The Irish band are piecing together their final album following the recent death of their lead singer. They talk candidly about her troubled life and the challenges of working without her
The last time the Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan saw Dolores O’Riordan was in the Limerick hotel where we are now standing, in November 2017. He had agreed to do an interview with a Chinese journalist: the band are huge in China, apparently, and had a run of arena gigs booked there. O’Riordan was living in New York and she wanted distraction; she decided, in a typically whimsical move, to come to meet the journalist, too, taking the direct flight to Shannon airport. She was in good spirits, although ongoing back problems – a slipped disc, from picking up a guitar – had led to a cancelled tour that summer.
Christmas came and went, but the Cranberries were still recording. O’Riordan would send Hogan vocals by email. On 14 January, she emailed him new songs: she had flown to London to record a new vocal for a cover of their 1993 hit Zombie with the metal band Bad Wolves. At 1.12am on 15 January, calling from the Park Lane Hilton, she left a friend an excited voicemail in which she said the cover version was sounding “fucking terribly good”. At 2am, she spoke to her mother. Later that night, she died. I meet the band four days before an inquest ruled that the 46-year-old had drowned accidentally in the bath, with high levels of alcohol in her blood. Hogan looks around the lobby and says it is hard to believe that the last time he saw her it was somewhere so mundane.
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