The story of The Cranberries

A girl from Ballybricken

Dolores Mary Eileen O'Riordan was born on the sixth of September 1971 in Ballybricken, a village in County Limerick in the west of Ireland. She was the youngest of nine children, two of whom had died as babies. Her mother Eileen worked as a school caterer and named her after Our Lady of Dolours, a title of the Virgin Mary. Her father Terry had been a farm labourer until a motorbike accident in 1968 left him brain damaged and unable to work. Dolores adored him. He taught her the accordion, and she picked up her famous yodel by copying the way he sang an old cowboy song called The Lonesome Cattle Call. It was a devout Catholic house, and music and faith were never far apart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By her family's account she was singing before she could talk. When she was five, the head of her school carried her into the class of twelve year olds, sat her on the teacher's desk and told her to sing for them. She played the tin whistle, then the spoons and the bodhran, and she became a soloist in the choir of Saint Ailbe's church in Ballybricken, where she also played the harmonium for years. When she was seven, one of her sisters accidentally burned the family house down, and the local community raised money to buy the family a new home. By ten, her uncles were taking her round the local pubs to sing.[1] [2] [3]

There was also a hidden darkness in those years. From the age of eight until she was twelve, Dolores was sexually abused by a man her family trusted, a family friend from the area. She kept it secret for decades. In 1995 she told Rolling Stone only that she had a lot of secrets about her childhood, and she did not speak about the abuse publicly until 2013. She never named the man. She later linked it to the depression, self loathing and eating disorder that would shadow her adult life. In the same interviews she remembered warm beds, big dinners and a strong faith, and she would swing between those two versions of her childhood for the rest of her life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At twelve she started at Laurel Hill Coláiste, a convent secondary school in Limerick city. On the first day each girl had to say what she wanted to be. Her friend Catherina Egan remembers Dolores standing on her chair, announcing that she was going to be a rock star, and bursting into song. Her classmates called her Dollar, the stage name she had picked for herself. She won the national Slógadh song contest for the school almost every year, collecting around twenty medals, took piano lessons, learned guitar at seventeen and became head girl. Her mother hoped she would become a nun or a music teacher. Instead, at eighteen, she left home to live with her boyfriend, broke and sometimes hungry.[1] [2] [3]

The Cranberry Saw Us

The band started without her. Brothers Noel and Mike Hogan, descendants of the nineteenth century Irish poet Michael Hogan, met Fergal Lawler in Limerick in the mid 1980s, when they were teenagers breakdancing together. They loved English indie music, above all the Smiths and the Cure. Fergal got his first drum kit for Christmas at about seventeen, and two months later the Hogans had a bass and a guitar. In 1989 they formed a band with a singer called Niall Quinn, who also drummed and wrote the songs for another Limerick group, the Hitchers. They called themselves the Cranberry Saw Us. In January 1990 they recorded a demo called Anything. Then Quinn quit, saying he was not cut out to be a frontman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

For a few months the three friends carried on as an instrumental band, and then they went looking for a female singer. On a Sunday afternoon in 1990, a small, shy eighteen year old cycled up to their rehearsal space at Xeric Studios in a tracksuit, carrying a broken Casio keyboard. It was Dolores O'Riordan. She sang a few of her own songs and a Sinéad O'Connor song, Troy, though the band could barely hear her through the amplifier. Fergal gave her a lift to the bus stop. They handed her a cassette of chords Noel had written. A week later she came back with words and a melody, and sang them a rough version of a song called Linger. Noel said later he could not understand how she was not already in a band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

With Dolores on board, things moved quickly. They recorded a four song cassette called Water Circle, and in July 1990 they played their first gig with her, in a hotel basement called Ruby's Club, to about sixty people. Dolores was so nervous she sang turned sideways, and the three boys kept their heads down. Their next tape, Nothing Left at All, was pressed in just three hundred copies and sold out in Limerick record shops within days. The owner of Xeric Studios, Pearse Gilmore, became their manager and producer. He recorded a demo with early versions of Linger and Dreams, and Noel posted it to record companies in London. Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade, loved it, and a bidding war began.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the eighteenth of April 1991, the band played a student show at the University of Limerick in front of fourteen hundred people. In the crowd were Denny Cordell of Island Records and some thirty other talent scouts who had flown over from London. Soon afterwards they shortened their name to the Cranberries, and the Hogan brothers quit their day jobs. Island won the race and signed them to a six album deal. The reality was less glamorous. They slept on floors and in cramped vans, earning at most twenty five dollars a day. In December 1991 they were booked to open for Nirvana in Belfast, but the show was cancelled at the last minute because Kurt Cobain was ill.[1] [2] [3]

Their first real release, the Uncertain EP, came out in October 1991 and got poor reviews. Noel later complained that Gilmore had cluttered the mixes with dance beats and industrial guitars. The relationship with their manager was falling apart. By the band's account, he was keeping information from them and making his own arrangements with Island's American office. In January 1992, after a miserable attempt to start their debut album, they scrapped the recordings and fired him. Noel put it simply: the four of them had no problem with each other, their problem was with him. Geoff Travis became their new manager, and Island found them a new producer.[1] [2] [3]

Cracking America

The new producer was Stephen Street, who had made records with the Smiths and Morrissey, the band's heroes. Island sent him to see them at the Marquee club in London, where Dolores was still so nervous that she sang sideways to the crowd. He saw something special anyway. In March 1992 they started recording in Dublin. Their first single, Dreams, came out in the autumn of 1992 and Melody Maker made it single of the week. The strange extra voice near the end of the song belongs to Mike Mahoney, Dolores's boyfriend at the time. In November they played the Royal Albert Hall, supporting Mercury Rev and the House of Love. Melody Maker had already described Dolores as having the voice of a saint trapped in a glass harp.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, came out on the first of March 1993, and at first it went nowhere. Linger and Dreams both missed the charts. A Hot Press writer remembers Dolores in a Dublin pub that spring, asking him to lend her twenty quid and buy her a drink, convinced the band were already in the last chance saloon and about to be dropped. Island sent them to America as the opening act for Suede. Then a senior MTV producer, who had come to see Suede in New York, fell for the support act instead. He put the Linger video into heavy rotation. Halfway through the tour the running order was reversed, and the Cranberries became the headliners.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By the autumn of 1993 America had gone Cranberries crazy. College radio played Linger constantly, and it climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, spending twenty four weeks on the chart. The album went from silver to gold to platinum in a matter of months. Dolores dragged a visiting journalist into a New York bar, asked for MTV and promised Linger would come on before they finished their drinks. Their tour bus was upgraded to one with air conditioning and four fridges. Back home, Island reissued the singles, and in June 1994 the album went to number one in the UK, only the fifth album in rock history to top the chart more than a year after its release.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Life off stage was changing just as fast. Early in 1994 Dolores badly injured her knee skiing in the French Alps and needed major surgery, and she wrote songs from her hospital bed. On the road in America she met Don Burton, a Canadian who had been the tour manager of Duran Duran, when the two bands toured together. They married on the eighteenth of July 1994 at Holy Cross Abbey in County Tipperary. Dolores was twenty two. Burton already had a son from a previous relationship, and the couple would go on to have three children. The Irish press was fascinated, and it was the start of a level of fame she would find very hard to live with.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Zombie

On the twentieth of March 1993, two IRA bombs hidden in cast iron litter bins exploded on a crowded shopping street in Warrington, in the north west of England. Three year old Johnathan Ball, who was out buying a Mother's Day card, died at the scene. Twelve year old Tim Parry died in hospital five days later. Dozens of other people were injured. The IRA admitted the attack but blamed the British authorities for not acting on its warnings, a claim the police rejected. No one has ever been convicted, and Cheshire Police still list the killings as unsolved murders. The Cranberries were on tour in Britain at the time, and Dolores watched the grieving mothers on television and was devastated.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song came to her on that tour, and she finished it alone, late at night, on an acoustic guitar in her flat in Limerick. Its working title was In Your Head. When she brought it to the band's little rehearsal shed in Mungret, the boys started playing it in their usual gentle, jangly way. Dolores stopped them, picked up an electric guitar and said it had to be heavy, because it was angry. She kicked in the distortion on the chorus and asked Fergal to hit the drums hard. She was clear about what it meant. She said the IRA did not speak for her, her family or Ireland, and that she simply could not accept children being killed for politics.[1] [2] [3]

They played Zombie live for a year before recording it with Stephen Street. Island was nervous about releasing such a political, grungy song as the lead single, but the band pushed until the label gave in. It came out on the nineteenth of September 1994. The video was directed by Samuel Bayer, who had made Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. He filmed children and British soldiers in Belfast under the cover story of a documentary, and a soldier's rifle pointing at the lens is real. Dolores suggested painting herself gold in front of a cross with silver painted boys. The BBC and RTÉ banned the original for its violent images. Zombie still went to number one in Germany, France, Australia and on American alternative radio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album No Need to Argue followed on the third of October 1994. The band had sketched early versions of six songs during a week off in New York, flying Stephen Street over from London. It was darker and louder than the debut. Beside Zombie there was Ode to My Family, about Dolores longing for her simple childhood, and The Icicle Melts, her response to the murder of the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool. It became their biggest record, with around seventeen million copies sold worldwide. At Woodstock in August 1994 she dedicated Zombie to the victims of war in Belfast, Bosnia and Rwanda. In November a brooding performance on David Letterman's show sealed their American stardom.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On Valentine's Day 1995 they taped MTV Unplugged in Brooklyn with a string section, playing a song called Yesterday's Gone that Dolores and Noel had written the day before. A few days later their early champion Denny Cordell, the Island man who signed them, died of lymphoma in Dublin at fifty one. A week after that, still raw with grief, they played Zombie on Saturday Night Live. In March Dolores was on the cover of Rolling Stone, which called the band Ireland's biggest musical export since U2. In May a free show in Washington for three thousand fans drew more than ten thousand. Police stopped it after a song and a half, a riot broke out and Dolores's guitar was stolen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Too much, too soon

The rest of 1995 was a blur of honours. In September Dolores sang Ave Maria with Luciano Pavarotti at his charity concert in Modena for the children of Bosnia. Princess Diana, who was there, told her it had brought her to tears, and she also sang Linger with Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. In November Zombie won Best Song at the MTV Europe Music Awards, beating Michael Jackson's You Are Not Alone. Their European tour played to more than half a million people. With her bleached pixie cut, bare feet and heavy boots, Dolores had become a style icon. The New York Times even credited her with a large share of the decade's Dr. Martens sales.[1] [2]

Their third album, To the Faithful Departed, arrived at the end of April 1996. It was produced by Bruce Fairbairn, and dedicated to Denny Cordell and to Dolores's grandfather Joe, who had both died. A track called Cordell was their tribute to him. The sound was harder still. The first single, Salvation, a punky warning against drugs, spent four weeks at number one on the American modern rock chart. But critics mauled the album for songs about Bosnia and war, and for I Just Shot John Lennon, which used real gunshot sounds. It still reached number two in Britain and number four in America, their highest ever US chart position.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The world tour to promote it was booked for one hundred and seventeen dates. In June 1996, in Cairns, Australia, Dolores injured her knee again, the Australian leg was cancelled and she flew home for surgery. They restarted in North America in August but stopped after twenty eight shows. Dolores later admitted she was badly depressed, suffering from insomnia, paranoia and anorexia, and that her weight had fallen to around forty one kilos. Their manager Allen Kovac said he flew to Ireland and took her to a doctor, who told her she was not healthy enough to tour. Cancelling reportedly cost between eight and fourteen million dollars. The rest of the tour was scrapped, and the band very nearly split.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Instead they stopped. The band took most of 1997 off, and Dolores gave birth to her first child, a son named Taylor. In May the band received an Ivor Novello award for International Achievement in London. Dolores recorded God Be with You on her own for the soundtrack of the film The Devil's Own. Her mother later said simply that it had all been too much, too soon. In December 1998 the band returned to the stage at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, the year the prize honoured the Northern Ireland peace process. They played Promises there for the first time, four months before it appeared on their next album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Bury the Hatchet and the long goodbye

Bury the Hatchet came out on the nineteenth of April 1999. Motherhood ran through songs like Animal Instinct and You and Me, alongside darker songs about divorce and child abuse. The cover, by the famous Pink Floyd designer Storm Thorgerson, showed a naked man watched by a giant eye in the desert, and years later Pitchfork put it on a list of the worst record covers of all time. Promises was a heavy rock song about divorce and became their ninth and final UK top forty hit. The album topped the charts in Canada and across Europe, and the band even appeared as themselves on the TV series Charmed, playing Just My Imagination.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour that followed was the biggest of their career, about one hundred and ten dates between April 1999 and July 2000, playing to more than a million people. The Cranberries were the first artists to sell tickets for a national tour exclusively online, through Ticketmaster's website. Their reach went far beyond Europe and America. In Asia, the video for Promises broke into the MTV Asia charts, and Linger, Dreams and Zombie became karaoke standards from Bangkok to Singapore. Money followed the fame. In 1999 Dolores was listed as the fifth richest woman in Ireland or Britain, and a year earlier she and Don had bought a large stud farm in County Limerick.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After Universal took over their old label's parent company, the band landed at MCA. Their fifth album, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, reunited them with Stephen Street and came out on the twenty second of October 2001. Thorgerson's cover featured a man in bed on a beach surrounded by red balls, which he said were cranberries blown up to the size of gym balls. It reached only number forty six in America. Dolores gave all the proceeds of the single Time Is Ticking Out to the Chernobyl Children's Project, after Ali Hewson and Adi Roche showed her pictures of children affected by the disaster. That December she sang at the Vatican Christmas concert for Pope John Paul II.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A greatest hits album, Stars, followed in 2002. In January 2003 the band walked away from MCA with one album left on their contract, complaining that the label had lost touch with them and let the album sink. That summer they opened for the Rolling Stones and AC/DC, where Dolores struck up a friendship with Brian Johnson, and they tried out new songs in Belfast. Then, in September 2003, they announced they were taking time off for family and solo projects, and shelved the sessions for a sixth album. Dolores later said they had been too hungry, always wanting more, and had played with fire and got a bit burnt.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Apart, and back together

The break lasted six years. Noel built an electronic project called Mono Band, with a rotating cast of guest singers and Stephen Street producing, and it grew out of songs meant for the shelved Cranberries album. It later became a band called Arkitekt. He also produced young Limerick bands and put out a compilation of them on his own label. Mike and his wife Siobhán opened the Sage Café on Catherine Street in Limerick in 2006, and ran it until 2017. Fergal played and produced for local acts and formed a band called the Low Network. The four stayed on friendly terms, but by 2007 Dolores said she had not seen the others for a few years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dolores moved her family to Canada, where Don's mother was dying of cancer, and in the long snowy winters she found herself writing at the piano again. She sang on the soundtrack of the film Evilenko with the Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti, and in 2006 made a cameo in the Adam Sandler comedy Click as a wedding singer performing Linger. Her first solo album, Are You Listening?, came out in May 2007. It included Black Widow, about her mother in law's death, and Stay with Me, about her father's cancer. The label that released it was bought out within months. A second solo album, No Baggage, followed in 2009 to mixed reviews.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2009 the four played together for the first time in years, when Trinity College in Dublin made Dolores an honorary patron of its Philosophical Society. She said it felt as if they had never stopped. That August she announced a full reunion tour, which began in North America in November and went on to South America and Europe, with the band now managed by Danny Goldberg, who had once managed Nirvana. Vocal cord nodules forced cancellations along the way. They recorded a new album, Roses, with Stephen Street, and it came out in February 2012. They launched it at Italy's Sanremo festival and played an NPR Tiny Desk concert.[1] [2] [3]

The reunion years carried a heavy personal cost. On the twenty fifth of November 2011 Dolores's father Terry died at home in Limerick after six years with cancer. According to Dolores, he held on long enough to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary eleven days earlier. At his funeral, the man who had abused her as a child came up to her, introduced himself and apologised. She said she had been having nightmares about meeting him for a year. On the European leg of the Roses tour in 2012 she could not bring herself to sing Ode to My Family, the song about her childhood home, telling a French newspaper that it was still too soon.[1]

The darkest years

In 2013 Dolores became a coach on RTÉ's The Voice of Ireland, replacing Sharon Corr, and her act reached the final. But that October she gave a harrowing interview to her friend, the journalist Barry Egan. She revealed for the first time that she had been sexually abused as a child, and said she had once tried to take her own life with an overdose of pills but wanted to live for her children. The same month, she started High Court proceedings against her bandmate and songwriting partner Noel Hogan. Neither of them ever explained what the dispute was about, and the case was struck out in July 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the end of 2013 she moved back to Ireland without her family, and in 2014 her life came apart. In September she and Don Burton ended their marriage after twenty years. She went to New York and lived out of hotels, far from her children in Canada. On the tenth of November 2014, on an Aer Lingus flight from New York to Shannon, she became agitated and stepped on a flight attendant's foot. At Shannon Airport she told police she was an icon and the queen of Limerick, and when a garda caught her after she got out of a patrol car, she headbutted him and spat in his face. She then falsely accused him of groping her. Afterwards she spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In court in Ennis in 2015, Dolores pleaded guilty to assaulting the garda and two airport police officers. Her solicitor accepted there was no truth in her allegation against the garda, and said these were the actions of a very ill woman who did not remember what she had done. Judge Patrick Durcan called it appalling behaviour, but ruled that a severe mental illness had completely inhibited her judgement. He spared her a criminal conviction on condition that she paid six thousand euro to the court poor box and wrote apologies to her victims. That year she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Outside court she urged anyone struggling with their mental health to reach out for help.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In New York she found a new partner in the musician and producer Olé Koretsky, and with him and the former Smiths bassist Andy Rourke she formed a trio called D.A.R.K. Their album Science Agrees came out in 2016. In April 2017 the Cranberries released Something Else, acoustic and orchestral versions of their hits with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, plus three new songs, and set off on tour with a string quartet. Dolores mostly sang seated, in severe pain. After their show at the London Palladium on the twentieth of May 2017, the remaining European and American dates were cancelled because of a herniated disc in her back. Her final public performance was at a Billboard Christmas party in New York that December.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Losing Dolores

Off the road, Dolores was writing furiously. From June 2017 she and Noel traded ideas by email, with Noel sending music and Dolores sending back vocals, often in bursts of short messages at two in the morning. By the winter they had demos of eleven songs. The band planned to rehearse in early 2018 for a tour of China, then make their first album of new songs since Roses. In January Dolores stopped in Limerick, where her mother thought she seemed down on herself. On the twelfth she talked plans with Noel, and on the fourteenth she emailed him a new song from Shannon Airport before flying to London and checking into the Park Lane Hilton.[1] [2] [3] [4]

She was in London to mix the second D.A.R.K. album with the producer Youth, to meet the Cranberries' label BMG about a new record, and to add her voice to a cover of Zombie by the American metal band Bad Wolves. Her mother said she had given up wine for three years, but that night she was drinking. Just after one in the morning she left excited voicemails for a friend, the label executive Dan Waite, talking about her children and singing a snatch of Bitter Sweet Symphony. In the small hours she phoned her mother, full of plans. Later that morning, the fifteenth of January 2018, she was found in the bath of her hotel room. She was declared dead at sixteen minutes past nine. She was forty six.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Police said early on that the death was not suspicious. The inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court was held on the sixth of September 2018, which would have been her forty seventh birthday. It heard that she had been found with her nose and mouth under the water, and that she had no injuries and no sign of self harm. Five empty miniature bottles and a champagne bottle were in the room. Her prescription medicines were only at normal therapeutic levels, but her blood alcohol was more than four times the British drink driving limit. The coroner, Shirley Radcliffe, ruled it accidental death, drowning after sedation by alcohol, and called it a tragic accident.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dolores came home to Limerick. She lay in repose at Saint Joseph's Church, where thousands of people from as far away as China and South America filed past her open coffin, an honour usually kept for heads of state. On the twenty third of January 2018 her funeral Mass was held at Saint Ailbe's in Ballybricken, the church where she had sung as a girl. It opened with her recording of Ave Maria with Pavarotti, and ended with the Cranberries' When You're Gone, which Irish radio stations played at the same moment. The congregation burst into applause. President Michael D Higgins was among the mourners, and she was buried beside her father.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tributes came from U2, Duran Duran, Hozier, Dave Davies of the Kinks and many more. Colin Parry, whose son Tim was killed in Warrington, only learned after her death that Zombie had been written about his boy, and thanked her for lyrics he called both majestic and real. Three days after she died, Bad Wolves released their Zombie cover anyway. It topped the American mainstream rock chart, and in June 2018 the band handed a donation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to her children on stage in New York. Her former manager Allen Kovac, who by then ran Bad Wolves' label, set up the gift. Amazon sales of her music rose by hundreds of thousands of percent.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In the End, and after

A few weeks after the funeral, Noel went through the hard drives and realised Dolores's demos were almost a finished album. With the blessing of her family, including her brother P.J., who managed the band, the three survivors went into a London studio with Stephen Street in April and May 2018. There were no lyric sheets, and the songs were only numbered, so Street wrote the words down by ear. Their touring singer Johanna Cranitch filled a few gaps in the harmonies. They refused to use pitch correction, joking that Dolores would have killed them. At night they still caught themselves watching the corridor, waiting for her to arrive. On the last day, listening to a song called Lost, Fergal broke down.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In September 2018 Noel confirmed that the new album would be the last, and that the Cranberries would end with it. They would not replace her, and they dismissed any talk of a hologram. The first single, All Over Now, came out on the first anniversary of her death. The album, In the End, followed on the twenty sixth of April 2019, reached number three in Ireland and the top ten in Britain, and was nominated for Best Rock Album at the Grammys. As MusicBrainz records, the band officially ended with that release. In January 2019 the University of Limerick gave the three men honorary doctorates, and Eileen O'Riordan accepted one on her daughter's behalf.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The songs took on a new life. In 2018 Limerick's hurlers adopted Zombie on their way to their first All Ireland title in forty five years, Dreams rang out at Croke Park, and the team carried the cup to her family home. Munster rugby fans took up Zombie too, and at the 2023 Rugby World Cup it became the Irish team's celebration song. Some nationalists objected, calling it anti IRA, while Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called it an anti terrorism song everyone could sing. In April 2020 the Zombie video became the first by an Irish band to pass a billion views on YouTube. From 2025, with the blessing of Tim Parry's family, it has even been played at Warrington Wolves rugby league matches.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The vaults kept opening. A twenty fifth anniversary edition of the debut album came out late in 2018, a compilation called Remembering Dolores in 2021, and in 2024 an EP and a new remix of Linger by Iain Cook. A thirtieth anniversary edition of No Need to Argue followed in August 2025, and in November 2025 their 1995 MTV Unplugged set was finally issued as an album of its own. New generations found the songs through covers. Miley Cyrus's Zombie won the band's public approval as one of the finest they had heard, and in 2024 the Australian duo Royel Otis took Linger into the Billboard Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The Cranberries sold close to fifty million albums, and in 2018 Billboard named Dolores the top female artist in the thirty year history of its Alternative Songs chart. Their influence spread far beyond Ireland, from Faye Wong's Cantonese version of Dreams in the film Chungking Express to singers like Florence Welch, Halsey and Adele. U2 described her as a storm of a voice out of the West. The story has had more losses since. The band's former touring keyboard player Denny DeMarchi died in 2020, and her D.A.R.K. bandmate Andy Rourke died of pancreatic cancer in 2023. As of 2026 the three surviving members have kept their word, and the Cranberries remain retired.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around The Cranberries

Dolores O'Riordan and Noel Hogan. They were the band's songwriting team from the day he handed her the tape that became Linger. Noel wrote the music and Dolores wrote the words and melodies, yet they never sat in a room and wrote together at the same time. Their partnership survived a High Court action she took against him in 2013, which was later struck out, and ended with the eleven songs they traded by email in her final months.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Noel Hogan and Mike Hogan. The brothers founded the band with their friend Fergal Lawler, with Noel on guitar and Mike, about two years younger, on bass. They are descendants of the nineteenth century poet Michael Hogan. Mike was only about twenty when fame hit. They also played together in Noel's side project Mono Band during the long break.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dolores O'Riordan and Don Burton. Burton, a Canadian who had been Duran Duran's tour manager, met Dolores when the two bands toured America together. They married in July 1994 at Holy Cross Abbey in Tipperary and had three children, and she became stepmother to his son. The family divided its time between Ireland and Canada. The marriage ended in 2014 after twenty years, and Burton attended her funeral with their children.[1] [2] [3]

Dolores O'Riordan and Olé Koretsky. Koretsky, a New York DJ and producer, became her partner in 2015 after her divorce. With Andy Rourke of the Smiths they formed the trio D.A.R.K., releasing Science Agrees in 2016. He was at her funeral, and he has continued to work as a solo artist.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Cranberries and Stephen Street. The former Smiths producer shaped their sound on the first two albums, returned for Wake Up and Smell the Coffee and Roses, and finished In the End with the surviving three after Dolores died. He watched her change from a shy girl singing sideways to a fierce frontwoman, and called her his Irish songbird.[1] [2] [3]

The Cranberries and Pearse Gilmore. The owner of Xeric Studios in Limerick recorded their first tapes, became their first manager and produced the demo that started the bidding war. The relationship turned sour over the Uncertain EP, which the band felt he had over produced, and over claims that he was keeping them in the dark. They fired him in January 1992.[1] [2] [3]

The Cranberries and Denny Cordell. The veteran producer, who had worked with Procol Harum, Joe Cocker and Tom Petty, was the Island Records man who signed them after the Limerick student show in 1991. He died of lymphoma in Dublin in February 1995. The band wrote a song called Cordell and dedicated To the Faithful Departed to him.[1] [2] [3]

Dolores O'Riordan and Allen Kovac. Kovac managed the Cranberries in their peak years. He says he took Dolores to a doctor during the 1996 breakdown, and tells the story of her tearing up a million dollar cheque over Zombie. Years later his label released Bad Wolves' Zombie cover, and he arranged their gift of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to her children.[1] [2] [3]

Dolores O'Riordan and Andy Rourke. The bassist of the Smiths, the band that had inspired the young Cranberries, became her bandmate in D.A.R.K. in New York, alongside Olé Koretsky. He called her talent breathtaking. After her death he formed a new band, Blitz Vega, and he died of pancreatic cancer in May 2023.[1] [2] [3]

Dolores O'Riordan and Niall Quinn. Quinn was the original singer of the Cranberry Saw Us and the only one heard on their first demo. When he quit early in 1990, he helped find his own replacement, by most accounts bringing Dolores to her first rehearsal. He went back to his other Limerick band, the Hitchers, where he was the drummer and main songwriter.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dolores O'Riordan and Luciano Pavarotti. In September 1995 she sang Ave Maria with the great tenor at his charity concert in Modena for the children of Bosnia, a performance that moved Princess Diana to tears. More than twenty years later, that recording opened Dolores's funeral Mass in Ballybricken.[1]

Rare facts about The Cranberries

• The Hogan brothers are descendants of the nineteenth century Irish poet Michael Hogan. Noel and Mike Hogan, who founded the Cranberries with Fergal Lawler, trace their family back to Michael Hogan, a Limerick poet of the eighteen hundreds.[1]
• The three male Cranberries first met as teenagers breakdancing in Limerick. According to the band, Noel, Mike and Fergal were city kids who met through breakdancing in the mid 1980s, long before any of them owned an instrument.[1]
• Fergal Lawler got his first drum kit as a Christmas present at about seventeen. Two months after Fergal's Christmas drum kit arrived, Mike Hogan got his first bass and Noel his first guitar, and the band grew from there.[1]
• The band's very first demo misspelled their own name on the cover. Noel Hogan drew the cover of the Anything cassette in 1990 and spelled the band as the Cranbery Saw Us, with one r missing. The price was written as two pounds, then changed to two pounds fifty.[1]
• Dolores cycled to her audition in a tracksuit, carrying a broken Casio keyboard. The eighteen year old arrived at Xeric Studios on a Sunday afternoon in 1990. The band could barely hear her sing through the amplifier, but she took home a tape of chords and came back with Linger.[1] [2]
• At school, Dolores's friends called her Dollar, the stage name she had chosen for herself. Her classmate Catherina Egan said Dolores planned to call herself Dollar as a star, and the old school gang kept using their nicknames for decades.[1]
• Dolores learned her yodel by copying her father singing an old cowboy song. Terry O'Riordan used to sing The Lonesome Cattle Call. Dolores copied him as a child until she mastered the sharp vocal break that became her trademark.[1] [2]
• The Cranberries were booked to open for Nirvana in Belfast in December 1991. The show at Conor Hall was cancelled at the last minute, along with the rest of Nirvana's dates, because Kurt Cobain was ill.[1] [2]
• Their first commercial tape, Nothing Left at All, was pressed in just three hundred copies. Released on cassette by the local Xeric label under the name the Cranberry Saw Us, it sold out in Limerick record shops within days.[1] [2]
• An original Water Circle demo cassette was offered on eBay in 2011 for nearly fifteen hundred dollars. Water Circle was the first recording with Dolores singing. A bootleg of it had leaked in 2002 from CDs of rare tracks that Fergal Lawler gave to a fan site owner.[1] [2]
• The strange voice at the end of Dreams belongs to Dolores's boyfriend at the time. Mike Mahoney, her early boyfriend, sang the extra backing vocals and sounds heard at the close of the song.[1] [2]
• Their debut was only the fifth album in rock history to reach number one in Britain more than a year after release. Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? came out in March 1993 and flopped, then hit the top of the UK chart in June 1994 after America embraced the band.[1] [2]
• The same sofa appears on the covers of their first two albums. For No Need to Argue, the art director hired the sofa from the debut album again and carried it around Dublin for photos. It later turned up in the video for Supergrass's Alright.[1]
• The cover of Something Else recreates the cover of No Need to Argue. In 2017 the four sat in almost the same positions as in 1994, but on a different sofa in front of a dark green wall instead of a white one.[1]
• The yellow room on the To the Faithful Departed cover was built in London and put up in a forest in the Lake District. Snow fell on the day of the shoot, and the band shivered in thin purple Dolce and Gabbana suits. The original front cover was meant to be a photo of a baby boy.[1]
• The Bury the Hatchet cover by Storm Thorgerson later made Pitchfork's list of the worst record covers ever. The famous Pink Floyd designer photographed a naked man watched by a giant eye in Monument Valley. He also designed the next cover, with its giant red balls.[1] [2]
• The red balls on Wake Up and Smell the Coffee began as coffee granules. Storm Thorgerson said the idea started as coffee in the air waking you up, then the granules turned red like cranberries and grew to the size of gym balls.[1]
• A free Cranberries show in Washington in 1995 ended in a riot. A radio station expected three thousand people at the Washington Monument grounds, but more than ten thousand came. Police stopped the show after a song and a half, and Dolores's acoustic guitar was stolen.[1]
• Zombie beat Michael Jackson's You Are Not Alone for Best Song at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards. It was one of a string of awards that year, alongside a World Music Award and recognition as the best Irish act at home.[1] [2]
• The Cranberries were the first artists to sell tickets for a national tour exclusively online. They partnered with Ticketmaster's website for the Bury the Hatchet tour of 1999 and 2000, which played to more than a million people.[1]
• Zombie was the first song with a female singer to top Australia's Triple J Hottest 100. Listeners voted it number one for 1994, and Dolores stood alone in that achievement for sixteen years.[1] [2]
• Parts of the Zombie video were shot in Belfast under a cover story about a documentary. Director Samuel Bayer said the rifle aimed straight at the camera belonged to a suspicious British soldier telling him to leave.[1] [2]
• British broadcasters temporarily pulled Zombie from the airwaves at the start of the Iraq war in 2003. It was among songs judged too sensitive during the conflict. In 2006, CBS also cut the lyrics about tanks, bombs and guns from a contestant's Zombie performance on Rock Star.[1]
• They played a new song called Yesterday's Gone on MTV Unplugged, only a day after writing it. Noel Hogan said he and Dolores wrote it in a couple of hours the day before the 1995 taping, and that was the only time it was ever performed.[1]
• Dolores had a cameo in the 2006 Adam Sandler comedy Click. She played a wedding singer performing an alternate version of Linger set to strings.[1] [2]
• Íosa, an outtake from the debut album sessions, is the only song Dolores sang entirely in Irish. It drew on her years as a church soloist, and her singing was often linked to the old unaccompanied Irish style known as sean nós.[1]
• Faye Wong's Cantonese version of Dreams became a classic across Asia. Retitled Dream Lover, it featured in Wong Kar Wai's 1994 film Chungking Express. A Chinese talk show host also used Zombie as his opening theme for years.[1] [2] [3]
• Zombie was used as a teaching aid in some Singapore secondary schools to explain the Troubles. The BBC reported the Cranberries' enduring popularity across Asia, where their songs became karaoke and radio staples.[1]
• After a piano teacher tried to give her vocal lessons, Dolores vowed never to go near a vocal coach again. Fergal Lawler said she insisted it was her voice to do whatever she wanted with, and she did not want to sound like everyone else.[1]
• Dario G's hit Dream to Me originally used Dolores's own vocals from Dreams. The dance trio were not allowed to keep them, so the song was re recorded with another singer. It still reached the top ten in Britain in 2001.[1]
• In Clueless, the character Elton leaves class to rescue his Cranberries CD. He later sings along to the B side Away in his car. Their songs also turned up in My So Called Life, Empire Records and the opening scene of Derry Girls.[1] [2]
• Dolores sang at the Vatican Christmas concert several times and met Pope John Paul II. In 2001 she performed with a sixty seven piece orchestra in a broadcast seen by more than two hundred million people.[1]
• Mike Hogan ran a café in Limerick during the band's long break. He and his wife Siobhán opened the Sage Café on Catherine Street in 2006, and it closed in September 2017.[1]
• In 2018 Billboard named Dolores the top female artist in the thirty year history of its Alternative Songs chart. The ranking covered solo women, frontwomen and duo members. Zombie spent six weeks at number one on that chart in 1994 and Salvation four weeks in 1996.[1] [2]
• On her last day, Dolores emailed Fergal suggesting a song for the next album that the band had already recorded. It was called So Good, and it had come out on Roses in 2012. Fergal reminded her, and she replied that it was a pity, because it was a good song.[1]
• When Limerick won the All Ireland hurling title in 2018, the team took the trophy to Dolores's family home. It was Limerick's first title in forty five years, and Dreams was played to the crowd of eighty two thousand at Croke Park.[1]
• Dolores and the band gave every penny from the single Time Is Ticking Out to the Chernobyl Children's Project. She wrote it in 2001, shortly after her second child was born, when Ali Hewson and Adi Roche showed her images of children harmed by the Chernobyl disaster.[1] [2]
• Kinks guitarist Dave Davies had planned to write a song with Dolores called Home. They met by chance in a London restaurant and agreed to work together, but never got the chance before she died.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.