Dolores O’Riordan

Sun 6 May 2007

After a personal breakdown and the break-up of her band The Cranberries, Dolores O’Riordan is returning with a new album.

Calm after the storm

CHITRA RAMASWAMY

THERE was a point in the Nineties when Dolores O’Riordan was Britain’s biggest female rock star. The lead singer of the Cranberries was one of Ireland’s richest artists’  estimated to have a bank balance and was recognised the world over for her voice, an ethereal howl which was revered and re-viled in fairly equal measure. The band had won numerous awards, sold millions of records and O’Riordan had sung with Luciano Pavarotti and re-duced Princess Diana to tears with a performance of ‘Linger’, one of their biggest hits.

Then came the classic crash-and-burn chapter of the fable a tale of non-stop touring, overwork, depression, anorexia and a very public nervous breakdown. After years of struggling with fame and fortune, O’Riordan left the Cranberries in 2003 and the quartet quietly disbanded.

?€?You can’t see the forest for the trees when you’re in the midst of it,’ she says of those years as she sits in the Four Seasons in London’s Knightsbridge. ‘I was in the eye of the storm and I couldn’t get out. When I was young I was very hungry for fame. I was a workaholic and I enjoyed it, but then I overdid it. It became too difficult to stop.?€?

Now, after a four-year hiatus, the 35-year-old has returned with her first solo album, Are You Listening? Musically, it picks up where the Cranberries left off, with its mainstream and folk- edged guitar rock, though O’Riordan claims she experimented more on this album. ‘There were no limitations, no band waiting for me and no contractual obligations, so it was like having a brand new canvas and new paintbrushes she says. I’d never done it like that before. It was just what the doctor ordered, much better than churning out an album every two years. It’s better to take four years out and bring out a quality bunch of songs.?€?

O’Riordan often speaks like someone who has been through a lot of therapy. It was her psychotherapist who many years ago, when she was battling depression in the Cranberries and her weight had dropped to six stone, told her to get out of the limelight, fast, and go where nobody knew her. It’s advice that she has continued to take ever since, disappearing along the coast outside Dublin, where she lives with her husband and three children, or into the forests in Ontario, Canada, where they go for part of the year.

‘At the end of the day everybody likes to switch off’ she says. ‘But if you’re really full-on, it’s hard to. I think that over the years I’ve found a way of doing it and it’s about stepping away for long periods and being quiet.?€? As for being back on the music scene, she doesn’t feel wary at all. ‘I was 18 when I started this and I’ve been doing it longer than I’ve been a mother’she says. ‘Also, I know my limitations and boundaries.’

In the sleeve notes for Are You Listening?, she very publicly apologises for my lack of contact, and how I have isolated myself?€?, adding but these are the only means whereupon I can grow?. Likewise, her conversation is peppered with therapy’s clichs, heart-felt though they are, such as ?€?what doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger?€?, and there is much talk of emotional journeys and learning curves. She may be earnest but she has also managed to turn things around for herself.

O’Riordan is wary and intense, her handshake limp, her green eyes fixed on me. Over the course of the interview, this diminutive, softly spoken woman gradually becomes much less jittery. Strangely, it is when she is talking about her personal life that she is most relaxed. Growing up in Limerick as the youngest of seven and now with 28 nieces and nephews family is very important to her and much of the conversation finds its way back to her children, her pregnancies and her husband, who is also her manager and flits around in the background while we speak.

O?€™Riordan used to have a reputation for being something of a livewire with the press, who in turn have been pretty vitriolic about her in the past, more so perhaps than towards fellow Irish acts such as The Corrs or, say, Sinead O’Connor. Even now, when someone’s voice is described as resembling O’Riordan’s, it is often not meant as a compliment.

‘When I was younger and really famous, the inevitable backlash came and I would get people coming to talk to me who had very negative energy or were just mean’? she says. ‘Now that I’m older I realise people are people and we’re all different and it doesn?€™t mean they don’t like me.’

O?€™Riordan began writing again six months after leaving the band, while she was caring for her mother-in-law. Diagnosed with cancer, her mother-in-law was given six months to live though she lasted 10, O’Riordan says with a wan smile“ and her deteriorating health ended up being part of the reason for O’Riordan leaving the band. At that time the priority was to look after her. I knew if I was going to Ontario that it made more sense to tell the Berries not to wait for me. I told them to go on with their lives and do something else.?€?

In the evenings, O’Riordan would walk and write, for therapeutic reasons at first, but soon whole songs started to emerge. One of the darker tracks on the album, ‘Black Widow’, on which O’Riordan yodels “Feelin’ lonely. Feelin’ lonely/ And she dies, and she dies? is about this time. It’s not all grief and sadness though, and on the new single, Ordinary Day’, O’Riordan celebrates the birth of her third child, Dakota, and extols the healing power of the simple life. Be-cause the album spans four years of her life, it runs the gamut of her experience.

When she wasn’t writing and co-producing the album, or flying in backing musicians, O’Riordan volunteered in a school, planted vegetables, learned to paint and looked after her children. ‘The Cranberries were just so massive and I was so young that I had no life experience before this. I went from a classroom to fame overnight, while all my friends went to college and did normal things. In the four years that I had off, I went away and tried to reclaim what I lost.’

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