How Dolores O’Riordan Propelled the Cranberries
Dave Fanning, an Irish music
journalist and one of the first to discover the Cranberries, talks about
how Dolores O'Riordan found a place between grunge and Brit pop that
catapulted the band to international stardom.
Dolores O’Riordan, the lead singer of the Irish rock band the Cranberries, died on Monday in London. She was 46.
Her death was announced by her publicist, who did not specify the cause.
“Irish
and international singer Dolores O’Riordan has died suddenly in London
today,” Lindsey Holmes, the publicist, said in an emailed statement,
adding that Ms. O’Riordan had been in London for a recording session.
The
statement said that family members are “devastated to hear the breaking
news and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”
A
spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said on Monday that the police
were called to a Park Lane hotel in Westminster at about 9:05 a.m., and
that Ms. O’Riordan was pronounced dead at the scene. Her death is not
being treated as suspicious.
Ms. O’Riordan wrote lyrics and often music for the Cranberries’ 1990s hits, including “Linger” (which remained on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for 24 weeks) and “Dreams,” which proclaimed both vulnerability and steadfastness. She was the sole writer of the noisier, angrier “Zombie,” a response to an Irish Republican Army terrorist bombing in 1993.
In
the band, her voice — high and breathy, but far more determined than
fragile — rode atop a rich wash of electric guitars. Her unmistakable
Irish accent and the Celtic inflections of her melodies gave her singing
a plaintive individuality and a flinty core.
The
Cranberries were formed in 1989 as the Cranberry Saw Us and renamed the
Cranberries after Ms. O’Riordan took over as lead singer in 1990. Along
with the brothers Noel Hogan on guitar and Mike Hogan on bass, the band
includes the drummer Fergal Lawler.
The
group arrived during the early 1990s ascendance of alternative rock:
tuneful, punk-derived, guitar-driven songs that often made their way
from college-radio playlists to commercial radio.
Four of the group’s albums reached the Billboard Top 20.
Female
rock singers like Sinead O’Connor and Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays
had recently preceded the Cranberries on the pop charts, and the band
also drew deeply on the musical example of the Smiths, the 1980s band
that propelled warm, rounded guitars and confessional lyrics with
post-punk drumming. The Cranberries’ 1993 debut album, “Everybody Else
Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?,” which included the career-making hits
“Linger” and “Dreams,” and the 1994 album “No Need to Argue,” with
“Zombie,” were both produced by the Smiths’ producer, Stephen Street.
After
“Zombie,” the Cranberries lost much of their pop audience as their
late-1990s albums grew harsher and more concerned with sociopolitical
messages than with love songs. The Cranberries disbanded in 2003. In
2007 Ms. O’Riordan released her first solo album, “Are You Listening?”
In an interview published in The Guardian last year,
Ms. O’Riordan described how the band wrote “Linger,” its first song
together. “I wrote about being rejected,” she said. “I never imagined
that that it would become a big song.”
In 1996, Neil Strauss, a pop music critic for The New York Times, described Ms. O’Riordan as a performer who can “sing almost anything and make it seem musical.”
Ms.
O’Riordan’s death was also announced on the group’s Twitter account,
where fans shared messages of mourning and of the impact that the
group’s music had on their lives.
“She was part of my DNA, the soundtrack to my life,” wrote one, Michael Traboulsi.
Ms.
O’Riordan was born on Sept. 6, 1971, and grew up in the Ballybricken
area of County Limerick, Ireland. In 1994, she married Don Burton, a
former tour manager for Duran Duran; the couple divorced in 2014. She is
survived by her three children, Taylor, Molly and Dakota, and her
mother, Eileen O’Riordan.
Six
years after the Cranberries’ split, the group reunited and began
touring again. But last year, the band canceled dates on its European
and North America tours because of Ms. O’Riordan’s ongoing back
problems.
“There
have been some comments suggesting that Dolores could perform if she
sat while singing. Unfortunately it is not as simple as that,” a
statement on the group’s Facebook page said then.
The
Cranberries released the acoustic album “Something Else” in 2017 and
had plans to perform shows in Europe and North America. But the tours
were cut short or canceled because the band said that singing put
pressure on the parts of her spine that were giving her so much pain.
