Dolores found a life of fame tough but her sublime talent eased us through our teens
BEING a teenager is characterised by spending half your waking hours obsessing over someone or something: the handsome guy who sits at the back of the school bus in the morning, the kooky star of your favourite sitcom, your inability to apply eyeliner.
But the most enduring of all those teenage obsessions, to my mind, is the unquenchable, irrational love you have for the pop songs that define your youth. That music is the torch that guides you along the murky and frequently scary path of adolescence, helping you navigate the overwhelming cascade of new emotions and experiences that define growing up: first love, rejection, excitement, heartache, disappointment, the thrill of every fresh experience.
And when you don’t have the words to describe what’s happening to you, somewhere out there, there’s a guy with a guitar or a girl with a piano who does, and can package up all those messy emotions into a perfectly crafted three-minute pop hit. You can sing along while feeling briefly better about the fact you’ve got acne, the guy you fancy just asked your best friend out, and you’ve failed your mid-term maths exam. Again.
The baby boomers had The Beatles and The Stones, the flare-wearing hippies of the 70s had Marc Bolan and Bowie, the punks had the Sex Pistols, and the lucky 80s kids had The Smiths. We had the Smashing Pumpkins,
REM and yes, The Cranberries.
Since hearing the horrible news about Dolores O’Riordan, I’ve spent the week listening again to the homegrown band whose first two albums appeared in every teenage CD collection in the 1990s. I was astonished to find I remembered every single word, even though I haven’t dug those albums out for 25 years. But that’s how everpresent The Cranberries’ music was in our lives back then as the soundtrack to underage discos and classroom crushes and mitching off school and bored weekend nights stuck inside watching American TV shows and phoning your friends.
They were there in teenage bedrooms late at night, on headphones on buses and trains, on kitchen radios at dinnertime, in your parents’ car on long summer drives through the countryside.
Listening today, I hear the sound of youth, perfectly captured by a Limerick girl with a voice given to her by the gods. Yearning, desire, obsession, heartache – all delivered with a deceptive lightness. It still sounds gorgeous.
Like the rest of the fans, I moved on, slipping seamlessly into an adult world where music seems incidental, not fundamental. The bands that once meant the world to us faded into half-forgotten memories.
But for Dolores O’Riordan, and for many more like her, the price of being so exalted was very high indeed.
She had welldocumented battles with eating disorders and depression. Being a star was hard work. As her granny once said, maybe she’d have been better off if she’d stayed working as a shop girl in Limerick. Because unlike her fans, Dolores couldn’t simply move on.
She was destined to forever remain that elfin girl from Limerick with the super-stellar voice that touched millions. What a blessing. What a curse.