As The Cranberries prepare for the release this Friday of their In The End album, Fergal Lawlor and Mike and Noel Hogan open up to Stuart Clark about their friend and bandmate Dolores O’Riordan.
“Lyrically, Dolores had a lot to say again,” Noel says of the creative roll she’d been on. “When you spoke to her, it was always, ‘So much has happened to me over the last three years that I want to write about’ – and a lot had happened. It felt like she did five times the living the rest of us did. There was so much that needed to come out, to the point where I couldn’t keep up with her. You’d mail Dolores a rough idea and she’d say, ‘You got anything else?’ I was like, ‘Give me a chance!”
A year on and the band are still finding it hard to come to terms with Dolores’ tragic death.
“The shock is impossible to explain,” Noel notes. “That whole day is just a blur. It felt like somebody had made a mistake. It still does sometimes. You think you’re going to get another call in a minute saying, ‘Oh, there’s been a mix up, she’s fine.’ It all feels so… unfair.”
Recalling the early days of the band, Noel says: “Initially, Dolores was very shy around us because we were strangers, but as we got to know each other better we realised that, ‘She’s well able to stand up for herself.’ She was never the ‘innocent colleen’ that the British music press made her out to be. She was a very smart person.”
The lads also pick out some of their favourite band memories.
“We opened up for the Stones in the San Siro,” Ferg fondly reminisces. “I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Jayyyysssssusssss!’ During ‘New New York’, I could hear Dolores’ vocal just swirling around. It was fucking unreal.
“The thing we remember the most about Dolores is the craic we had," he continues. "She’d be sat on the bus ripping the piss out of you.”
In shops today, it’s an interview that all Cranberries fans will want to read.

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