Dolores O’Riordan and Feminist Magazine

I talked about the death of Dolores O’Riordan, and the recent spate of deaths of musicians of her era, with the great Lynn Ballen on her Feminist Magazine show on KPFK. You can hear it here:

https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/40348/53003344

Dolores O’Riordan Transcript

In either late 1994 or early 1995, I interviewed Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan for Interview magazine, over the phone. The article ran in the March 1995 issue, as an edited Q&A. When she passed away Monday, I dug up the old transcript; following is the unedited interview. She had just gotten married and the band had released their second album. It’s poignant, and powerful, to read now.

Interview with Dolores O’Riordan

By Evelyn McDonnell

 

EM: You’ve had more success in the U.S. than in England, haven’t you?

DO: It was hard to take off here because of bad marketing, I think. The two singles were released on a demo a year before they came out as singles, so most of the press had already heard them. They’d hyped up the band a year prior to the release of the debut. So when the debut came out it wasn’t anything new to the English public. They started going against them, backlashing, saying the demo was better and whatnot.

EM: How is the English press treating you this time?

DO: I don’t really read them anymore. The band’s happening around the world, everywhere except Japan. So at this time in my life my perspective is more global, so I’m not really worried what an English paper says, or what an Irish paper says.

EM: Are you at all reluctant to do interviews?

DO: No, but I suppose I’m getting a bit cagier.

EM: Where are you living now?

DO: In the south of Ireland. I’m building a house there overlooking the sea. It’s really quiet and peaceful. We haven’t actually started building, we just got planning permission.

EM: Are you building a dream house?

DO: Yeah, it’s a nice big house. I’ve never really been that type of dream-house person, ‘cause I never grew up with too much materialism around me, so it wasn’t as if I longed for it. The idea of having a gymnasium in your house, or a bar, would just not be in my mentality, because you don’t see it that much. But as you travel and stuff, you realize you can’t go out to public places that much, so you put it all in your house — your own little gym and your bar, everything you need in there. You can go there for peace and tranquility, when you need to get away from everything.

Dolores O’Riordan Interview

Dolores O’Riordan had one of the most distinctive voices in rock’n’roll: an angelic brogue, like a rose and briar entwined. “I grew up with a very strong Irish accent, and I didn’t see why I should put on airs and graces for anything or anybody,” she told me when I interviewed her for Interview magazine more than two decades ago. You can see that article below; I’m working on getting the whole transcript typed up (feel free to contact me if you’re a Cranberries fan and would like to help out). You can also hear a snippet of what I told NPR’s Andrew Limbong about her.

https://www.npr.org/player/embed/578247252/578247253