A fitting tribute to a true star
IN AN era when it sometimes seems as if celebrities are dropping like flies, we would do well to remember that plenty of them were old enough.
Many of those people who became famous in the ‘60s and ‘70s are simply reaching the end of their natural life span, but the proliferation of social media has a tendency to magnify things and people are prone to pattern recognition, even when there is no actual pattern.
But when a star as young as Dolores O’Riordan dies, it affects everyone, even those who weren’t fans.
The Cranberries were never really embraced by the Irish music press – nor, indeed the UK media, which ran some particularly scathing and vicious reviews of the band during their all-conquering heyday – and that was something the band and their singer had to deal with.
But for a brief period in the 1990s they were one of the biggest acts in the world and many of us in her home country failed to grasp just how massive they really were.
Tonight, long time supporter of the band Dave Fanning presents Dolores (RTÉ One, 10.35pm), a special tribute to O’Riordan, who died at the age of 46 in a hotel room in London last month.
Featuring previously unseen archive footage of interviews conducted between the pair, Fanning stresses that this ‘is not the definitive Cranberries documentary’ but is, rather, a collection of some of the more searingly honest discussions she had with him.
Encapsulating the ‘90s in reverse order, the interviews start in 1999 and work their way back to the very earliest days of the band in 1991.
One of the many heartbreaking elements of her story is the fact that she seemed to have put most of her personal problems behind her and had begun to make music again, and the recent positive changes in her life make her shocking demise seem even crueller.
She may not have been the voice of a generation, as some of the more (understandably) emotional tributes paid after her death claimed, but she was an undeniably huge figure in the history of Irish rock and while this may not be, as Fanning admits, the definitive documentary about the band, it’s a pretty good start...
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