MARY CARR
AS rock stars and politicians paid tribute to Shane MacGowan at his 60th birthday in the National Concert Hall, the startling news of Dolores O’Riordan’s sudden death in London the previous day put a damper on the revelries. The irony of the hell-raising Pogues frontman – in defiance of every wellintentioned but bleak prognosis for his survival – making it to his seventh decade, while the 46-year-old Cranberry expired before her time, must have struck the packed audience forcibly.
Although friends say Dolores was in great form and working on new music before her death, her grip on reality often seemed tenuous and there were episodes, such as the air rage incident in 2014, that flagged her mental frailty.
Like Sinéad O’Connor whose battles with her demons are legendary, it seemed that fame had unhinged Dolores.
It may be coincidental, but unlike Shane MacGowan who seems perfectly at ease with himself, success brought neither Dolores nor Sinéad lasting happiness. Both women had childhoods marred by physical and sexual abuse and they spoke of its haunting legacy.
Did that make them more vulnerable to the harsh demands of the music business, or was it that they had not the stomach for the callous exploitation of new talent, the relentless emphasis on youth, or the sexist double standards that seek to control female performers more than men? In a heartfelt letter to Miley Cyrus, Sinéad O’Connor described how the music business prostituted young female stars, turning its back on them after they went into rehab. In a sign of how merciless the business is to women who break ranks, Miley retorted by cruelly taunting Sinéad about her mental illness. Miley will survive. It’s not surprising that amid the fakery of the music business, Dolores and Sinéad found joy, almost salvation, in motherhood. Yet for whatever reasons neither raised their broods to adulthood. At the time of her death Dolores’s three children were living with their dad in Canada, while Sinéad’s youngest children are with their respective fathers.
Sinéad’s heart-wrenching video from her motel room in America about her isolation and mental suffering, and Dolores’s death wish declaration that she’d be happy if she made it to her 50th birthday, show that while the music business delivered them both into the arms of fame, it also exacted a brutal price.
Hedonistic icons like Shane MacGowan and Keith Richards who survive with the tenacity of cockroaches capture our imaginations, but rock’n’roll is also littered with sensitive souls, collapsed in despairing heaps on the floor. The casualties are not always women – Michael Hutchence and Kurt Cobain checked out before their prime.
But the young Britney Spears’ breakdown, the grief-stricken figure of Sinéad O’Connor and now the premature death of Dolores O’Riordan show how idealistic female performers can be destroyed by following their dreams.