The Cranberries: News, History & Updates

The Cranberries Biography

By FERGAL LAWLER, exclusively for Alternative Nation

Recognizing Dolores O’Riordan’s Talent Early On

Fergal Lawler: Yeah, yeah, we knew straight away. The very first day we had been playing just the three of us. We had a singer originally, a guy, we did maybe eight or nine months with him, and it was a great learning experience – how gigs work, and did a demo in the studio, and kind of got the feeling of how to record in the studio. And then he left – he was in a drummer in another band, but he was doing this as a side project. So, he left to focus on his main band. And then we were playing just the three of us instrumentally for a few months, and we kind of put the word out that we were looking for a singer.

So, Dolores came into the rehearsal room on a Sunday afternoon, and we played some of the instrumental stuff we had – the idea for ‘Linger’ being one of them. And then she plunked her keyboard down, and she was plugged in…we had no PA or anything. We had no money, so we just had, like a guitar ramp with her vocal mic plugged into it. So, she sang through that.

But we knew straight away. We were like, ‘Whoa. She can really sing.’ And then she played some songs she had on keyboard, and took a tape home with her of the music for ‘Linger,’ and came back, I think, like the following Tuesday or Wednesday, and she had loads of ideas. The song wasn’t quite finished, but nearly there, and she had that string line and vocal melody and the lyrics. So, it was amazing.

And then I think, really, maybe after three months, we went into the studio, and once we went into the studio and did a demo, she was doing vocals and soprano stuff and all this mad stuff. And we were like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ Because you could really hear it clearly then. It wasn’t like, through a distorted guitar amp. You could hear crystal clear, and we were blown away.

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?

Fergal Lawler: It was a great time. Really, really good fun. I think it was like May, and the weather was starting to get nice, and we were in Dublin, and it was just a small studio. It was Windmill Lane, but there was two Windmill Lane studios. There was a bigger one outside of town, and there was a smaller one right in town, besides St. Stephen’s Green in the center of Dublin. I think it was where Def Leppard had done Hysteria a couple of years before that. So it was just us in the studio. Was really nice. Was really relaxed.

We kind of did a week’s trial with Stephen [Street, producer], because he wanted to get to know us, and we wanted to get to know him, and that worked out really well. So, a few weeks afterwards, we went back into the studio and just tore into it. It was great fun. It was a really good experience for us. It was very relaxed. And really focused. Stephen was really focused on all aspects of it, of the sound, and he just managed to capture an absolutely beautiful, beautiful job he did with that album. It’s incredible.

The Success of ‘Linger’

Fergal Lawler: We had been touring in Europe, opening up for a band called the Hothouse Flowers. And no one really knew us at that stage. We were known in Ireland and in the UK, but not in mainland Europe. And then we got a call saying that ‘Linger’ had been playing on college radio in the States, that we needed to get over and start touring there. So we went off and we toured for six months. Pretty much did three months. Took a break for two weeks and did three months again. And during that time, as the tour progressed, the song was getting bigger and bigger – because it was picked up by MTV.

And then they started playing it in heavy rotation. And you could feel the energy in the crowd every night. And it was getting bigger and bigger, and more people were coming and singing all the songs, the lyrics to everything they knew. And it was incredible for us, to have been slogging away around Europe for a couple of years and not really getting anywhere, and then to have that break and to have people know your songs. And just the energy was incredible. It was fantastic. And we were young. We were early 20s, so it was a big adventure for us. We just loved every minute of it.

The Massive Success of No Need to Argue and ‘Zombie’

Fergal Lawler: That was a bit scary at the time, I think. Because we were an alternative band, and suddenly we were kind of in the limelight, and we were all fairly shy people and didn’t know how to deal with fame or whatever. It was a bit unnerving. I suppose if I could go back and tell myself to calm down and just enjoy it and not worry about it, I would. But it’s part of learning, isn’t it? You have to learn to deal with tough situations.

We huddled together as a unit, because our crew had been with us since the start, and we were all touring around together and on this big adventure, and we just kind of stuck together more so than anything. Didn’t really go out to like, ‘VIP celebrity events’ or anything like that. We just kind of did our own thing, and hung out together. And I think that just kind of made us feel a bit more safe.

The Cranberries’ MTV Unplugged

Fergal Lawler: It was a morning shoot in Brooklyn, in a theater in Brooklyn [on February 14, 1995]. It was really relaxed and casual. There was no stress. It was really well put together. I think they’d been doing it for a few years by the time we got to do it. So, we had seen some of the other artists, and were really excited and honored to get asked to do it.

We weren’t stressed because we had done loads of acoustic performances since we started, really, actually. Because you go into a record store, set up your equipment and play a few songs. And radio stations, that kind of thing. So we’d bring some acoustic guitars, some bongos, shakers, tambourines, that kind of thing.

Most of the songs were suited to be played acoustically, anyway. So it wasn’t much hassle. There wasn’t loads of, like, electronics and loops and stuff going on. We never got into that kind of stuff. So we were completely not a bit stressed, really.

The only one we were a little bit worried about maybe, was ‘Zombie,’ because it’s such a powerful, electric guitar-driven song that we were worried how it would translate. But we did rehearsal and we worked with the electric strings. They were a quartet we had worked with before in the UK. We had done a TV show with them, and we did a performance in the Royal Albert Hall with them.

So we did a rehearsal, and they kind of dug in with the strings for the heavier parts of ‘Zombie’ – the chorus and that. And it just really worked. Worked really well.

The Most Underrated Cranberries Album

Fergal Lawler: There’s an album called Roses that came out around 2012, and not many people know it. And there’s some amazing songs in that album. We’re actually thinking about doing a whole reissue of that because at the time, we weren’t signed to a record company, because we had taken a break for a long time, and we were out touring again.

And while we were touring, we started writing new stuff and decided to record that album. I think it just never got the proper publicity or whatever. And there’s some amazing songs on it. I would like to re-release again. I think we all always felt like that album was a bit kind of lost or something.

Dolores’ Passing in 2018 Comes as a Shock

Fergal Lawler: Yeah, for everyone. I mean, she was only 46. It’s still something that I find it hard to get to grips with. You know, I expect an email or a phone call or something like that. And it’s something…I don’t know, you’ll never really get over. It’s something you just learn to live with, I think – as time goes on.

Was Delores One of the Iconic Voices of the ’90s?

Fergal Lawler: Definitely. Yeah. She had a totally unique voice that, she was herself. I remember her saying that she played the piano since she was a kid. And her piano teacher said, ‘Maybe you should get vocal lessons.’ And she said, ‘Okay, I’ll try it out and see.’ So she went to the vocal coach, and the vocal coach was saying, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. That’s the wrong way. You can’t do it that way.’ And she was saying, ‘But that’s the way I want to express myself.’ ‘No, you can’t do it like that. That’s not the way they do it.’ So, it was just one time she said she went. ‘If someone’s going to tell me I can’t do what I’ve always done, it just doesn’t make sense. I want to do it my way, and this is the way I express myself. And I don’t need a vocal coach telling me I shouldn’t do it that way.’

And that’s what makes her unique, I think, because she’s not trained. Especially nowadays, I think you hear a lot of artists that sound the same, like I can hear my kids playing stuff on their iPod or whatever, and I say, ‘Is that such and such a person?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh no, that’s someone else.’ And I said, ‘But it sounds exact same as that other artist.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, they’re kind of around the same time they came out.’ There’s no uniqueness there for a lot of pop artists, especially, I think.

Fergal Lawler interview conducted exclusively by Greg Prato for Alternative Nation.