, in 2013, she told the Irish Independent that between the ages of eight and 12 she had been sexually abused by a family friend. Throughout her life she would flip, in interviews, between poetic positivity and confession.

The heady combination of raw, emotional lyrics and evocative Irish flavours quickly caught the attention of the wider world: the very first song O’Riordan wrote for the band was Linger, and it remains their biggest hit. Although their debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, tanked the first time round, after two US tours Linger was put on heavy rotation by MTV and upon its rerelease the album went to No 1 in the UK. By 1995, it had sold 5m copies in the US. It is being reissued in a box set next month.

Despite their huge commercial success, the Cranberries were never exactly cool in a UK smitten with Britpop; the US was always their second home, where Irish connections were felt so strongly. O’Riordan wrote an international protest song in Zombie, her response to the IRA bombing that killed two children, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, in Warrington in 1993. Its lyric was so powerfully abstract that Parry’s father, Colin, only realised, on O’Riordan’s death, what had inspired it. Their label was wary of the track’s politics, but the band were not.

“In the 30 years with Dolores, what she wanted to do lyrically was her thing; we never interfered,” says Noel. “That first album was all about relationships that she’d had through her teenage years, and to stand there and spurt that out to everyone, you could open yourself to ridicule – but she didn’t care. That remained with her always. She wrote what she felt was right.”

When fame hit, they were all about 20. It was always tougher for Dolores, says Mike, being on the front of the local paper, buying fish fingers at the supermarket. She broke her leg badly on a group ski trip during the recording of their second album – she wrote songs from her hospital bed – and, during her protracted convalescence, she began to struggle with depression and anorexia. By 1999, she was listed as the fifth-richest woman in the British Isles, but fame was wrecking her nervous system. By 2003, the band were “burned out”: they saw very little of each other for six years, with O’Riordan living in Canada with her husband, Don Burton, and their three young children. There was a reunion in 2009, but you get the sense of a band kept on their toes by an unpredictable leader.

“She would say we needed some time off and a week later she would be bored,” says Noel. “Her emails were like text messages. Fifteen of them, but they’re all like two lines, at two o’clock in the morning …”

“Sometimes when you did want time off you’d be dreading seeing her ringing,” his brother smiles.

After her split from Burton, she spent a period living in hotels in New York. In 2014, she had a manic, paranoid episode on a flight from JFK to Shannon and assaulted the cabin crew, reminding them who she was. Shortly afterwards, she invited the Irish journalist Barry Egan into her home and told him how much trouble she was in; it was a cry for help from someone who had grown up in the public eye and who possibly struggled in periods of relative obscurity. “My life has no control,” she said. Shortly afterwards, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. How much did the band know about her problems in her later years?

“It was only the last few years that she started talking about psychological problems, because she didn’t know herself,” says Lawler. “She saw a few different therapists and realised what she had and she started getting treatment for it.”

“She was a lot more herself,” says Noel. “Especially last year, when we were rehearsing: you wouldn’t even know, because they had found the right cocktail of whatever it was she needed to be on. There wasn’t even a case of having to ‘work around it’. The hardest thing was her back, because playing live she could not move as freely as she used to.” The new album gave her something to focus on, he says. “She was really psyched about getting back out and really looking forward to China, because that was a big tour for us.

“Dolores had an awful lot going on and she was on a roll of being able to write,” he continues. “Lyrically, the new album is very strong. She always said she found it hard to write songs when she was happy. She always said: put a bit of misery in her life and it was easier.

“We will do this album and then that will be it,” he adds. “There is no need to continue.”

The band step out on to the balcony to do the photoshoot. Noel stood out here with O’Riordan the last time he saw her. This is new for them: no frontwoman, no idea how to stand, to pose, without their focal point.

“With Dolores, doing pictures was so easy, because you knew exactly what to do,” he smiles. “Just all get behind her.”

The Cranberries on Their Surprise Hit Debut and Final Album With Dolores O’Riordan

When Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, the Cranberries’ major-label debut, was released in March of 1993, “we were gutted,” says Noel Hogan, the band’s guitarist and co-songwriter.

The reason? “It came out and basically disappeared without a trace,” he recalls. “So we figured, ‘That’s it. We’re done now.’ We were doing empty clubs as an opener in the U.K. and it was pretty depressing. We really, really thought, it’s just a matter of time before we get that call [from Island Records] and they say, ‘We’re going to move on, thanks very much.’”

The band did in fact receive a call from their label, though the message that was relayed was quite different. “We were told we had to drop off our tour and come straightaway to America,” Hogan says.

Apparently, college radio had picked up on one of Everybody Else’s singles, the lilting, strings-adorned ballad “Linger,” and it was quickly taking off. “You could have knocked us over with a feather, we were so surprised,” he says. “And so the next day we flew to Denver and did our first gig in the U.S., opening for The The. We walked out onstage that first night and everyone in the theater knew our songs. And from there, everything changed.”

Fueled by “Linger” and the buoyant “Dreams,” Everybody Else Is Doing It went on to sell more than 6 million copies worldwide, beginning an impressive run that would see the Limerick, Ireland–based band — Noel, his brother and bassist Mike Hogan, drummer Fergal Lawler, and singer and co-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan — become one of the most successful pop-rock acts of the Nineties. Their next album, 1994’s No Need to Argue, went on to sell more than 17 million units, and its first single, the O’Riordan-penned smash “Zombie,” is currently enjoying new life on the charts courtesy of an updated cover from L.A. groove-metal act Bad Wolves.

Last year, the four Cranberries reconvened to begin work on an expanded edition of that life-changing debut album in celebration of its impending 25th anniversary. But as they got close to completion, tragedy struck. On January 15th, 2018, O’Riordan, 46, was found dead in the bathtub in her hotel room at the London Hilton. A later inquest determined she had drowned accidentally after excessive alcohol intake. O’Riordan had been vocal over the years about struggles in her life, from mental-health issues to being sexually abused as a child and grappling with fame as the very visible face of a very popular band. But, says Hogan, the singer was in a good place at the time of her death. “When I heard the news, it just didn’t add up,” he says. “So I knew she didn’t do this deliberately. And the inquest confirmed that.”

The days and months following O’Riordan’s death saw an outpouring of grief from peers in the music community and fans across the world. But few were hit as hard by the loss as the three men who had been her bandmates for just under 30 years. “Everything just fell apart,” Hogan says.

Eventually, the remaining Cranberries did regroup and complete the 25th-anniversary edition of Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, which, in addition to the original 12-track album, gathers B sides, studio outtakes, early EPs and demos (including material from when the band was known as the Cranberry Saw Us) and previously unreleased live performances in a deluxe package that is due out October 19th.

In addition, they’ve also put the finishing touches on a new record, which features songs and vocals O’Riordan wrote and recorded with the band prior to her passing. That album, titled In the End, will also be the Cranberries’ last. “The Cranberries is the four of us, you know?” Hogan says. “Without Dolores, I don’t see the point of doing this, and neither do the boys.”

In the End will see release in early 2019, “and we’ll leave it at that,” he says. But before closing the book on the Cranberries with a final album, Hogan took some time to talk with Rolling Stone about the one that started it all.

When you were compiling the reissue, did you come across anything that surprised you or really struck you?
You know, the most surprising thing for me was actually the album itself, because even though we’ve played songs like “Dreams” and “Linger” at almost every show, I hadn’t listened to the whole record in probably 20 years or more. And I’m not trying to be cocky, but I was very surprised at how great it sounded. And it brought back a lot of nice memories as well, because it was a month or two after January [and O’Riordan’s death] by the time we got to sit in the room and remaster it.

One thing that is clear from listening to the record is that the classic Cranberries sound was already fully formed even at that early stage in your career.
Yes. And you know, the album’s 25 years old, but some of these songs are even older than that, because we wrote them when we first met. We were so young, and all we were doing was working to the best of our abilities. We had only playing a couple of years, and we weren’t the best musicians in the world. But that actually helped to make the Cranberries sound. Because if we had been better musicians that album probably wouldn’t have been the album it was. Not probably — definitely.

What do you recall about Dolores coming in to audition for the band in 1990?
I can still remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Sunday afternoon. And everyone kind of knows the story of how we had a singer before Dolores [Niall Quinn], and that it was a completely different sounding band at that time. But when Niall left, I had started to write, and I had stuff like “Linger” and “Dreams,” which were just instrumentals at that time. And we’d been playing them, it could have been for up to six months, just kind of hoping that someday we’d find a singer. And then I’d run into Niall and he said, “My girlfriend knows a girl who’s looking for a band that’s doing original stuff.”

So Niall came up with Dolores on that Sunday and I remember she was shy, very soft-spoken. A very quiet country girl. Not the Dolores that everyone grew to know. And she comes in and we’re just kind of a gang of young guys sitting around the place. It must have been very, very intimidating for her. But she sang a couple of songs that she had written herself, and she did a Sinéad O’Connor song, “Troy.” And then we did some of our stuff. I remember we definitely played the instrumental version of “Linger.” I was just shocked that she wasn’t in a band already. Because the minute she sang, you know, it was like your jaw drops at her voice. When she was getting ready to leave I gave her a cassette that had the basics of “Linger” on it and I said, “Do you want to take this home and work on it?” And within a few days she’d come back with basically the version of the song that everyone knows.

How was it to work with Dolores in a songwriting capacity?
It was amazing, to be honest. I don’t think I really realized it at the time. Both of us, you know, we were just kids, 17, 18 years old, and we both had a passion. Dolores was musically far superior to me, because she had been doing it all her life. She had been singing and she had taken piano lessons. She had done all the things that you would expect somebody that’s an accomplished musician to do. Whereas I had just been a listener of music. I’d been a massive fan of music, particularly English alternative bands. But I had only started playing guitar a couple of years before that. But she often said that’s what she liked about my playing — the simplicity of what I did left room for her vocal. There wasn’t someone filling the thing up unnecessarily. And the excitement was always when one of us would give the other a track and see what they would come back with. To the very end, that was my favorite part, when she would send me back a song.

At the time that “Dreams” and “Linger” became huge hits, mainstream music, especially here in the States, was geared toward heavier and more aggressive styles like grunge and hardcore rap. Did you recognize that you were having huge success with a sound that wasn’t particularly in fashion?
We did. And we never really got to the bottom of that, you know? We couldn’t figure it out. I remember when Nevermind came out and grunge became such a massive, massive thing. And “Linger,” it’s the complete opposite of that; it’s jangly guitar and strings. But still, it seemed to be accepted by the same kind of audience. But one thing Dolores and I always agreed on is that we would just write songs that we would want to listen to, and that we felt were good. Because trends come and go. And so for the 29, 30 years we were together, we just did what we felt was right. That might lead to different levels of success, but at least you can always stand by what it is you’ve done.

Being the face and the voice of the band, did Dolores find it hard to cope with success at such a young age?
I think she found it most difficult going back to Ireland. Because Ireland is a small country, and not a lot of huge music celebrities, particularly at that time, had come out of Ireland — you had U2 and probably, you know, Thin Lizzy, who are the two I can remember that would have had the most success. And we were so young. I know she started to find it harder and harder to go back home because people wouldn’t leave her alone. The boys and myself, we had a touch of that, but we stayed very much within our circle of friends that we had grown up with. So when we went home and we went out, we were in many ways protected a little bit. Whereas Dolores had grown up in the country [in Ballybricken, outside of Limerick] and most of her friends were out there. So if she went into the city it was a bit more difficult. So as the years went by she spent less and less time in Ireland. It was easier to be in places like New York, where you can kind of be anonymous and disappear into the crowd.

In recent years Dolores had begun to open up publicly about some of the personal struggles she had experienced in her life. With her passing, do you feel like those parts of her life have been magnified in the press in an effort to find an explanation for what happened?
Yeah, it definitely amplified it a bit. And look, it’s par for the course. We learned very early on that if you do this for a living, you’re putting yourself out there. It’s why Dolores decided she was going to be very open about it in the first place. Because she felt, “I have nothing to hide here because I haven’t done anything wrong.” And to be fair, most people were like, “Good on you for talking about it.” Because things like mental-health issues, they’re far more common than people would like to admit.

But the terrible thing about what happened with Dolores is that she had gotten on top of all of that in the last few years. Last summer, she and I began writing what will be the next — the last — Cranberries album, which we finished a few weeks ago. And because of that we would speak constantly, either by phone or by email. We’d been in touch literally up to the day before she passed away, and we were discussing when we were going to go in and start recording, because we had all the songs written. So that’s why when I heard the news it just didn’t add up.

What can you tell us about the new record?
It’s a very strong album. Especially lyrically — it’s very moving. When Dolores and I first discussed writing a new album she was very keen. She kept telling me, “There’s so much going on in my life and I have so much to say.” So I went to France last June on my own to start writing, and then I started sending her stuff. She was based in New York at that time. And we were just going back and forth, going through different ideas. And by the time we got to December we basically had the album written. We knew what the stronger songs were, we knew which ones needed a bit more work. And then literally up until the day before she passed away — she passed away on a Monday, and this was Sunday morning — I had an email from her with another song saying, “Look, I don’t know if I sent you this one yet, but listen to it and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And the plan after that was that we were going to get in touch with the two boys and take it from there.

And then obviously the news came in and everything fell apart. But once the dust settled, I started going through all this stuff I had. And I contacted the boys, because I hadn’t really spoken to them about it yet, and I sent them what I had. They were really, really pumped about the whole thing and wanted to do it as well. But we were very careful that we didn’t destroy the legacy of the band by doing this kind of glued-together album that didn’t need to be done if it wasn’t strong enough.

What does the new material sound like?
Honestly, it’s probably as close to the first two albums as we could have gotten, especially lyrically and sonically. It’s very, very similar, and we deliberately tried to do that. We just said, “Let’s go back to the original Cranberries sound.” And anyone that’s heard it has agreed: “Yeah, you managed to do that.”

What’s the name of the record?
So there’s a song called “In the End,” it’s the last song on the album, and it just kind of summed up the whole album and the band. Because it’s definitely the end of it for us. So we’ve called it that. In the End.

So after this album, that will be it for the Cranberries?
Yes, that’s it. None of us wants to go ahead after this. But we’re delighted that we have this last album to give to fans. And you know, we’ve had an amazing run — far greater than a lot of bands. I think we’ve written some good songs, some great albums. And we’ve got great memories and we’ve had experiences that completely changed the four of us. Our lives would have been so much different if we hadn’t had this band. But the Cranberries was the four of us. There’s no reason to do it without Dolores. So we’re going to leave it after this.

The Cranberries Unveil 'All Over Now' Video From Final Album



The Cranberries upcoming album may be called In The End, but things are really just beginning for the album the Irish group finished in the wake of singer Dolores O'Riordan's death in January of 2018 -- including the track "All Over Now," whose animated video is premiering exclusively above.

"It's kind of a mix, really," guitarist Noel Hogan says of In The End's impending April 26 release. "It's exciting, because you've finished a pretty good album and are putting it out there. But there’s a lot that comes with it, with Dolores not being around and everything. And it's also the end of the band once it does come out. So those things pop into your head along the way. It's a weird feeling of a kind of happiness, then sadness, I guess."

Hogan and O'Riordan had started writing songs for the Cranberries' eighth studio album during the summer of 2017, and the group was planning to record in earnest, as well as tour in China, during 2018. "It was being written as another Cranberries album," Hogan says. "The last thing on our minds was that this would be the last album we'd write." O'Riordan, he adds, was "in great spirits about the future" after coming out of a rough patch that include divorce, alcoholism and mental health issues and was looking forward to recording again with the rest of the band -- including Hogan's brother Mike on bass and Fergal Lawler on drums -- and original Cranberries producer Stephen Street.

"That summer in particular she kind of turned a corner where she felt like, 'That part of my life is over and I'm kind of moving on, finally' -- which makes (her death) all the harder to deal with," Hogan recalls. "A lot of the subject matter in (the songs) is really about taking stock of that previous three or four years and the end of that time in her life and putting it behind her and moving on from that. Now the songs become something else, even though they're not meant to be about the end of all that. I'm sure people will read more into it than was intended to be there."

The rocking "All Over Now," a song about domestic abuse that opens the album, was one of the first tracks Hogan and O'Riordan demoed for the album. The group hadn't considered what it wanted to do about videos for the project and was somewhat relieved when BMG brought animator and director Daniel Britt's work to the table back in December. "We thought animation was the way to go -- it was either that or have actors in the video," Hogan says of the impressionistic clip, which depicts the light of hope amidst depressing circumstances. "But animation is something we'd never really done, so we thought it would be nice."

Hogan says discussions are also underway about a video for the album's next single, "Wake Me When It's Over." "The record company is really kind of pushing for a mix of old footage of us," he reports. "I don't know if that's something we want to do. We kind of feel a video should in some way represent the song more so than be just a bunch of clips that look nice. It's kind of an ongoing discussion at the moment."

What isn't open, however, is the future of the Cranberries. The Hogans and Lawler will not continue the band without O'Riordan, and they feel that playing together in any form isn't possible, either. "Anything where the three of us are in a band again, it's always going to be compared to the Cranberries," the guitarist explains. "A lot of people said, 'Why don't you just get another singer and move on,' but Dolores was such a massive part of this band, so...it would just feel wrong to us. We just decided, 'Look, we're doing this album. We're lucky to be doing that, so let's put it to bed and move on with our lives.' And it probably will be separate ways. To do anything together, there's always going to be that shadow of the Cranberries. It's a long, very big shadow to try and get out from under."

For his part Hogan plans to explore songwriting with others -- "I've only written with Dolores, basically, for 30 years," he notes -- and try his hand at film scoring and soundtracks. He'll continue to be involved with archival anniversary issues of the Cranberries' albums, with a 25th anniversary edition of No Need To Argue expected this fall. And Hogan says the remaining trio may return to a documentary project that was started a few years ago and put on hold. "There'd never been one made about the band, so we started one and did individual interviews, but then we went on tour and forgot about it," Hogan says. "Obviously last year when Dolores passed away it was the last thing on our minds, but it's something we may look at again; Now that the band is actually finished it will have a conclusion, whereas before it was only going to be up to a point. So we'll see; That's probably a couple years down the road by the time that would see the light of day, 'cause there's a lot to be done yet. But I think it would be worthwhile."