Volume

The Cranberries
by Pierre Paphides

Can you imagine being a Cranberries song? Being carted about from town to town across the world and having your slender frame subjected to Dolores O'Riordan's Hades hellbitch yowl some way between the getting-slightly-carried-away bit that usually comes between the instrumental break and the final refrain; having thousands of sensitive young Americans wet themselves with sorrow and glee upon the very first chime of your timorous, automnal intro; living in 1.200.000 houses at once. You'd go mad wouldn't you? Perhaps that's why at their last London gig at the Astoria, The Cranberries were the most insane thing I'd seen since my mad uncle, Uncle Jack McMad, put on a sari and nailed a kipper to the garden wall. Contradictions fluttered into each other with the grace and elegance of a thousand virtually challenged seagulls, while half of London - shoehorned into a tiny auditorium - moshed and stagedived to "Not Sorry", "Pretty" and "Put Me Down", some of the sweetest, most fragile ballads that ever decorated your depressions. If any of the above has left you in any doubt as to what my feeling on The Cranberries is, then I'll be more succunt. Basically no band in the world can flagrantly rhyme the line "Did you have to let it linger?" with "You've got me wrapped around your finger" and still move me to tears. No band, that is, but the Cranberries. It is as the late Mr Bulsara opined, "a kind of magic". Dolores O'Riordan's defensiveness in the face of questioning makes Arsenal FC seem like a team of genetically cloned Eric Cantonas by comparison. Half-remembering me from a disastrous interview last year, Dolores leads me into the patio bar of West London's Embassy Hotel and wearily tells me how she hates being described as "innocent" and "naive". She says that part of the band's phenomenal Statside success over the last year is because Americans don't have the same hang-ups as English people over how female Irish singers should be. The rampant success of The Cranberries' only album to date, the alternately serene and savagely tuneful 'Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?' is a living testimony to the fact, reckons Dolores. Was there never a time when you were more innocent and naive? "I might have been",she whispers,"but people who would say those kinds of things about me were always sayng them for the wrong reasons. Like anyone who's an Irish Catholic is like that, and it's not true. We have microwaves and computers in Ireland, just like everywhere else." Do men generally have a hung-up in perceiving women in bands as non-aligned individuals? "Not men, just journalists in this country." Uh-oh. I detect a pet theme emerging from this kennel. "It was such a relief when the album started selling in America and we didn't have to answer all these stupid questions like: Are you a Riot Grrrl? Who cares? People are constantly looking for categories to put you in." So this probably isn't the best time to tell Dolores, replete with suedehead crop and size 92 Docs that she looks more frightening than any Riot Grrrl I've ever seen. Unsurpringly, in Dolores' worldview, America (the country that transformed her band's paltry-selling album, turned it into a million-selling success story and the Cranberries into bona fide copper-bottomed stars) is absolutely terrific, its inhabitants fantastic, its clouds lined with silver and its streets paved with gold. Britain on the other hand, has become inextricably tied up with trivia, parochial attitudes and bad memories. Come on, Dolores! It's not that bad here, is it? "We love our fans everywhere",she mutters, preparing the ground for the inevitable 'but'. "But there's a kind of exclusivity here that really gets on my nerves. There's no room for honesty. You open the papers and it's all Suede and PJ Harvey, and people go around saying, That PJ Harvey, she's the one who's in all the papers, isn't she? But how many people can name more than two or three of her songs? And now there's this new group, Elastica. Initially you just hear the name. And then you hear, Blah! The you hear, Blahblah! Then you hear Blahblahblahblah! It's got nothing to do with music." And there are the Latest Great Indie Hopes dealt with, in one strychnine-laced nutshell. Of course, if we cast our minds back to 1991, before the Canberries' magnificent debut EP, released on Irish Indie label Xeric, the acclaim they received was rapturous. And not without good reason. The urgent and astonishing tones of"Pathetic Senses" and "Nothing Left At All" more than put paid to the Sundays comparisons invoked by the dreamy lovesighs of "Them" and "Uncertain". Imagine being a bunch of Cork teenagers just out of school, getting tidal waves of adulation in the British press, and all because you wrote some songs with your mates. You come to London and the head of A&R of every major label is out to see what the fuss is about. For all of Dolores' talk about the naivety with which the press can imbue its subjects, I'd wager her bitterness is as much levelled towards herself for having been naive enough to entrust jounalists with information about her family and home life, as it is towards the hacks who abused her trust. Whatever, the upshot of all the initial acclaim and the comparative silence that followed it was that Dolores fell ill (she won't specify the exact nature of her illness) as a result of all the expectations and stress headed upon her. "I remember the first time we came to England. Things were so different. I didn't really know the rest of the world. They were just these three boys that had recently asked me to sing with them. And so I got on this tour bus with them and the road crew, and it just became too much, with all the press and having to face exspectant audiences every night."And that's what made you so ill? "It was too much too soon," recalls Dolores, still visibly upset by the trauma, "I went back home and the doctor told me I had to take some time off and forget about the band." It was at that point, ironically, that Dolores got to know her colleagues: Noel, a chap among chaps who will quite happily discuss football, religion, his guitar playing (Noel's guitar brings to mind all the sweetest aspects of Johnny Marr's mid- period Smiths style) and the intrinsic thrill of drawing on the sole of your slippers with a biro; bassist Mike, Noel's kid brother and quite good at drawing caricatures of the rest of the band; and Fergal, that rarest of all rarities - an intelligent drummer with a delightfully dry sense of humour to boot. When they found out that Dolores might not be able to continue with the band, thereby dissolving the band and the new deal with Island, their priorities were forced to rearrange themselves accordingly. "They were lovely," gushes Dolores, cracking into a smile for the first time. "They came around to visit me, just went on about how they'd always be there for me because they cared about me, and just demanded that I forget about the band if it was gonna do my head in." "It was around that time that I learnt everything I know now. As time went on, we started tentatively touring again. Often after the gigs we'd be at a club, and I'd be lying there, just smashed out me head. The boys would be standing there just minding me. They wouldn't go anywhere without me." These days things are a little different. Dolores, by her own admission, has become strong enough to deal with the everyday bullshit that surrounds the promotion of million-selling albums. Both in terms of demeanour and presentation, the econo-size Tank Girl that leaps around the stage getting the audience to, uh, "put your hands together" is unrecognizably from the chronically shy, bob-haired waif that performed entire gigs facing her drummer. What's been the big change then? "Well, the more you learn to perform and play, the more the crowd respond. Success isn't really a factor in making you confident, because you don't get a real sense of what it is. In any case the more successful we become, the less I care. The less I find myself caring about what people think, the more successful we become." That's a very Zen-way of becoming massive! "Well, I've had enough sadness in my life to know that happiness doesn't necessarily come from fame. We made a good first album and a nice bit of money, but that's not nearly as satisfying as the success you feel from writing a song that can make you cry." Would you change anything? The illnesses? The traumas? America's most popular adopted daughter ponders a year that began loitering around the Number 76 postion in the Gallup Top 75, and ended up playing to stadiums packed stadiums and prime-time US chat shows. "No, I don't think I would", she ruminates. "Everything that's happened has just made me strong enough to cope with all the other negative things that being away from home entails. Touring puts a test on relationships but you have to be able to cope with that. It's funny also how the songs change in meaning the more you go through life. I wrote 'Dreams' about something that was happening at the time. But life changes. Meanings change. My songs change with those meanings. We bludgeon new emotions into them." As I said, it's a hard life being a Cranberries song. And about "Everybody Else ..." Volume says: 'Everybody Else' is still one of the most underrated debuts of recent years, with Dolores' alterantely stratospheric and deeply melancholy timbre oscillating between unrequited love and fierce castigation. Noel Hogan embellished Dolores' melodies with the kind of delightful six-string economy that propelled The Smiths into the hearts of a generation. Listen to 'Pretty' -perhaps a reassuring few words from Dolores to her younger self? - and see how long you can contain your tear ducts. A magically understated masterpiece.

VOLUME Volume Nine, booklet p. 118-125