Intervista 8

A LOOONG INTERVIEW WITH THE CRANBERRIES

The cranberries' first album outsold all other debuts by an Irish band.
As the release of their second coincides with a shaky kind of peace in
Ireland, the band unveil a tougher approach and Dolores calls for the
return of violent justice.

What's so enthralling about Dolores O'Riordan today, as she dances and
poses in a Dublin studio, is the pencillength scar running down the
lefthand side of her leg from her lower thigh to the topof her calf.
Like a twist of clumsily applied dark lipstick, it's an endearing,
flaw, and yet it also conveys a strength of character that seemed so
lacking when The Cranberries first performed in Britain three years
ago.

That night, at London's Camden Underworld, they shuffled on before a
thin crowd of curious hacks and business insiders. The teenage singer
hardly faced the crowd long enough for the assembled photographers to
snap a frame. Despite reverential talk of The Sunsays, The Sugarcubes
and the Cocteau Twins, and O'Riordan's astonishing, eloquent vocabulary
of whoops, lilts and sights, the experience was nevertheless entirely
underwhelming. The reviews unanimously failed to declare The
Cranberries as the future of rock'n'roll.

Dolores clutches the ankle of her brown, kneelength boot and gradually
pulls her foot up to her bum, stretching the scar tissue taut in
accordance with her physio's orders.

"At 18 I left home because I wanted to sing," she recalls. "My parents
wanted me to go to college and things like that. I was really poor for
a year-and-a-half; I remember actually being hungry, like I'd die for a
bag of chips. That's when I joined The Cranberries. I wanted to live in
the city, because I wanted to get tough as a woman. I knew that if I
stayed at home...the only way, as a woman,you could get out of my house
was to get married, that whole Catholic family thing. So I kind of did
a runner."

Six months after their debut appearance, The Cranberries released a
single called 'Uncertain', one of the most depressingly
self-descriptive records of recent memory. By then the consensus was
that the original demo must have been a bit of a fluke. The Cranberries
were officially missing, presumed for gotten.Then a Kafkaesque legal
hassle with a former manager followed, and the band turned up for a
show at Dublin's Rock Garden. They were hardly Aerosmith, but there was
a quiet poise developing. The -odd people who showed up were impressed,
perhaps more than they expected to be, but it all looked - for The
Cranberries- like it might be over before it had really started.

"I know," remembers Dolores. "People turned their backs on us-England,
Ireland,everybody. We went to Europe then, supporting Hothouse Flowers,
and we had Germans saying 'Wo ist der Hothaus Flowrz?'. I was thinking:
What'll I do? Just give it all up? Go home? Go back to my mother's
house, retire, get married, have ten children, what?"

The turning point came in the autumn of 1992, when The Cranberries
finished recording their debut Album for Island with former Smiths
producer and Morrissey collaborator Stephen Street. It was a collection
of gracefully arranged pop songs delivered in a voice destined to
attract more elaborate metaphors about windsurfing angels than Liz
Fraser or Harriet Wheeler could conjure. On 'Pretty', an eerie hiccup
in the title word suggested the tape had been stretched.'Put Me Down'
had a wordless chorus of surely impossible height, range and power. On
'Dreams', a neat slice of straightforward radio pop was subverted by a
giddy descent into counterharmonising caterwauls.

Clearly teetering on the cusp of greatness, The Cranberries played an
arts festival in Wick, Scotland, 15 miles south of John O'Groats. Their
journey from Limerick took them more than 40 hours by car and they went
straight back home the following day. The 60 people and four adolescent
Goths who turned up seemed to enjoy it, the rattling acoustics and
Dolores' hour-long effort to vanish behind her fringe notwithstanding.

As one of the 64-strong audience, I asked guitaris Noel Hogan what he
and his band were doing there. "I have no idea," he replied, "at all."
There was a brilliantly judged pause."And you?" over breakfast the next
morning, Dolores informed her hungover fellow diners that the album
would be called "Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?" When
interviewed she was personable and gently opinionated, but spoke in a
voice barely audible over the tape hiss.

Today, she says clearly: "I did realise that if I stood sideways for
the rest of my life, it wasn't really going to happen. It was cute at
the time, though."

Dolores O'Riordan, in an eventuality that not long ago had seemed as
likely as an IRA ceasefire, has become a pop star. The Cranberries sold
two million albums in America alone, the largest sales for a debut from
an Irish band. When you consider the competition, it's going some.
"Yep," she confirms. "Whatever. Pop star, rock star, alternative rock.
I can do all that."

More surprisingly, she seems to be enjoying herself. Just a week aga
she played to tens of thousands of people, kicking off the second day
of Woodstock II in fine style, escaping just before the arrival of the
torrential rain that turned the festival into a mudbath. She encouraged
the mob to clap along to 'Dreams'.

She got them to sing along to The Cranberries' version of The
Carpenters' 'Close To You' while she did deadpan high-kicks back and
forth across the stage. The night before, as a whirling ghost shrouded
in white, she'd done the same before a capacity crowd of 6,000 in front
of the Summer Stage in New York's Central Park.

It seems quite a metamorphosis. "Of course, yes. I'm...I'm a woman now.
I've travelled, I'm married, I've done lots of things and seen a lot
now. Anyway, inevitable I would feel differently at 18 than when I was
21 or 22, wouldn't I?"

Dolores got married - to Duran Duran's tour mangager Don Burton, no
less - in Tipperary, in white leather boots, bikini dress and lace
leggings. She still guffaws at the memory. "They kicked up war in
Ireland, controversy of the week, like, on the front page of
everything. Giving out shit about my morals, they were. I thought it
was a laugh."

"Yeah, Yeah, I can. The time when we went to one big open-top venue on
that American tour with Suede, this place that held 4,000 people, and
it was all sold out. I just thought 'Oh Jesus'. Every song was too
fast, we were so nervous. We kind of relaxed after that, though. You
just take a few deep breaths, remember that you're still a human being
and get on with it."

This is Noel Hogan, asked if he can think of a particular moment when
it became clear that The Cranberries had cracked it. Noel and drummer
Fergal Lawler are sitting in the lobby of Manhattan's Novotel Hotel, a
place with delusions of post-modern grandeur that resembles a Bulgarian
disco. Noel is much as he was, cautious and quiet, old before his time,
with a rather wonderful wintry wit that breaks cover only rarely.
Fergal, on the other hand, breaks is a man playing the role he was born
for. I'd once entertained the possiblility that he was mute.

This morning, he is the very model of a modern rock'n'roll drummer, his
hair short and awkwardly bleached, his constant smile framed by a wispy
go atee, yammering away at a mile-a-minute. He is charming
("Milk?Sugar?"), likeable, and not above blurting out that "at the end
of the day we just play music that we like, and if anyone else likes it
that's a bonus".

Fergal is especially keen on not letting any of it go to his head.
"There are bands - you see quite a lot of them in Dublin - who've made
one album that hasn't even gone anywhere, and they're walking around in
cowboy boots and leather trousers with sunglasses on indoors, walking
into fuckin' walls. I hate people like that, I really do." Asked if
they've ever once let the temptations of the rock'n'roll myth distract
them, the pair fall briefly silent.

"We trashed those Porsches, remember," says Noel, staring bleakly into
his glass of milk. When reminded that his band have achieved more in
less time than any other Irish act, he idly wonders:"Does that get us
in the Guinness book, then?Must do. I'll keep an eye out for that."
Noel seems genuinely surprised when confronted with the idea of his
gradual elevation to the major league, and then shrugs. "We haven't
really taken any notice. You can't become obsessed with everyone
knowing who the band are, you know. We just always treat it like we
would as if we were playing in...Wick."

"For example," adds a giggling Fergal. Their memories of a recent
fashion spread done for 'Rolling Stone' provide a reasonable
illustration of their attitudes. "We always wear faily shitty clothes,
just jeans and stuff," explains Fergal. "So we thought, why not try it
out and do it for the laugh. We had a good crack, like." Did you keep
the gear, then? "Yeah. I got mine for about 70 quid or something, which
was much less than it was worth." "Well, I bloody gave mine back," says
Noel. "Gladly. I mean, it did get boring after a while. And we were on
the street in these really ...well, I thought, stupid-looking clothes.
We were down in the East End of London, with all these winos coming up
and... well, it was an experience, anyway."

The night before in Central Park, we had been treated tothe innovative
spectacle of Noel in full-tilt guitar-hero mode, crouched over his amp,
flailing away at his guitar, coaxing forth squalls of feedback. The
song he was playing was 'Zombie', the first single from The
Cranberries' imminent, laudably ambitious and again Streetproduced
second album, No Need To Argue. It's an arresting song in style and
content -the former, unabashed ringing rock; the latter, a seething
condemnation of the IRA with Dolores bringing forth a fearsomely angry
vocal 66rom a previously untapped reservoir of bile.

Hardly the universally understandable lovelorn withfulness of 'Dreams'
or 'Linger' and, as such, aneccentric choice of single. One senses the
presence of A Statement of one kind or another."I know that a lot of
people who listen to 'Zombie' won't even know what it's about," says
Noel. "It's more the feeling of it. We don't want to be seen as a pop
band, and 'Linger' and 'Dreams' are pop songs. We don't want to end up
in this hole we can't climb out of."

Dolores, who wrote "Zombie", is more strident about its subject matter.
"It was written on an English tour about a year-and-a-half ago, when
there was a big eruption of trouble between Northern Ireland and
London, and it was doing my head in. For a while, things were gnawing
at me about the whole bombings thing, and I was reading articles about
what was going on in Bosnia and the way women and, more painfully, kids
were being treated.

"At that time there was the bomb in Warrington, and those boys were
killed. I remember seeing one of the mothers on television, just
devastated. I felt so sad for her, that she'd carried him for nine
months, been through all the morning sickness, the whole thing, and
some...prick, some airhead who thought he was making a point, did that.
I mean, hello?"

The fact that the IRA claim their atrocities are carried out for the
greater good of Dolores' homeland seems to strike a particular
dischord: "The IRA are not me. I'm not the IRA. The Cranberries are not
the IRA. My family are not. When it says in the song,"It's not me, it's
not my family", that's what I'm saying. It's not Ireland, it's some
idiots living in the past, living for a dream. OK, I know that they
have their problems up there, but there was no reason why that child
should have been taken, why that woman should have gone through that."

'Zombie' is the only song explicitly about The Troubles to have been
recorded by a major Irish group in recent yuears, unless you count
American rappers House Of Pain's fatuous rebel blusterings. It hits
home with the rawness of its sentiment and a blistering delivery. With
so much discourse-cultural and political-on Northern Ireland concerned
with history, protocol, ideology, semiotics and detail, Dolores wonders
simply, incredulously, what a person is thinking when they detonate a
bomb in a shopping arcade. "What's in your head, zombie?" she demands.

"I really don't give a shit-excuse the culgarity- but don't care
whether it's Protestant or Catholic, I don't care whether it's England
or Ireland. At the end of the day I care about the fact that innocent
people are being harmed. That's what provoked me to write the song, it
was nothing to do with writing a song about it because I'm Irish. You
know, I never thought I'd write something like this in a million years.
I used to think I'd get into trouble."

As for the recent, sudden outbreak of precarious peace brought about by
the Irish Republican Army's ceasefire announcement, Dolores in not
exacly full of optimism. "It'd be marvellous if the country were at
peace, but I'm a little sceptical that peace will remain." It rapidly
becomes apparent that Dolores is one of life's compulsive carers, a
haemorrhaging heart, someone incapable of viewing the world's ills with
any kind of detachment. She talks of what she's been reading about
Bosnia and Rwanda with genuine anguish. She appears truly mystified as
towhy bad things happen to good people, expressing feelings of guilt
that she is living an enviable life while millions aren't. At times,
thinking yourself clever and worldly and her naive and innocent, you
feel as if you're discussing politics with Bart Simpson's little
sister. At others, she has a way of scything directly through the
bullshit that make you embarrassed at your own cynicism. And again, at
other times, it all just gets a bit odd.

Dolores is especially concerned about children. Another new song, the
weird and wracked "The Icicle Melts", would appear to be a reaction to
the murder of Jamie Bulger (" I don't know what's happening to people
today/ When a child can be taken away "). "I love children," she
affirms. "You know, kids, they're so innocent, and so afraid, and
they're the future of the world. How can people harm them ?" But Jamie
Bulger was killed by two other children; surely the young have the same
capacity for evel as the rest of us?

"I think if those two kids knew that the penalty for that was being
hung by the neck, I don't think they'd have done it. I think hanging
should be brought back for murder. I know it sounds sick and
everything, but I do." Don't you think that even the most crime-weary
Daily Mail-reading disciplinarian would baulk at stringing up
pre-teens?

"If they'd known beforehand, though...I still think the penalties are
too nice. One of my brothers is a prison officer. I know, personally,
people who have gone: 'I just got out of prison yesterday and I'm
bored, I've got no money, I'm gonna steal a car and go straight back
in.' Some people like it in there. What happened to the days of being
thrown into the cell and being starved and beaten every day? At least
make them bleed." She is possibly joking at this point. She will
nonetheless run for Home Secretary without my vote. Despite a sense of
justice and taste for retribution that seem to place her somewhere to
the right of Terry Dicks, Dolores repeatedly speaks of wanting to use
her position in some way for the common good.

When asked whether she would give away much of the money she is likely
to earn, she says she'd use it to stage concerts for causes, make an
effort to "heal the world, make it a better place, blah, blah, blah..."

It seems fair to wonder whether her hyperactive conscience is still
tied in with the Catholic faith or any particular Christian belief.
"Well," she says, "I was never like: 'Hello, I'm a Catholic and I'm
into Jesus Christ and John and all the boys,' you know. When I was a
teenager I was, like, falling asleep in church, but when it came to the
hymns, then I was like yes!, because I loved the hymns, the Gregorian
hymns." Great tunes. "Oh, great tunes. That's definitely where
rock'n'roll came from!" She winks, and laughs. "I suppose being brought
up a Catholic was good, as opposed to having a mother into voodoo or
black magic or something. It could be worse."

What did you think when Sinead O'Connor tore the Pope's photograph? "I
thought...she's very hurt by the church. Well, not by the church,
because the church is actually the people, but you know what I mean.
She was taught too many things as a kid that she had a pretty hard time
as a kid.

"I did meet her briefly once. She had a great handshake, you know, I
got a feeling that she was very honest. Too honest. She'd say things to
me, and I'm like:'Shhh! Noooo, tell you boyfriend that, or write a
song, or go to sleep, or watch television.'"

Like Sinead, Dolores has had her share of emotional scars, and they run
far deeper than the weal on her leg. "The Catholic church does, for
some people, leave lots of scars. And I have to say I didn't come out
smiling from my Catholic childhood. I had lots of problems, you know,
lots of hang-ups. But you get over it and get on with life. Whatever
was good, take that with you.Whatever was bad, get over it, get it out
of your head, leave it behind. And that's what I think I did. I don't
go to church very much any more, you know."