‘I WAS EXPECTED to be perfect’
Last month, the Cranberries became the first Irish band to join the YouTube hall of fame, with over a billion views for their anti-war smash hit ‘Zombie’. Here, Barry Egan remembers Dolores O’Riordan; a woman who was unhappy, talented and loving in equal
Listening, my shoulders dropped. I was sitting in the tiny St Ailbe’s Church in Ballybricken in Co Limerick on January 23, 2018, for Dolores O’Riordan’s memorial service, which ended with a recording of Dolores singing When You’re Gone by The Cranberries.
Rendered hymn-like, it was ethereal, and beautiful, not least because Dolores, who grew up down the road from the church, was finally released from the pain of this world into the other world that she believed in.
Even now, sometimes it is hard to finally believe that she is, as the song says, gone. She was a great woman and a great friend, and I loved her then as I love her now. Ireland is a lesser place without her creativity, without her empathy, without her. There are very few like her.
There are wounds that never show on the body; deeper and more painful than anything you can see. Dolores’s wounds weren’t visible. Unless you looked at her some days and saw how sad she was, with her secret sorrows. Her singing, her gift to a privileged world, was a response to inner pain, and had its origins in trauma and isolation.
In the summer of 2013, Dolores asked me to come to her house in Abington, Malahide, Co Dublin. Up in her bedroom, after a long silence, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head hung low, she said the words: “I was raped, abused, as a child. I was only a child. For years. I was only a little girl. For four years, when I was a little girl, I was sexually abused.”
Those words still haunt. As they should.
It seemed somehow prescient that Dolores’s mother
Eileen named her daughter in honour of Our Lady of the Seven Dolours, or Sorrows. Eileen once told me the story of a music business executive coming to the O’Riordan family home in 1995 to see her daughter, by then a rock star. “She was very sick. He told Dolores that she would lose everything and that she couldn’t break her contract. She came home to me and she was in the little box room. He was telling her: ‘You just have to do this tour’,” Eileen told me in April 2014 over lunch in the small village of Bruff, Co Limerick, with Dolores by her side.
“So I got so angry and I said: ‘I have fed her all my life and I can feed her now! She has her own little room. That’s all she wants’. I got really mad. I was going to hit him. I said to him, ‘If anything happens to her, I will kill you’. I looked in his eyes. And I meant every word of it.”
“They just saw me as a commodity, as a cash cow,” Dolores said then. “I was very, very lonely.”
Then Eileen said that she remembered her own mother telling Dolores one morning: “You’d have been better off if you’d kept your little job in Cassidy’s in Limerick.” Dolores didn’t deny that her grandmother might have been right. “I worked there part-time when I was in fifth and sixth year,” she said.
Part of me wishes now that Dolores had stayed working in Cassidy’s in Limerick (although I would surely never have met her in that case); that she had never entered the music business; that she had remained a girl who you knew could sing like no other, but who kept her talent to herself.
Instead, Dolores was a global superstar, although barely an adult when she started out in the music business. Once she entered it — the industry for which she made millions upon millions of dollars — she was changed beyond all recognition.
The poetry was still in her soul, but the iron had entered her heart. You wish she could have vanished for a few years, like Sinead O’Connor did from music, or Winona Ryder did from Hollywood. Maybe it just wasn’t possible for Dolores. She wanted to run and keep running, but her legs wouldn’t carry her away.
“I was only a human being and I was expected to be perfect,” Dolores told me in 2002.
“And life is never like that. It is really weird, because you see a lot of other young entertainers now having problems with fame — but they’re only kids, like I was. It was with our first album that we became huge in America. We didn’t warm up into it with the second or third album,” she added. “It was just huge fame from the beginning. I was 18 and from the countryside outside Limerick. It wasn’t even like I grew up in Dublin and I was used to people and crowds and the Big Smoke. I grew up in the fields, with cows. It’s such a dramatic leap if you grew up with that, and you’re dead naive. I had a cool childhood playing with insects and talking to cows in fields, and then... suddenly, Los Angeles! On every TV and every newspaper and magazine!”
Dolores O’Riordan had a sublimely beautiful singing voice, yet she seemed lost — “to the person in the bell jar, the world itself is a bad dream,” as Sylvia Plath put it in her novel, The Bell Jar.
“I’m happy in Limerick now,” she emailed me the week before she was found dead at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London. “I have to stay positive and healthy. I’m going to go for a swim in Limerick,” she wrote.
I recently found an old text she sent me when my mother died in 2009: “Your mother is looking over you now more than you would ever believe. Don’t worry, because when you acknowledge her presence in your life now, you will relax and be the kind angel boy she created!! Talk to your Mom as she is listening to her boy!!! Don’t thank me, thank your Mom, I hear her trying to talk to you tonight! Okie dokie. She’s in another dimension and she is loving you, I swear!!”
I have so many memories of Dolores, not all of them particularly happy, but all worth remembering because they give us some idea of the person she was, maybe.
The other day, I found an old magazine from the early 1990s in which Dolores talked about her schooldays, and how “the principal of the school cancelled her class and stood me on her desk for the 12-year-olds to listen to — it must have been good”. And listen they did. “If I started to sing, then all the others in the room would stop and listen.”
And she was indeed a magnificently talented singer and performer. But the emotional baggage she brought with her was sometimes enormous. Still, as quickly as she would lose her temper, she could calm down again, and be the funniest, coolest girl you’d ever met.
Dolores just wasn’t like other stars you’d see on television. She had a lovely way about her that drew you in. Dolores would charm you. Because she was so very charming. And witty. And different. I remember visiting her at her home in Kilmallock in Co Limerick in 2001. She made me sandwiches and coffee and brought me for a walk in the fields.
It was in the fields of Kilmallock that she told me that she remembered one day, when she was a little girl, her father found eggs buried in the back garden. He came into the house the colour of a sheet. “‘Some fecker is cursing me!’ he said to my mother. ‘Somebody’s put a curse on me’.
“The potatoes failed that year,” Dolores said then. “They got a blight. So I believe that in Ireland there is still a lot of old stuff, but it is actually very interesting. My dad is really into pishogues [superstitions],” Dolores said of her father Terence, who had cancer for seven years and died in 2011, at home in Ballybricken.
Then, without skipping a beat, she recalled her time at school in Laurel Hill on O’Connell Avenue in Limerick, where she used to play camogie. She and another girl were the only two in a class of 35 who played camogie. The other 33 girls played hockey. Dolores hated hockey. Hockey was for “posh sissies. You had to wear culottes. I wanted to wear shorts and socks and push and shoulder and shove like the boys”.
Amanda Petrusich must have picked up on this when she wrote in The New Yorker just after Dolores died that, “I suspect every young woman eventually finds a figure (or, more likely, a series of figures) who helps disabuse her of certain stifling notions about femininity, of all the outmoded binaries — the things a woman is supposed to choose between as she comes into her own. It feels almost quaint to point out now, in a cultural moment in which we’re rethinking the whole of gender dynamics, but, in the early 90s, O’Riordan helped further the then-iffyseeming idea that a woman could be both beautiful and ferocious. She appeared accountable only to some internal voice — which meant we could be, too.”
In his review of The Cranberries’ No Need to Argue album in the November 1994 issue of Spin magazine, Jonathan Bernstein wrote that it wasn’t so long ago that “we had a mini-Prozac Nation full of these ethereal gals who submerged their little whispery odes to eating disorders under waterfalls of astringent guitars…[But] once Dolores O’Riordan’s tones lured you… toward
Linger and Dreams, it became apparent that again, unlike its sub-genre contemporaries, the group could take its atmospherics and make songs out of them”.
And yet there was a dinner in April, 2007, at Dolores’s house in Howth, when after all the children had gone to bed, she told me about the year following that Spin magazine piece — 1995 — when she was so unhappy that her weight fell to under seven stone. (The Telegraph magazine in 1994 wrote that Dolores went to America on