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Getting to see The Cranberries in 2012 at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. was simply one of the best rock concerts I've ever been to, especially considering I wasn't very familiar with The Cranberries before that evening.

Sure I knew "Zombie" and "Linger", their two big radio hits during the mid-1990's. But what I didn't know is The Cranberries have been releasing music on and off since then, including their 2012 album, Roses (which is what they were touring at the time).

Dolores O'Riordan is truly a vocal master, seeing her perform live, I was blown away at how completely identical she sounded to the songs on the album. In the age of auto-tuning, Dolores and The Cranberries brought such an authentic, almost past world sound to the concert that night, it was hard not to be swept up in their total Irish whimsical charm.

Their style is a bit more melodic than the angsty 90's rock vibe I remember being drawn to, like so many other listeners of alternative rock. Instead of moshing and crowd surfing, the audience was mostly relaxed, happy, and just starstruck by The Cranberries beautiful, yet sometimes still dark music.

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The show was amazing! The band performed extremely well and the mood in the concert hall was buzzing. Dolores' voice remains one of the most unique voices by a band's lead singer and it was an honour for me to see and listen to the band live. Definitely one of my most awesome concerts ever! :)

The Cranberries show was amazing!

all the classics in a great show! definitely worth it!

But the opening show, cant remember the name of the duo, was terrible... sounded like playback

I thought the concert was canceled according by you guys.

Nothing to review. All United States shows were cancelled. Refund received. Waiting to see if a another tour is announced. All depends on Dolores health. Keeping an eye on this.

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Tour Itinerary

About this section (tour itinerary).

EEIDI   |   NNTA   |   TTFD   |   BTH   |   WUASTC   |   Stars   |   Summer 2003 Tour   |   AYL   |   20 Years   |   Roses   |   Summer Tour 2016

U.S. TOUR ITINERARY SUMMER, 1993

• From 11 June 1993 (Arrive Denver from Zurich) to 18 July 1993 (Return To Ireland)
• Format: 21.5 x 28 (cm)

US TOUR 9·10 93

• From 9 September 1993 (Vancouver, BC) to 13 October 1993 (Boston, MA)
• Format: 17 x 22 (cm)

U.S. DATES OCT.13-NOV.20, 1993

• From 15 October 1993 (Dayton, OH) to 12 December 1993 (Los Angeles, CA)
• Format: 18 x 23 (cm)

EUROPE ’94

• From 3 October 1994 (Manchester) to 20 October 1994 (Stockholm)
• Format: 15 x 21 (cm)

1994 US TOUR · v1

• From 1 November 1994 (Albany, NY) to 19 December 1994 (Travel Day)
• Format: 14 x 21.5 (cm)
• 118 pages · Spiral Binding

1994 US TOUR · v2

• Exact same as v1 above except different binding (Wire Binding)

UK AND EUROPEAN TOUR – 1995

• From 10 January 1995 (London) to 9 February 1995 (Gent)

AUSTRALIA · NEW ZEALAND · JAPAN 1995 TOUR

• From 25 February 1995 (Perth) to 27 March 1995 (Tokyo)

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND TOUR 1995 · MEDIA SCHEDULE

• From 4 March 1995 to 22 March 1995

1995 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR

• From 29 March 1995 (Seattle, WA) to 15 May 1995 (Travel Day Home)

NO NEED TO ARGUE WORLD TOUR ’95 · UK & IRISH LEG

• From 23 May 1995 (Portsmouth) to 4 June 1995 (Millstreet)

NO NEED TO ARGUE WORLD TOUR ’95 · EUROPEAN LEG

• From 23 June 1995 (Paris) to 31 July 1995 (London)
• Click image below to read the full book in HQ

NO NEED TO ARGUE WORLD TOUR ’95 · U.S. LEG

• From 4 August 1995 (Hartford, CT) to 31 August 1995 (Irvine, CA)

FREE TO DECIDE TOUR

• No information

FREE TO DECIDE TOUR · BAND

Loud and clear · europe.

• From 12 April 1999 (London) to 22 April 1999 (Madrid)

LOUD AND CLEAR · NORTH AMERICA · CREW

• From 28 April 1999 (Washington) to 19 May 1999 (Los Angeles)

LOUD AND CLEAR · BAND

• From 5 August 1999 (Tampa, FL) to 19 September 1999 (Travel Home)

LOUD AND CLEAR · CREW

Loud and clear · europe 99.

• From 1 November 1999 (Rotterdam) to 14 December 1999 (Newcastle)

PROMO TOUR · DECEMBER 2001

• From 1 December 2001 (Boston) to 12 December 2001 (Detroit/Fly Home)
• Format: 12 x 18 (cm)

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE WORLD TOUR 2002 · EUROPE

• From 17 February 2002 (København) to 30 April 2002 (Torino)

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE WORLD TOUR 2002 · NORTH AMERICA

• From 9 May 2002 (Montréal, QC) to 7 July 2002 (Fly Home/Ireland)

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE WORLD TOUR 2002 · FRANCE/MONACO

• From 27 July 2002 (Lyon) to 1 August 2002 (Fly To Shannon/Limerick, Ireland)

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE WORLD TOUR 2002 · SOUTH EAST ASIA

• August 2002

“STARS – BEST OF (LIVE)” WORLD TOUR 2002

• From 14 October 2002 (Paris) to 11 December 2002 (Band & Crew Travel Home)

SUMMER 2003 TOUR

• From 28 May 2003 (Belfast) to 28 June 2003 (Home/Limerick, Ireland)

ARE YOU LISTENING? TOUR 2007

• From 29 May 2007 (Barcelona) to 24 June 2007 (Travel Day)

ARE YOU LISTENING? TOUR 2007 · USA JULY

• From 6 July 2007 (Montréal) to 23 July 2007 (Vancouver)

ARE YOU LISTENING? TOUR 2007 · EUROPE NOVEMBER ’07

• From 2 November 2007 (Murcia) to 27 November 2007 (Travel Home)

20 YEARS · USA 2009

• From 12 November 2009 (Baltimore) to 8 December 2009 (Travel Home)

20 YEARS · USA 2009 (POCKET SIZE)

• Format: 10 x 14 (cm)

20 YEARS · SOUTH AMERICA 2010

• From 22 January 2010 (Seattle) to 20 February 2010 (Travel Home)

20 YEARS · EUROPE 2010

• From 28 February 2010 (Lille) to 14 April 2010 (Amiens)

20 YEARS · EUROPE MAY-JUNE 2010

• From 29 May 2010 (Paris) to 19 June 2010 (Nice)

20 YEARS · EUROPE JUNE-AUGUST 2010

• From 27 June 2010 (Cork) to 9 August 2010 (Travel Home)
• Mistake on page 7 where tour is titled “May-June 2010” instead of “June-August 2010”

20 YEARS · SOUTH AMERICA TOUR 2010

• From September 2010 (Mexico City) to 24 October 2010 (Travel Home)

20 YEARS · SOUTHEAST ASIAN TOUR 2011

• From 23 July 2011 (Jakarta) to 1 August 2011 (Singapore)

NORTH AMERICA TOUR 2012

• From 1 May 2012 (New York City) to 18 May 2007 (Travel Home)

EUROPEAN TOUR AUTUMN 2012

• From 2 October 2012 (London) to 15 October 2012 (Travel Home)

EUROPE AUTUMN 2012

• From 24 October 2012 (Toulouse) to 9 December 2012 (Montbéliard)

SUMMER TOUR 2016

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The unlikely success of The Cranberries

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The Cranberries barely knew how to play their instruments. They became one of the biggest rock bands in the world.

Brothers Noel and Mike Hogan met Fergal Lawler while breakdancing in a park in the small Irish city of Limerick.

They were young teenagers at that stage, and as their adolescence went on, their tastes began to change.

“As we got older, in the late-80s, we became a lot more interested in alternative music,” Noel Hogan tells Double J. “We started listening to The Cure, The Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, that kinda thing.”

This coming of age coincided with increased activity in the Limerick underground music scene, and the three friends were right into it.

“Around that time a lot of bands in Limerick started to form,” Hogan recalls. “We used to go to the gigs, we never really thought we'd be in a band, but we were really, really into the music.”

But they couldn’t resist the allure of being on stage. Before long, they’d started their own garage band and roped in a more experienced campaigner.

“Eventually Ferg started playing drums, Mike picked up the bass and I got a guitar. A friend of ours [Niall Quinn] was a drummer in another local band, but he wanted to be a singer. So, he joined us for a while, maybe five or six months.

“We were absolutely terrible. We were really bad.”

But they got good. Fast.

“Niall left and, through him, a few months later, we met Dolores,” Hogan says.

Dolores O’Riordan was a friend of Quinn’s girlfriend. She was the same age as the three other band members and the connection between the four of them seemed strong enough.

“He brought Dolores up to meet us on a Sunday afternoon and we just hit it off,” Hogan remembers. “I played her a few songs we had, she had some of her own stuff, and that was it. The moment the four of us came together.”

Finding Success

Barely two years after that fateful Sunday afternoon in Limerick, The Cranberries , still teenagers at the time, found themselves in a Dublin recording studio with The Smiths and Morrissey producer Stephen Street.

They had signed to Island Records and were making their debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?

“We were really, really happy with it,” Hogan says of the album. “We were a bit shell shocked in some ways that we had, within the space of a few years, gotten together, demoed songs and suddenly had an album out on a proper label.”

This embryonic stage of their career filled the band with excitement. A label bidding war and plenty of attention from the press suggested big things were to come. But the thrill of potential success didn’t last long once the album was released.

“The album came out in the UK and Ireland and it just died,” Hogan says. “It bombed. It was a real anti-climax for us.

“Nobody was really bothered with it, we got no radio play, we were playing to empty rooms.”

The harsh reality of the music business was about to reveal itself to the band, or so they thought.

“We felt we were probably going to get a phone call from the record company going, 'Look, thanks for everything but this hasn't worked out. We're going to move on' We'd be dropped and that would be it.”

The monumental success the band ended up achieving in the early-mid 1990s is a spoiler in and of itself. A curious thing about The Cranberries’ salvation from a floundering career was that it came from America, of all places. The toughest market to crack.

“It was almost a year later when 'Linger' was released in the US,” Hogan says.

“We'd been signed by the US office of Island Records. A guy called Denny Cordell had signed us. He had always said, 'Don't worry. It'll be fine. I really believe in you'. You hear that, but you think, 'Yeah, they all say that'.”

Cordell – a famed producer who had made hit records with Joe Cocker, Tom Petty and Procol Harum – had meant it, baking his words up with canny promotion of the band to those who mattered.

“We weren't aware that he had been chipping away at the US, kind of shopping it out to college radio, getting it pushed on MTV,” Hogan says.

“Suddenly, we get a call out of nowhere – we were on a tour in Europe opening for another band, nobody had a clue who we were – and suddenly we get this call saying, 'You've got to get on a plane. Drop what you're doing.'

“'Linger' had charted at number eight on the Billboard charts. So, we needed to get to America. That was it, that was the moment when things started to change.”

The band flew to America and noticed an immediate change in their position in the eyes of the gig-going public.

“We came out and the place went crazy,” Hogan says.

“Again, we were the opening act, but everybody knew all the songs. We couldn't believe this. We had spent the bones of the year before this playing to five people, none of them knew what we were doing, suddenly we were doing this every night. It just completely took off.

“Then the album was re-released off the back of the success in the US and it just took off everywhere. All of a sudden, it was a worldwide hit.”

All this just a couple of short years after the band picked up their instruments for the very first time.

“Believe me, we were more shocked than anybody else when things took off.”

The big hits

“‘Linger’ was the first song that Dolores and I wrote together,” Hogan says. “It's a very, very simple song. I'd only been playing guitar a short while.”

Hogan gave O’Riordan a cassette demo of the song when she came up to meet the band on that first afternoon. They reconvened a few days later and the new singer had already written her vocal part.

“Dolores said, lyric-wise, she had met a guy one night at a teenage disco,” Hogan recalls. “The guy had just joined the Army and was home of a couple of days or something like that. That was the song was about, this chance meeting with this guy. 

The band never changed their writing process after this first encounter. They’d stumbled upon a method that worked and they didn’t change it.

“For the whole 30 years together, we never sat in a room together and wrote at the same time,” Hogan says. “I'd write at home, Dolores would write at home, and then we'd meet and go through it then.”

Nothing about ‘Linger’ suggested that it would be the band’s breakout hit. In Hogan’s eyes, it’s only in hindsight that the song has such a strong role in the band’s narrative.

“For us, it was just another song in the set,” Hogan says. “We didn't think it was anything extraordinary. But it went down to be such a massive hit.

“It has a special place, it was the first song we wrote together, and it was out first hit that really launched the band into the public eye.”

But the biggest impact The Cranberries ever had came thanks to ‘Zombie’, the massive single from their 1994 album No Need to Argue .

“Dolores came in with that one,” Hogan says. “She came in and said, 'I have this idea for a song, but I think it needs to be really, really heavy'.

“If you listen to the first album, there's a lot of jingly, washy sounds in there, the guitars especially. There's not any distortion really, at any point. So, she kind of had this idea for this song.”

In 1993, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) were responsible for a deadly bombing in Warrington, England. The incident incensed O’Riordan, so she wrote a song about it.

“There had been a bombing in this place called Warrington and two young boys were killed in it,” Hogan recalls. “She felt strong enough about this that Zombie came out of this. Lyrically, that song came from that one moment and, basically, Dolores' disgust with it.

“The music needed to match that, and she felt that it had to be aggressive and heavy. She didn't have to ask twice.

“We were used to playing these softer, sweeping sounds. Once we discovered distortion then that changed the sound of the band completely. We became a lot heavier.”

‘Zombie’ was not only the band’s biggest hit – it reached number one in many countries around the world, including Australia – it gave the band an opportunity to shift their sound.

“It was really a godsend to us,” Hogan says. “We had been trying to do what we did on the albums live, some of the earlier gigs were very empty because of that.

“I guess we had this thing in our head that distortion meant you were a heavy metal band or something. But we learnt to use it to our advantage.

“When we were recording Zombie, we just basically layered and layered the guitars, so we ended up with that big, big sound that everybody knows now.”

Despite the song coming from a place of anger, Hogan doesn’t consider it to be a protest song.

“I don't think it's a protest song. I think it's one person's disgust at peoples acts of violence,” he says.

“I think that's what she was trying to get across, that this was so ridiculous and stupid. It was the mid-90s and people were still doing this.

“Until that point, Dolores hadn't been political in any of the songs, a lot of them were very much relationship-based songs. So, this was her first jaunt into that area.

“But it wasn't a 'we want to shove our ideas down your throat' kind of thing, because we never considered ourselves a political band by any stretch. It was just that she felt that moved about that one act that she felt she had to talk about it.”

Reflecting on the past

The Cranberries wrote many more songs in the ensuing couple of decades. None as commercially popular as ‘Zombie’, but many that touched their fans just as deeply.

They made eight records – the final one, In the End , will be out in April – and toured the world countless times.

Dolores O’Riordan died in January 2018, which has given her bandmates plenty of reason to reflect on their time together.

“Those early days when we first met to up around the time of when things started to take off, you remember those parts the best,” Hogan says.

“Because we were just this little gang that came from Limerick. It was the four of us, a couple of friends in a van, playing to empty rooms a lot of the time. But we had a lot of fun in doing it, we really, really enjoyed it.

“It was just us. There was nobody else involved, there was no outside influences, you were very much in control. We were just writing songs that we really liked.

“I'll always remember that part with the most fondness, because it was an us against the world kind of thing. It was our first time doing all this stuff: first time recording an album, first time doing a tour, first time having a song in the charts - all these things are new to you and you're amazed by everything.

“We were so young, we were only 19 or 20 when we had the big success. At the time you think you know everything, but looking back on it 30 years later, I realise how young we were.”

They’d started as barely capable musicians playing jangly indie rock in a freezing shed in Limerick. They went on to become one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.

It remains a source of complete amazement for Hogan.

“Limerick has grown a lot in that time, but back then it was a small town in Ireland,” he says. “There hadn't really been that much that had gone on here.

“You don't really think you're gonna be as big as we ended up being. I certainly never thought in a few years’ time we'd be one of the biggest bands in the world, playing sold out arenas and all that kinda stuff. If you sold out a room of 500 people, that was a great thing. You were delighted.

“It's baby steps, but when it did happen, we were pinching ourselves that this was real. That it was the four of us kids. You look out across this crowd of people and think, 'We did all this'. It's a lot to take on.”

Listen to The Cranberries J Files right here .

The Making of the Cranberries’ Haunted Farewell

• By David Browne

David Browne

Every night, around the same time, they expected her to show up.

It was hard to blame them, since much of what the Cranberries were doing last April and into May evoked old times. Once again, the members of the Irish alt-pop band were gathered in a studio with their longtime producer, Stephen Street. The core trio — guitarist Noel Hogan, his bass-playing brother Mike and drummer Fergal Lawler — worked on arrangements while listening on headphones to unfinished vocals by their lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan. Mike Hogan was even playing one of the same basses he had used throughout the Cranberries’ career.

O’Riordan rarely showed up in studios during daylight hours; concerned about over-singing and smothering the raw emotion in her delivery, she preferred to arrive later, after the rest of the band had done their work. “Dolores would come in to do the vocals and we’d have a chat,” says Lawler. “She’d have a listen to what we’d done and then we’d head off and let her do her thing. So in the evening time, you’re almost looking out in the corridor to see if she’s coming in.”

Lawler pauses. “And then you realize, ‘Oh, yeah, she won’t be in.’”

About three months before those sessions, on January 15th, 2018, O’Riordan had been found dead in the bathtub of her London hotel room at age 46. An inquest later determined she had drowned from excessive drinking. The alcohol in her system added up to more than four times the legal limit for driving in the U.K. The British coroner called it a “tragic accident.”

Yet O’Riordan left behind songs and tapes — and with the band playing along to her now-ghostly voice, those recordings have been fashioned into a new album, In the End . Scheduled for release this April, it is being billed as the last Cranberries album. “It’s the end of the Cranberries and so on,” Hogan says. “I think it just brings it full circle. Everybody knows now that this is the final … for us, definitely … It makes it feel like a proper ending after so long spent with this thing.”

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By “this thing,” Hogan means the process of constructing a unique posthumous record. But in some ways that phrase also means more: the often uplifting but equally difficult life of one of the most treasured alt-rock stars of the ’90s.

Everyone remembers the girl in the tracksuit who showed up at an audition in Limerick, Ireland, in 1990 to sing in a local band, the Cranberry Saw Us. “It was a Sunday afternoon,” says Lawler. “She arrived with a keyboard under her arm, just set it up and played a few songs. We couldn’t really hear her because she was singing through a guitar amp or something. I gave her a lift up to the bus stop and I was saying, ‘Will we see you next week?’ We gave her a tape of the music for ‘Linger,’ which she took with her. The following week she came back, and she had lyrics written out and melodies and she sang along to what we were playing, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God. She’s great.’”

Thanks to early songs like “Linger” and “Dreams,” the renamed Cranberries rode the alt-rock wave of the early ’90s. Their music was grunge-hard but also crisp and wispy, and O’Riordan, seemingly frail but siren-voiced, captivated music fans. Although the band was greeted with a collective meh in their home country, America took to them — starting with an opening act slot on a U.S. tour with Suede — and the band’s first two albums, 1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? and the next year’s No Need to Argue , sold millions. “Zombie,” from the second album, fulfilled O’Riordan’s wish to give the group a harder musical edge. In 1994, she married Dan Burton, a former Duran Duran road manager; their first of three children arrived in 1997.

Even if her band mates didn’t know it yet, O’Riordan was, as she later called herself, “a bit of a trainwreck.” She later confessed she had been sexually abused by someone in the Limerick area, starting when she was 8 and lasting for four years. The band’s success and accompanying luxuries (like a personal wardrobe assistant for O’Riordan) didn’t diminish her feelings of self-loathing, and the pressures on the singer, who was in her early twenties when international fame hit, were enormous. A bout of flu and exhaustion forced the band to cancel U.S. tour dates in 1996. “She lost an awful lot of weight from an eating disorder,” her mother, Eileen O’Riordan, says. “She was very young. I remember I brought her back home to her little small bedroom in the house once. It was too much, too soon.”

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Starting in 2003, the Cranberries took a five-year hiatus, and O’Riordan began spending more time in a small town just west of Toronto with her husband and children. “The fame thing definitely didn’t help,” says Lawler. “Her mother had wanted her to become a piano teacher or teach music. Had she gone down that path, who knows? It might have been more suited to her.”

But the quiet life didn’t stick. “She tried breaking up with the band, taking time off and being ordinary,” Eileen says, “but she went to music all the time.”

After various side projects, including two under-the-radar O’Riordan solo albums, the band reunited in 2009. O’Riordan talked openly about her issues in the years that followed. In a notorious incident in 2014, she was arrested for alleged assault after accidentally stepping on the foot of a flight attendant with her heavy boots; the attendant had asked an agitated O’Riordan to take her seat as the singer was attempting to grab something from her overhead bin. Although charges were dismissed, she made a voluntary contribution to a charity.  Gaunt and sometimes skeletal-looking, O’Riordan announced she had bipolar disorder. She and Burton divorced that same calamitous year. According to Lawler, “She never really drank until she was older. Until after she got married.”

To be near her children but not in Canada, O’Riordan wound up in New York, forming a new, electronic-rooted band, D.A.R.K., with Smiths bassist Andy Rourke and DJ and producer Olé Koretsky, her new romantic partner. But she seemed to rarely find peace. “She missed her kids a lot,” Lawler says. “She found it very hard to be away from them. That kind of ate away at her.”

With a new album of acoustic and orchestral remakes, Something Else , the Cranberries planned to tour Europe and the U.S. in 2017, but they had to cancel due to O’Riordan’s back problems (which Mike Hogan says were a legit herniated disc, not an excuse for substance abuse). “We always knew there was some kind of mental issues there, you know,” says the bassist. “It was something we had to work around in a certain way, especially when we’re doing gigs and things like that, and not put too much pressure on her. It seemed to work out pretty well, apart from the back issue. That was a different story.”

With no roadwork on their schedules, O’Riordan and Noel Hogan — her regular songwriting collaborator in the band — found themselves with free time starting in June 2017. Adding to the chaos in her life, the two had had a few fallings-out, culminating in O’Riordan filing an undisclosed and later retracted High Court action against him in 2013. (Neither would discuss it.) She had once told Hogan she couldn’t write when she was in good place, so the fact that she wanted to jump on new material was telling. “She said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to start writing songs, because I have so much to say right now,’” he says. “She found it a lot easier to write lyrics when there was turmoil in her life.”

On and off over the next six months, the two wrote new songs, usually by email. Hogan would shoot her a melody, and she would add a rough vocal and send it back. She told Hogan that she also had songs she’d written and recorded in bare-bones form in the States, which she would be willing to contribute to the Cranberries as well.

As Christmas 2017 approached, the band mapped out its future. According to Noel Hogan, they were to start rehearsing early in 2018 for a tour of China that spring, after which they would begin recording what would be the first all-original Cranberries studio album since 2012’s Roses . “That was the plan,” Hogan says, “even up to the last couple of conversations I had with her that week. It was like, ‘We’ll get moving on this stuff in the next couple of weeks.’ Everything was normal.”  

First, however, O’Riordan had to visit London; a new D.A.R.K. album was in the works there, and she had been asked to sing on a remake of “Zombie” by the L.A. hard-rock band Bad Wolves. On her way from New York to London, she stopped in Limerick, and Eileen O’Riordan noticed her daughter was struggling. “She was a bit down on herself,” she says. “She wasn’t really herself. She wasn’t happy. But she was very happy that this would be something positive, to get her album done.”

On Friday, January 12th, two days before she was scheduled to fly to London, O’Riordan spoke with Noel Hogan, who still sensed their plans were in motion. She was so eager to work, he says, that she emailed him from Shannon Airport on Sunday, January 14th, to make sure he’d received an earlier message about a new song. “Check this out and I’ll call you tomorrow,” she wrote. After arriving in London later that day, she checked into the Park Lane Hilton hotel.

That day, exchanges with family, friends and work associates were equally reassuring and vexing. She emailed Lawler, asking if they should consider a song called “So Good” for the new album. Lawler had to remind her that they had already cut it and included it on Roses . “She said, ‘All right — pity, it’s a good song,’” he recalls. “She didn’t realize we had already recorded it.” Just after midnight, she left two voicemails for Dan Waite, a label executive (and former business associate of the band) who had set up the collaboration with Bad Wolves. In the messages, she talked sweetly about her children and sang a snippet of the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” (produced by Youth, who was overseeing the D.A.R.K. album).  Waite says she was in “good spirits and making jokes.”

Eileen O’Riordan says her daughter had earlier gone into rehab and hadn’t had wine in three years. After, she’d called her mother and said, proudly, “Mum, I filled up a glass of wine and threw it down the sink.”

But in her hotel room that Sunday night, with a mini-bar apparently within reach, O’Riordan found herself drawn to old temptations. About two in the morning, she called her mother. “She was up, talking about all she was going to do,” Eileen says. “She was full of life.”

Still, from the sound of her daughter’s voice, Eileen also sensed something wasn’t right. “I knew she was drinking,” she says. “She said to me, ‘Well, it only relaxes me and makes me happy.’ I can’t remember what I said to her. I tried to talk her out of it and I thought she would [stop].”

Instead, O’Riordan’s lifeless body, wearing pajamas, was found in her bathroom, her head and nose submerged, about seven hours later. Five empty miniature bottles and an empty bottle of champagne were found nearby. Eight days later, she was buried in Limerick, following an open-casket viewing attended by thousands of fans. Her music was played throughout the church service. When the Cranberries’ “When You’re Gone” was played at the end, those in the church broke out into applause.

When word of her death began making its way to her fellow Cranberries the morning her body was found, the musicians first had trouble processing it. “That’s the weirdness of it all,” says Noel Hogan. “ That Dolores, and the Dolores of the year before, were like two different people. It had felt like this fog had kind of lifted and gone, that she was coming out of a darker time in her life. She walked away from it, and then suddenly this happens.”

Lawler agrees with that assessment. “She seemed pretty good, you know?” the drummer says. “It was up and down, to be honest. Some days she’d be better than others and be struggling. And other days she’d be great and strong. But I definitely didn’t expect anything like this. She was working on her mental health and getting herself better. But this … I think this was just an accident, you know? A pity. Because 46… Jesus , you know?”

A few weeks after O’Riordan’s death, Noel Hogan filled in his brother and Lawler on the unfinished songs he and O’Riordan had left behind, stressing they were all from a specific period and were meant for what he calls “a proper album.” Even in their incomplete form, the songs reminded Lawler of the songs from their first two albums, and the decision was made to flesh them out. First, though, the band ran the idea by O’Riordan’s family — including her brother P.J., who manages the Cranberries. The family approved, as did fans by way of a Facebook post from the band announcing their intentions. “I know people can get a bit funny about this kind of thing — ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be doing this,’” Noel Hogan says. “But it was the complete opposite. It was met with this really positive outpouring.”

Given that they’d be working with unfinished songs, Lawler admits that some on the business side expressed concerns about the quality of the project. “Even some of the record company were worried that it might be a bit patchy, but we reassured them the whole time that we were not going to disrespect Dolores and just throw something out there,” he says. “It had to be either a top-quality album, or an EP if we didn’t have enough songs.”

To facilitate the process, the band turned to Street, convening at his favorite London studio last spring. “It was emotional seeing each other for the first time since Dolores’ passing, but it was also, ‘All right, we can do this,’” Street recalls. “You just have to try to hold it together. It had to be good, since you don’t want to mess with the legacy of what was done in the past.”

Still, the process was daunting. It wasn’t simply that they had to strip away the instruments on the tapes — whether it was Noel Hogan’s guitar and drum machine or the accompaniment on the tapes O’Riordan had made in New York. As they gathered in the studio with her voice in their ears, they were playing together for the first time in over a year while trying to fashion Cranberries-style melodic flourishes for songs only Noel Hogan had heard before. “It was a bit strange hearing her through the headphones,” says Mike Hogan. “Sometimes there might be a break in the song and you could hear her voice, talking. You’re kind of expecting her to walk in.”

Another issue was O’Riordan’s vocals, which weren’t always finished and required a degree of editing. “Dolores had the first chorus and middle eight, things like that, so we chopped and changed a few things as well,” says Mike Hogan. To bolster O’Riordan’s demo-tape voice, and even fill out an incomplete word here or there, the band turned to Johanna Cranitch, who sang backup on Cranberries tours. “There were things, especially in a couple of the choruses, where you could almost hear what Dolores would’ve done,” says Noel Hogan. “We brought Johanna in for them because we felt she had worked with us for so long on tour that she, of all people, would know best what kind of direction Dolores would’ve gone in. It was easy to explain to her, ‘Look, we need you to just do a little bit of oohs and ahs here and there and mimic her words.’”

The band powered through and, in about a month, they had completed all the backing tracks. “We just couldn’t believe it,” says Lawler. “We were kind of looking at each other going, ‘Geez, we’ve six songs done already’ or, ‘Oh, we’ve 10 done now.’ The days were flying by. I don’t know, maybe it was a good distraction for us. We were still feeling hugely emotional. It was better that we did it then, rather than waiting till a year had passed. We wouldn’t have been as fresh and as, I don’t know, emotionally charged.”

Since there were no lyric sheets and the songs were numbered, not titled, Street took to writing down the lyrics as he heard them. He was struck by their intensity. “A Place I Know” appears to be addressed to her children (“I’m sorry I left you/I’m sorry, I love you”) while “All Over Now” details a fight between a woman and her partner (“She told the man that she fell on the ground/She was afraid that the truth would be found”); chillingly, it also mentions “a hotel in London.” Other songs hinted at wanting to escape her inner pain: “Trudging through the darkness/Escaping from yourself/Only shoot to kill your pain,” she sang in “Catch Me When It’s Over.” As Lawler says, “Some of them…  I kind of want to say she could see into the future. There were some quite poignant ones there, even more so now that she’s passed.”

For all their productivity, reality would hit them later, as when Noel Hogan would return to his hotel room after a day’s work. “I found that the most difficult time through the whole thing,” he says. “You’re sitting down listening to what you did that day, and you’re not as focused, maybe, as you were when you were in the studio. The realization of it all comes to you more. Then you got up the next day and shook yourself off again, and you went back in and got kind of stuck into it again.”  

All along, Street knew there was at least song he wanted the Cranberries to refrain from tackling until the album was nearly wrapped up. “In the End,” one of the songs that required a degree of editing and tweaking, has spare but affecting lyrics: “Ain’t it strange?/When everything you wanted/Was nothing much you wanted, in the end?” O’Riordan sang. As Street recalls, “I didn’t feel it was right to work on it until we had achieved recording the major part of the album. I wanted the band to emotionally feel as if it was a conclusion.”

Given the lyrics, the band agreed to hold off on recording it until near the end of their work. “It’s a very emotional song,” says Noel Hogan. “You want all this when you start out, you want everything, but then you get it and it’s not really what you think it is. At some point in our careers, we’ve all felt that way.”

On the final day of recording, Lawler remembers the band listening to another especially moving song, “Lost,” and breaking down. “When we were listening back to that the last day,” he says, “I just couldn’t help myself. I lost it.” Adding to the intensity of the moment, the three musicians, who’d been playing together since they were teenagers, also realized they might have just played together for the last time.

“Nobody said anything,” Noel Hogan says, “but I know we all had to be thinking the same thing, because nobody wants to be the one bringing things down even more than they have been. It’s hard enough as it is without also trying to do, ‘Hey boys, by the way, do you realize that this is the last time we’re going to be playing together in a studio as the Cranberries?’” They went out for a bite to eat, told some stories, before two of them flew back to Ireland.

Living up to the band’s goals, In the End feels like a fully realized album, not a collection of incomplete sketches. The songs recreate both the metallic pulse of “Zombie” and the brisk, wide-screen ambience of “Linger,” but with a resigned, adult O’Riordan at their center. According to the band, it will be the last anyone will hear of them. There are currently no plans for the surviving members to tour with another singer or even play a tribute concert. The word “hologram” has come up but been dismissed. “People have said it to me,” Noel Hogan says. “People have said a lot of dumb things to me the last year, you know? It’s come up as well, ‘Well, find another singer.’ I don’t think people who say that fully get it. Maybe they think they’re being nice or something. It’s not something we’re ever going to entertain. I think the band accomplished a lot, and I think we’ll leave it on a high with this album.”

As of a few weeks ago, Eileen O’Riordan had not yet spent time with In the End . She has had a copy for several weeks, but it’s still too difficult to listen. “I’m delighted with it, that it’s finished,” she says. “I thought I’d listen to it, but I don’t feel ready yet to listen to anything. No use in getting yourself upset. I think she’s in heaven now. I think she’s at peace.”

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Many bands aspire to be timeless, or have a sound that transcends the whims of musical fashion. But The Cranberries are one of the few to have achieved that. Play one of the Irish rock group’s early anthems such as “Linger” or “Dreams”, and they sound as fresh - and deliver as much of an emotional sucker-punch - as when they captured a generation’s hearts in the 1990s. Now, nearly 30 years after the quartet of singer/songwriter and musician Dolores O’Riordan, co-songwriter and lead guitarist Noel Hogan, bassist Mike Hogan and drummer Fergal Lawler first appeared, they are returning with their eighth album In the End. After the sad and unexpected passing of Dolores on January 15th 2018, it will be their last - and is among the most complete works they have ever produced. It’s remarkable to look back and think just how how much of a cultural force The Cranberries have been, not only in the Ireland, UK and US, but across the globe: over their career, they have sold more than 40 million albums, making them one of the world’s biggest rock acts, as well as a staple on TV and film soundtracks. Through all their success, though, they have never compromised on their key trait: an honesty and directness that cuts to the soul. Central to their expression of emotional truth, of course, has been Dolores’ inimitable voice. It was an instrument that could be angelically soft or blisteringly angry to equally stunning effect - and was a match for opera legend Luciano Pavarotti when they duetted on an enduringly stunning rendition of Ave Maria in 1995. But the band’s power has also come from their gliding melodies and Dolores’ unvarnished lyrics, which were never less than absolutely sincere, whether she was writing about personal relationships or political violence - they all came back to “how human beings treat each other,” as she once described. “She truly didn’t really care what people thought about what she was going to say” says Noel. “It was a case of ‘If I feel strongly enough about this, I’m going to write about it, and whatever way the chips may fall, so be it. If I get slated for it, so be it.’” It all started for the band back in the mid-1980s, when Lawler and the two Hogan brothers met as teenagers growing up in Limerick - and, sharing a love for groups like the Cure and the Smiths, decided to try their hand at rock music. Initially, they formed a quartet with a male singer, though after six months, in early 1990, he left - at which point he suggested his girlfriend’s friend, who came from Ballybricken, a small town outside Limerick, as a replacement. When Dolores came to audition for them, a rural girl suddenly among city boys, she was “quiet as a mouse”, as Noel recalls - until she sang, that is. “We were immediately, blown away,” says Mike. “Her voice was something special.” Dolores, in turn, was enamoured by the boys. “I really liked what I heard; I thought they were nice and tight,” she later recalled. “It was a lovely potential band but they needed a singer - and direction.” There was no question that they had found their new fourth member. The band gained not only a compelling frontwoman but a brilliant musician. From a young age, Dolores learnt classical piano, and played piano, and harmonium in her local church, as well as singing in the choir. “I used to go from school to piano lessons to home and maybe I’d have to go to church and then I might have some homework and go to bed,” she said, of her early years routine. When she was 17, she then taught herself guitar. But above and beyond her training, she had an “amazing ear”, says Noel. “She was streets ahead of the rest of us in the beginning, but that was a good thing. It forced all of us to up our game.” As songwriters, Noel and Dolores gelled immediately, while finding their own particular way of working. From the very beginning, they never wrote in the same room together. Back then, Noel would lay down guitar parts on cassette which he’d then give to Dolores to develop verses and chorus around in her own space and time. For the first two years of the band, they wrote like crazy, Noel recalls. “It was that thing where you’ve found somebody that you clicked with, and you wanted to get as much as you could out of that.” At the same time, after their demo of ‘Linger’ did the record company rounds over in London, they quickly became the talk of the industry. In the summer of 1991, following a gig at the University of Limerick which was also attended by 32 A&R men, they signed to Island Records. The reason they chose the celebrated label was because of Denny Cordell, the legendary record producer who was at that time Island’s A&R. Seeing their long-term potential, he promised to allow the band the chance to develop at their own pace and suggested they get some touring under their belt in the first instance. The following year, they then began recording their debut album Everybody Else is Doing It So Why Can’t We? with producer Stephen Street. Street had worked with The Smiths and Blur, as well as co-writing Morrissey’s first solo album Viva Hate, and so his involvement was a dream come true. He has subsequently taken the reins on four further albums with them, including In the End. Noel credits him with helping to create the sweepingly epic Cranberries sound. “What happened was not just down to the songs - the production had a lot to do with it.” The album’s title was Dolores’ creation, as every album title was; it expressed perfectly their determination to succeed. “Elvis wasn’t always Elvis,” she said, explaining its meaning. “He wasn’t born Elvis Presley, he was a person who was born in a random place. Why shouldn’t a band from a small city in the Southwest of Ireland get signed, conquer the world, and make a great record?” And conquer they did. The success of Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? remains remarkable. After being released in the UK in March 1993, the album really took off a few months later when Linger was picked up by college radio in America and the band subsequently toured across the Atlantic. It would go on to hit no 1 in both Ireland and the UK, and sell more than six million copies worldwide. From the heart-wrenching Linger, a song inspired by Dolores’ first kiss, to the giddy Dreams, it managed to convey the highs and lows of young love with a rare purity and tenderness. After that, no one would have expected Zombie: the lead off single from 1994’s second album, No Need to Argue, and an era-defining howl of rage. Inspired by the IRA Warrington bombings, which left two boys dead, it saw Dolores fiercely decrying the violence of the Irish conflict over distorted, hard-rock guitars. “This song is our cry against man’s inhumanity to man, inhumanity to child. And war, babies dying, and Belfast, and Bosnia, and Rwanda,” she explained at the time. “It was a turning point for us,” recalls Noel. “I always remember the day she came in with it. We were in a tiny little shed in Limerick, where we were rehearsing. She came in and started playing it on acoustic guitar and we played along but she was like ‘no this needs to be heavy, it’s an angry song, and it needs to reflect that.’” As well as having an immense cultural impact, it was transformative for the band musically. “We learned from that song that you can actually do a lot with that aggression - and particularly live, it made a massive difference to us, because we became this loud, anthemic band all of a sudden,” says Noel. They carried both its harder sound and wider lyrical focus onto their third album, 1996’s To the Faithful Departed. Two more albums followed, 1999’s Bury the Hatchet and 2001’s Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, whose maturing outlook reflected their life experiences: “Animal Instinct”, on Bury the Hatchet, for example, saw Dolores powerfully evoke her experience of new motherhood. By 2003, all four of the band were ready for a break, after a relentless decade of recording and touring, and so they went on hiatus, with each pursuing their own separate musical projects. But after the band reunited for a world tour in 2009, they found themselves re-energised, and so returned to creating new material again. Their next album, 2012’s Roses, was an especially atmospheric collection, which incorporated new textures into their sound. “Because we’d all gone off in different directions, we all came back into the band with these new experiences and a new way of working and it was great,” says Noel. “It was a real buzz to do that album.” Among its highlights was the otherworldly title track, which Dolores wrote in memory of her late father, who died in 2011 and was one of her true guiding lights. Another break followed, before 2017’s Something Else, which saw them stripping back and reworking some of their most classic tracks with the help of a string quartet from the Irish Chamber orchestra. To add to the sentiment of the project, they recorded it in Limerick, making it the only album they completed in their hometown. What the end result foregrounded was the fundamental power of their melodies. “If anything, I’d never write songs like those early ones now, as it’s too easy” says Noel. “But I think their simplicity is what attracted people to them.” It was accompanied by an acoustic tour, during which Dolores and Noel got the writing itch again. Then, when Dolores’ back problems meant the group sadly had to cancel the rest of their live dates, the pair started working in earnest. “She went back to New York, where she was living at the time, and I went to France to meet up with my family, but they weren’t there yet, so I was on my own for a few weeks,” recalls Noel. “We were both bored and I said ‘why don’t we see if we can write an album and use the time productively?’ and that’s what we did.” Over six months, in the second half of 2017, the two of them came up with the songs that have now gone on to form their final collection ‘In the End’. Integrating this story of creativity and resilience, it’s interesting to note how the world has evolved, bringing forth not just artistic treasures but also advancements in various fields, including medicine. This aligns with the current trend of making once expensive and hard-to-get medications more accessible to the public. Generic Cialis here , a medication renowned for treating erectile dysfunction, stands as a prime example of this progress. Much like how Noel and Dolores found a way to complete their musical masterpiece despite the challenges, the pharmaceutical industry has worked diligently to ensure that essential medications are available in generic forms, significantly lowering the cost without compromising on quality. This development ensures that a larger demographic has access to the treatment they need, paralleling the way music touches the lives of people across various backgrounds and circumstances. In shock after Dolores’ passing, Noel and the rest of the band eventually began to look through the vocal demos that she had already recorded for the album. One thing was for sure, though: they weren’t going to release anything unless it could truly honour her by standing up as a brilliant piece of work in its own right. Thankfully, after some digging, they realised they had the material to make that happen. “There were bits that she had done but hadn’t sent to me so you’d have a verse and chorus but then no second verse and you’d think ‘it’s such a pity’”, says Noel. “But then Dolores’ partner came over with a hard drive and he had all these other bits she hadn’t had a chance to send, so we ended up with full songs.” And it helped, of course, Dolores was such a naturally virtuosic singer. “Even on a bad day, she clearly gave a great vocal performance.” Produced once again by Stephen Street, In the End sees the band coming full circle, with a collection that evokes their very first LP. “When we listened to the demos, the three of us and Stephen were thinking ‘this sounds much closer to the first album than anything else’. Dolores was singing very softly on some songs, which was closer to how she would have sung back then, and the simplicity of some of the songs as well brought us back to that time,” says Noel. Certainly, it’s an album that, tune after tune, snags immediately. It kicks off with a formidable one-two which is a reminder of their range. The driving All Over Now is a classic, widescreen Cranberries anthem, with Dolores giving voice to the fractures of a relationship against a backdrop of chiming guitars; then, following it, the haunting string-swept ballad Lost dials the tempo right down, while giving space to Dolores’ yearning vocals to soar to soul-piercing heights. Elsewhere, they veer from the grungy release of Wake Me When It’s Over to the tender, country-inflected A Place I Know and the upbeat jangle-pop of The Pressure. If there’s an overall lyrical theme, it’s a sense of wiping the slate clean, and new beginnings, which reflected where Dolores was, both in her personal and her creative life: re-energised and ready for a new phase. “I remember talking to her that summer and she said ‘I’m starting all over here’ and a lot of the songs discuss that,” says Noel. But, as ever with The Cranberries, lyrics that may derive from individual experience masterfully tap into universal emotions, framing them in terms that we can all relate to, whatever age, gender or nationality. As the huge wave of public adulation in the wake of Dolores’ passing showed, The Cranberries may be over, in one sense - but they will forever live on in the musical pantheon.  

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Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? The Cranberries’ debut album turns 30 today

They were outsiders but, in one of the great self-fulfilling prophecies in irish music, they quickly conquered the world.

Dolores O’Riordan was shy but 'sang as if her soul was caught up in a firestorm'. Photograph: Ferran Paredes/Reuters

The reviews weren’t wild. “Backwoods oiks from Limerick, West Ireland suffused with too much innocence for their own good,” said the NME. The Los Angeles Times highlighted “the Celtic-flavoured folk tinged with gospel sensibilities” but then awarded a backhanded three stars out of five. With write-ups like that, there seemed every possibility The Cranberries’ debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, would be forgotten almost as soon as it was out in the world.

Thirty years later, as the record marks its anniversary on March 1st, the consensus is altogether different. Despite the NME’s jeers, the LP has gone on to sell more than six million copies and stands tall as the ultimate underdog story in Irish rock. It also gave music in this country one of its most iconic figures in the late Dolores O’Riordan, just 19 when the Cranberries became overnight stars.

In March 1993, however, all of that would have felt like a pipe dream. True, The Cranberries had big label backing in Island Records. However, with Britpop on the horizon, the all-powerful British music press wasn’t interested in the specifically Irish strain of angst that fuelled The Cranberries (early on, someone described O’Riordan’s vocals as “the voice of a saint trapped in a glass harp”). There was also the small matter of a Dublin ensemble in whose shadow every new Irish group were destined to shrivel.

At the time, it was just another song and another day, but years later I realise how much that day changed our lives —   Noel Hogan on Linger

“If you thought Irish rock music, you thought U2, but that was way out of our reach,” Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan would later tell the UMusic website. “Coming from a small town in the south of Ireland, we thought no further than forming a band and playing a local club in front of a few friends if ever we got good enough. Really, we would have been content with that.”

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That “small town” was of course Limerick City, from which three of the four hailed. The fourth, O’Riordan, was from Ballybricken, a townland 18 kilometres away.

Dolores, the youngest of nine, was shy. Still, she sang as if her soul was caught up in a firestorm. She’d blown her future bandmates away in an audition after their original singer Niall Quinn left to spend more time with his other project, The Hitchers. And though retiring, O’Riordan had an inner steeliness. Standing before Hogan, his bassist brother Mike and drummer Fergal Lawler, she realised they needed her as much as she needed them.

“I really liked what I heard,” she mused. “I thought they were very nice and tight. It was a lovely potential band but they needed a singer – and direction.”

She passed the audition. Determined to kick things up a gear, Noel Hogan pressed into her hands a cassette containing rough sketches of new music. She took the instrumentals away and four days later came back with what would become their second single, Linger. “At the time, it was just another song and another day, but years later I realise how much that day changed our lives,” Hogan said.

The Cranberries: Mike Hogan, Dolores O'Riordan, Fergal Lawler and Noel Hogan

Things happened fast for The Cranberries. Geoff Travis, who had discovered The Smiths, became their manager. Another Smiths collaborator, producer Stephen Street, would work with them on Everybody Else Is Doing It, recorded at Windmill Lane in Dublin and Surrey Sound in the UK. They also had the best A & guy in the business, a wily veteran named Denny Cordell who had produced Procul Harum’s A White Shade of Pale and Joe Cocker’s version of With A Little Help From My Friends.

[  The Cranberries: how we made Linger  ]

Still, not everything was in their favour. The Cranberries were Irish before it was cool to be Irish (what historians called the “Father Ted dateline”). Meanwhile, the UK music press was too busy dribbling all over home-grown newcomers such as Suede to give them the time of day.

They had not quite meshed as a band either. O’Riordan was an outsider who preferred to sing alone. This resulted in an unusual dynamic during the recording of Everybody Else. The boys would toil all day in the studio. Then Stephen Street would set up for their singer, who’d arrive as they were exiting.

“We’d pass each other in the corridor,” bassist Mike Hogan recollected. “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!’”

Behind her introversion, O’Riordan had demons. She didn’t get into these on that first record, which is dominated by lyrics about young love and loss. Only later, on songs such as Fee Fi Fo from 1999′s Bury The Hatchet, would she delve into the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a family friend between the ages of eight and 12.

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? was a slow burn. In the UK it failed to breach the top five in the month of its release – even as another Irish outfit, The Hothouse Flowers, reached number two on March 20th with their LP Songs from the Rain.

Dolores O’Riordan performs with The Cranberries in Holmdel, New Jersey, on September 9th, 1996. Photograph: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

“We were dead in the water,” Noel Hogan told me when I interviewed him for the Irish Examiner several years ago. “When our first album came out we had press officers in the UK playing us bands like Slowdive, saying ‘this is in’. And I was like, ‘you can’t hear the vocals’. It had bombed and we were waiting to be dropped.”

As they cooled their heels, they went on a tour of the Continent with the aforementioned Hothouse Flowers. Raggle taggle folk-pop was squeezed up against plaintive jangle rock. The Flowers had an audience – but not one interested in The Cranberries. Night after night, they played in empty rooms.

“We were about a month into the European tour and we get a call out of the blue, requesting we come to the States,” Hogan explained to UMusic. “Denny Cordell had been working on [the album’s] first single, Linger, in New York and it had become a hit on college radio, where it had gone to number eight. Suddenly, from thinking we were about to get dropped by Island, we went to play our first American gig in Denver, Colorado, opening for The The. We went onstage and everyone knew the songs and the place just went mental.”

Dolores had such a lust for life and for meeting new people. She was never ‘starry’ – if people came up to her and said they liked the show, she’d sit down and gab away for hours —   Suede's Matt Osman on Dolores O'Riordan

America was ready for them and they were ready for America. Coming from Limerick they are always outsiders anyway. Why not be outsiders on the biggest stage of all?

“It was difficult for us first to break into the Dublin scene which was a good thing,” O’Riordan told Ian Dempsey in December 1993, by which time Everybody Else Is Doing It was selling 80,000 units a week in the US. “People tend to break into the Dublin scene and stay there forever.”

“Everything changed because of America,” Hogan told me. That autumn, the group set out on a US tour as support to Suede, floppy-haired wunderkinds beloved of the London music scene. However, what worked in Camden didn’t necessarily come off in Colorado. Out there in the American heartland, it was O’Riordan’s fragility that people took to rather than Suede singer Brett Anderson’s performative androgyny.

Dolores O’Riordan with The Cranberries at the Troubadour, Los Angeles on July 15th, 1993. Photograph: Donna Santisi/Redferns

Suede nonetheless had warm memories of their time, as their bassist Matt Osman explained to me when I spoke to him for Hot Press.

“That tour gets reported quite weirdly because they blew up while we were there,” he said. “They [The Cranberries] were so much fun. We were much less worldly than we probably made out. They were certainly not very worldly. It was kind of an adventure. We spent a lot of the time just drinking after the shows.

“Dolores had such a lust for life and for meeting new people. She was never “starry” – if people came up to her and said they liked the show, she’d sit down and gab away for hours, which I really liked.

“They were just breaking big and that’s usually the moment everyone gets a little bit, ‘don’t talk to me’. She’d be sitting with a beer chatting to everyone.”

Chatty or not, the attention became overwhelming, O’Riordan later said.

Dolores O’Riordan. 'I wondered how and why she wasn’t already in a band,' said Noel Hogan of his initial encounter with the singer. Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons

It was a bit of an oblivion,” she told me. “You’re so busy working. You do this thing, you do that thing. It was non-stop. I wouldn’t pay attention to the name of the venue, the name of the town. I’d have to have the placename written down on stage so I’d remember it. It’s so busy. It was moving so fast. I don’t remember a lot of stuff. I duetted with Pavarotti, I met Lady Diana. And it was all a blur. I look back now on it with my kids and it’s like, ‘oh I had no idea I was there – but look at my hair. What was I thinking, man?’”

[  Dolores O’Riordan’s mother says intense fame was ‘difficult’  ]

Thirty years on, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? stands as a memento to O’Riordan – who died in January 2018 . Dreams, the LP’s other big single alongside Linger, has been embraced by later generations, thanks in part to its prominence on hit Channel 4 comedy Derry Girls (set in the early 1990s). And for The Cranberries those mediocre early reviews would turn out to be a false alarm.

The “It” The Cranberries refer to in the title was commercial success: they saw other bands doing well and felt that they, too, deserved to see their name in lights. In one of the great self-fulfilling prophecies in Irish music, The Cranberries would indeed soon conquer the world – thanks to their empathically jangly songs and O’Riordan’s incredible voice.

“I wondered how and why she wasn’t already in a band,’ Noel Hogan would reflect. “I didn’t want to question it. We were lucky enough that she had come into this room.”

[  Dolores O’Riordan: Legacy of vulnerability again pulls star into collective consciousness  ]

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Storming both the US and UK charts, The Cranberries’ ‘Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?’ proved that, actually, they could.

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In the pre-internet scheme of things, a debut album traditionally built a band’s reputation through critical acclaim and led to commercial success a little further down the line. Yet, in The Cranberries ’ case, their resplendent debut , Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? , bucked the trend when it topped the UK charts, moved over five million copies in the US, and turned the unassuming Irish quartet into bona fide superstars.

Listen to Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? on Apple Music and Spotify .

The statistics don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story, either. The Cranberries’ rise to stardom required patience and fortitude. Formed in 1989 by bassist and guitarist brothers Mike and Noel Horgan, drummer Fergal Lawlor and vocalist Niall Quinn, they were initially a quirky indie-pop concern, The Cranberry Saw Us, until the late Dolores O’Riordan replaced Quinn and the Limerick-based outfit adopted the more user-friendly mantle of The Cranberries, 12 months later.

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The band first made headway when an embryonic demo tape featuring early versions of future signature hits “Linger” and “Dreams” sparked sustained interest from UK-based record companies. Next came a low-key, self-released debut EP, Uncertain , during 1991, but O’Riordan and company attracted more widespread attention through well-received radio sessions for Dublin-based 2FM’s Dave Fanning Show and for BBC Radio 1’s John Peel in the UK.

With Rough Trade Records boss Geoff Travis taking over managerial duties, and a deal with Island Records in the bag, The Cranberries paired up with producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur, The Psychedelic Furs) to record their debut album during 1992.

The disc they emerged with showed that the Limerick quartet were onto something special. Despite its sardonic title, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? had little in common with either the US alt.rock or proto-Britpop outfits in vogue at the time of its release, on March 12, 1993. Instead, Everybody Else Is Doing It… proffered singular, ethereal pop harking back to the vintage indie of The Smiths or The Sundays, with its engaging highlights “I Still Do,” “Waltzing Back,” the elegiac ballad “I Will Always” and the enticing “Put Me Down” dominated by elusive, chiming chords and O’Riordan’s haunting, acrobatic vocals.

Everybody Else Is Doing It… garnered its fair share of acclaim on release, with heavyweight magazines Rolling Stone and Q both awarding it four stars, and the Los Angeles Times ’ Mario Munoz picking up on the album’s “Celtic-flavoured folk tinged with gospel sensibilities” and astutely commenting that “Dolores O’Riordan’s arresting voice is the driving instrument in this beautifully understated debut.”

Island wisely chose the record’s twin artistic peaks, the slow-burning “Dreams” and the seductive “Linger,” as the album’s trailer singles, yet despite the favorable critical notices, neither caught fire the first time round. However, after The Cranberries embarked on a lengthy tour with Suede, they came to the attention of MTV, who duly granted the “Dreams” and “Linger” videos heavy rotation.

Accordingly, both the singles and their parent album enjoyed a remarkable second life, with “Linger” and “Dreams” both peaking within the UK Top 30 during the first half of 1994, and Everybody Else Is Doing It… not only re-entering the charts, but going on to top the UK album chart in the early summer of 1994. No longer the underdogs, The Cranberries’ profile was raised further by a highly successful opening slot on a comeback tour by returning 80s superstars Duran Duran. With Everybody Else Is Doing It… on course for well-deserved multi-platinum success, the group set their sights on the stratosphere with their sophomore release, No Need To Argue .

The super deluxe edition of Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? can be bought here .

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Breaking: The Weeknd has cancelled his Australian tour

After postponing due to “unforeseen circumstances”, the Starboy has officially scrapped all of his sold-out shows

Nooo! After months of confusion following the announcement in November last year that the Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn tour was postponed due to “unforeseen circumstances”, it has just been revealed that the entire run of sold-out Aussie gigs have been cancelled.

The Weeknd (aka Abel Tesfaye) had been scheduled to play four epic shows at Marvel Stadium on December 1, 2, 4 and 5, 2023, with performances also confirmed in both Sydney and Brisbane. None of these will go ahead now, with Ticketek confirming that full refunds will be issued to all ticketholders

“Whilst we continue to work through the rescheduling process with the artist, tickets for the existing 2023 tour will be cancelled. All purchased tickets will receive a full refund,” reads a statement on the ticketing company’s website.

It’s expected that refunds will take approximately 30 days to appear in the accounts of ticketholders. And if the Weeknd does indeed decide to head Down Under again (c’mon, we gotta hold out hope), those people will be able to access a priority pre-sale purchase window for new tickets. If sitting in that stressful Ticketek waiting room is something you’d do all over again just to see the Starboy in real life, there’s a waitlist you can join here .

There’s been no word from the Weeknd himself regarding the Aussie cancellations, and he didn’t publicly comment on the initial postponement – so we’re not holding out hope for statement (or apology!).

All those tears you were saving for another day? Yep, it’s time to shed ‘em. We’ll keep you updated with new info as it comes in.

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RBC Heritage: How to watch Monday finish, live scores, tee times, TV times

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A Monday finish will take place at the RBC Heritage after the final round was suspended due to darkness Sunday evening at 7:45 p.m. ET. Play resumes at 8 a.m. on Monday morning as Scottie Scheffler looks for back-to-back wins for a second time this season and his fourth win in five starts. The world No. 1 holds a five-shot lead with three holes remaining. This will be the second unscheduled Monday finish on the PGA TOUR this season and first since the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches.

Here's everything you need to know to follow the action.

HOW TO FOLLOW (all times ET)

Television:

• Monday: 8 a.m. (Golf Channel, Peacock)

PGA TOUR Radio on SiriusXM and free on PGATOUR.COM/liveaudio :

• Monday: 8-9 a.m.