Articolo 2

Handling the fruits of fame (April 23, 1999)
The Cranberries come back from exhaustion and overload
By Steve Morse, Globe Staff, 04/23/99

The Cranberries are back on the road, which is a minor miracle. The band had
sold 23 million albums and become the top Irish group since U2 before
crashing and burning on tour three years ago. Singer Dolores O'Riordan -
exhausted from a diet she describes as coffee, cigarettes, lots of wine,
little food, and no sleep - was too weak to go on. She dropped off the tour,
throwing the band's future into doubt.

It looked like the end of the line, but an inspiring rebirth has occurred.
The Cranberries have a vital new album, ''Bury the Hatchet,'' due Tuesday,
followed by a theater tour hitting the Orpheum for a sold-out show May 3,
then a likely shed tour later in the year.

As for O'Riordan, she has a child (Taylor, age 1), a new regimen (yoga), and
a new optimism that is the opposite of the depression that plagued her on
the last tour.

''I hadn't slept for about three months,'' O'Riordan recalls of that time.

''And that started to affect me. I was having shakes and panic attacks
during the day. Then I was having a few drinks to try to go to sleep,
because I didn't want to start taking sleeping pills. And I was smoking
cigarettes like a lunatic.''The fun was gone.

''The thing is, we never really took a career break for seven years. I
joined the Cranberries when I was 18,'' says the pixie-like, powerful-voiced
singer, who is now 27. ''I lived in buses. I didn't really have anything
else. I didn't feel like a female and I ended up really kind of isolated.

''Everybody thinks you're so happy and so wealthy and such a big star, but
you're really kind of lonely and don't know how to stop it,'' she says of
that grind. ''It was a very interesting learning experience. I went very
close to the edge, but it's nice to have been strong enough to get through
it. I'm lucky I had family, a good husband, and my mom. People like that
help balance you. When you're feeling down and bad, it's the people that
love you who kind of sort your head out for you.''

So much has happened to the Cranberries in these last three years. Guitarist
Mike Hogan and drummer Fergal Lawler have gotten married. But O'Riordan has
changed her life the most. She quit cigarettes when she became pregnant and
she's exchanged many nights of wine-drinking for early-to-bed evenings that
allow her to get up and watch ''Sesame Street'' with Taylor.

''Big Bird rules in our house,'' says O'Riordan, who is married to Canadian
tour manager Don Burton.

Giving birth - and she hopes to have another child someday - provided
O'Riordan with a another excuse to cleanse her lifestyle. ''I breast fed for
three months and it was just all very good. It really makes you realize how
important and precious the body is.''

The Cranberries didn't see much of each other in that first year off the
road, though. ''I missed the boys when I was pregnant,'' says O'Riordan. But
then the group met and discovered that its chemistry was still intact. The
band came up with new music (principally written by guitarist Noel Hogan,
brother of Michael), then O'Riordan added the lyrics.

This time, the lyrics are sunnier than those on the band's last album, the
often lugubrious ''To the Faithful Departed.'' That disc contained the
antiwar hit ''Zombie,'' but it also turned off some fans who preferred the
group's earlier and breezier acoustic-pop, such as its first hit,
''Linger.'' The new album addresses a few social issues (''Fee Fi Fo'' is
about child abuse), but for the most part has an upbeat flavor harking back
to the group's sound when it was first discovered in the town of Limerick.
''Now, it's more like when we started,'' O'Riordan says. ''We're also more
relaxed going onstage and having a laugh and just enjoying it all. You know,
there's no point in getting too worried about things, because life is too
short. ''It's a lot more fun now, really. And I don't plan to get into the
negative side of life anymore,'' she adds. ''I tend to kind of shy away from
it, because having been there, I've been sucked into that kind of mentality,
that down-and-out thing. ... I try to think about optimism. I try to look at
the beautiful things in life.''

She's also trying to keep her distance from the negative side of the
media, especially from the tabloid press that dogged her when the
Cranberries became stars. The ugliest moment occurred when, after she
returned to Ireland following the last tour, her grandmother died and
O'Riordan went to the morgue to identify the body. ''Some [expletive]
journalist came and took a picture of me there, and the next day it was on
the front cover of a tabloid. It was horrible. I was pregnant and my granny
had just died. I was sick and I said to my husband, `Let's get out of
here.'''

She and her husband went to live temporarily in Toronto, which helped calm
her nerves. ''I just stayed there awhile until the Cranberries became a
historical event, really. When it came to the media, they just totally
forgot about us, and it was brilliant. It was suddenly the Spice Girls, and
it was Oasis, and it was All Saints, and all these things were coming in and
we weren't in the papers anymore. It was like, ''Yes! They're leaving me
alone at last.'''We just sort of disappeared and it was perfect, the way we
wanted it,'' says O'Riordan. ''Then after another year, I had my baby, and
he was growing up, then you start to think about writing songs again. It's
just like when the band began. Nobody knows us, nobody cares, and you're
just writing songs for the laughs. This [new] album is almost like a first
album in a way.'' Next year will mark the band's 10th year (''We're fossils
now,'' she says), but O'Riordan is going into the next millennium with her
eyes wide open. She's cut her coffee intake to two cups only in the morning,
while her band has also picked up the health habit. The group has cut back
its nearly daily schedule of performing as a means to stay sane.

''Now we do a gig and then we take a day off,'' she says. ''It's just so
much more fun than before, when we used to just gig, gig, gig. We didn't
really have a life, so we used to get kind of sick of it. But now it's
really nice, because you enjoy the gigs a lot more.''

This story ran on page C15 of the Boston Globe on 04/23/99.