The Cranberries, ‘Linger’: In search of of Dolores O’Riordan

The Cranberries
‘Linger’

Highest UK chart position: #15 on February 13, 1994

1. If you could return

Every culture has a special term for that furtive, sloppy kissing that happens when you’re a teenager. Americans call it “making out”; British people call it snogging. In Ireland, it’s known as “shifting” or “getting the shift”, a strange term that makes it sound like you’re planning to move furniture.

Back in the days before Covid and Tinder, getting the shift was the highlight of any young Irish person’s weekend. A confident, good-looking person might even shift multiple people in one night, leaving broken-hearted conquests in their wake—this is known as the “shift and drift”.

Shifting and drifting was considered acceptable, because most people understood that kissing didn’t really mean anything, that it was just a fun thing to do at weekends. Occasionally, however, someone might interpret this kiss as something more meaningful. And that person might get their heart broken.

Here’s an example:

It’s 1988 and, somewhere in east County Limerick, a good-looking teenager is going to his local disco with a simple goal. Find a girl, get the shift.

He notices an awkward 17-year-old hiding behind a group of friends. She’s not wearing make-up (her mother won’t let her), she has short hair (her way of rebelling), she’s wearing Doc Martens (more practical than heels). Who is this girl?

He asks her to dance and kisses her on the dancefloor.

The following week, he returns to the disco and asked another girl to dance. He doesn’t notice last week’s girl standing right beside her; it doesn’t click that these two are friends. In truth, he’s probably already forgotten her.

But she hasn’t forgotten him. And someday, she’s going to surprise him. She’s going to surprise everyone.

2. But I’m in so deep

When Dolores O’Riordan and The Cranberries first started getting press attention, every journalist struggled to answer that question: Who is this girl?

The Cranberries started getting buzz in the UK in 1991. Their first proper live review said:

Dolores hasn’t yet learnt to banish hurt and bewilderment from her clean-cut face. Regrettably, she keeps her head in profile for most of the gig, trying desperately to hide what most singers try to replicate all the time. And let’s take a stab at that voice. She has the voice of a saint stuck in a glass harp while being pelted with ice cubes by vicious Clangers… no? Okay, she singles like an escapee from Les Voix Bulgares, grazed, brave and wounded.

Later in 1991, after the band had been signed, Paul Lester reviewed them live for Melody Maker. The audience was, he noticed, entirely composed of music industry professionals who had come to see Ireland’s hottest prospect. Lester described O’Riordan as:

…a smallish nonblonde Irish girl with a voice on soaring terms with Liz Cocteau, Harriet Sunday and Björk Sugarcube…set to be the latest heartthrob of every gangling teen neurotic from Rugby to Reading.

Beautiful, talented, crippilingly shy—this seems to be everyone’s first impression of Dolores O’Riordan.

The Cranberries started as an all-male band in 1989. Brothers Mike and Noel Hogan, bassist Fergal Lawler and drummer Niall Quinn met in school and started playing together under the terrible punning name, The Cranberry Saw Us.

Niall Quinn was the band’s lead singer and songwriter, but he quit to work on his own projects (including another excellent indie band, The Hitchers). The remaining members said they were thinking of getting a female singer, and Quinn put them in touch with his girlfriend’s pal who, apparently, had a pretty good voice. Her name was Dolores.

In a 1991 interview, O’Riordan told the story this way:

“There was a girl in my class and she told me there was a band looking for a girl singer. They were called The Cranberry Saw Us and I thought it sounded really funny, and I didn’t know whether to go up or not.

“So I came up here and they were all sat in this room. Of course, their style was all different from me: they were all wearing these tattered denims and things, and I was wearing this nice little pinkie pants. They were all laughing at me and I was really embarrassed, cos there was about nine fellas in the room and I was the girl from the country. They thought I was a scream. But Noel, he was really nice to me, and Ferg was nice, but the bass-player, Mike, he had to go out the room, he was laughing so much.”

Who is this girl?

The lads gave her a cassette containing one of their instrumental demos (Noel Hogan described that tape as “terrible… I knew about five chords and four of them are probably in [it]“) and asked her to think about some potential lyrics. Nobody was sure if they’d ever see her again.

A week later, the ridiculous country girl returned to them with the lyrics for ‘Linger’. According to O’Riordan:

“It was inspired by a night I had at a club called Madonna’s. This guy asked me to dance and I thought he was lovely. Until then, I’d always thought that putting tongues in mouths was disgusting, but when he gave me my first proper kiss, I did indeed ‘have to let it linger’.

“I couldn’t wait to see him again. But at the next disco, he walked straight past me and asked my friend to dance. I was devastated. Everyone saw me being dumped, publicly, at the disco. Everything’s so dramatic when you’re 17, so I poured it into the song.”

3. You know I’m such a fool for you

The Cranberry Saw Us became The Cranberries (mercifully) and began a meteoric rise to fame. Dolores played her first gig as a rock’n’roll frontwoman in July 1990. By April 1991, every record executive in London was flying to Limerick and begging them to sign. The band eventually went with Island Records, who put them straight to work on a debut album.

But the media still struggled to answer the question: who is this girl? Is she the next Bjork? The next Sinead O’Connor? Kate Bush? Patti Smith?

Melody Maker’s Everett True tried to frame her as a 19th century Irish peasant:

The kitchen that Dolores spent many hours of her formative years in, is covered in tacky religious icons. There’s a Jesus clock on the wall opposite me, a cross full of some nameless red liquid that glows eerily in the afternoon light…She’s slightly embarrassed by the thought the “city slickers” might be looking down on her country home, but proud nonetheless.

…in every beaten drum, in every plucked string you can feel the rhythm of Ireland’s rivers and paths, in every hiccupped syllable and every wondrous harmonic, you can sense centuries of easy-paced living and an openness not possible on this (jaded) side of the water.

(Dolores later called True’s paddywhackery “totally ignorant”, adding “We mayn’t know which side of the tube platforms to stand on, but these people come out from London and look at a field and say, ‘Is that a cow or a bull?’ They’re just as ignorant and naive as we were, but in a different way.”)

Rolling Stone portrayed her as someone so shy that she could barely speak. Their feature was full of moments like this:

“We mumble, mumble Amsterdam,” says O’Riordan.

Come again?

“We went to Amsterdam,” she says.

Eventually, this media interest started to fizzle out as The Cranberries’ debut album failed to materialise. The band had scrapped their first attempt at an LP, fired their producer, and begun working from scratch with Stephen Street. Their first official single, ‘Dreams’, appeared in late 1992, almost two years after the initial buzz. The debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? appeared in early 1993 to little fanfare.

The media finally figured who Dolores O’Riordan was. A small, shy country girl with a big voice, but who lacked the mentality to succeed in the cutthroat music industry. Like the boy who once kissed her in a disco, they began to forget about her.

4. Wrapped around your finger

1993 was the year that Suede were declared “The Best New Band In Britain“. Confidence was so high that Brett & co jetted off on an extensive American tour with a dream of bringing Britpop to the colonies.

The Cranberries came along as makeweights. They didn’t have a profile in the States, but they didn’t have a profile in Europe either, so why not try their luck in America?

And luck was on their side. One of the first shows in New York was attended by music industry people who wanted to hear the sound of this new British Invasion. Suede failed to make much of an impression on them. But ‘Linger’ caught everyone’s attention.

One of The Cranberries’ new fans was an MTV executive, who added ‘Linger’ to the channel’s playlist. It caught on like wildfire, eventually crashing into the Billboard Hot 100 at Number 8.

Tour dates started selling out, but nobody was coming to see Suede. Halfway through the tour, the bands agreed to invert the billing. Suede were now the support act; The Cranberries were headliners. Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? went on to sell 5,000,000 copies in the U.S. alone.

The Cranberries returned to Europe with overwhelming momentum, and the album reached Number One in the UK in 1994, a year after its release and three years after the first wave of Cranberries hype. The boy who broke her heart even reached out to her:

Some years later, after I was married, the guy Linger is about wrote me a long letter, saying: ‘I know the song’s about me. I never meant to hurt your feelings. Can we meet?’

“I thought: ‘It’s too late. You dumped me!’ I didn’t reply.

After the success of ‘Linger’, the question of Who is this girl? had an obvious answer. Dolores O’Riordan is a rock star. A natural rock star, with stardom in her bones.

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