At Home With Noel Hogan

Quietly spoken with an easygoing, laid-back manner, Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan is the very antithesis of the hell-raising rock star. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in a large period house close to the heart of Limerick City. “It suits me fine living here,” he says. “I had toyed with the idea of moving out to the country somewhere, but there’s so much more maintenance and work involved in keeping a big place going and you’re a bit far away from things.”

After living in London during the height of the Cranberries' initial success, he moved back to Limerick about five years ago. “I actually used to live about ten doors down from here so I knew the area well,” he says. “The house was in a really run-down state when we saw it first. We knocked out the whole inside leaving just four walls standing and the staircase is all that survives of the original interior. It’s nothing too fancy, it’s got five bedrooms with a basic garden with a hedge around it. But it’s 150 years old and we discovered an old shed at the back with a row of coat-hooks up on the wall, so we think it might have been used as a school or an institution at some point in the past.”
When not on the road with The Cranberries, Hogan can usually be found at home either working on new songs, listening to music or watching DVDs. “I have a pretty big CD and DVD collection,” he says. “I started buying records when I was about 12 and I’ve kept everything, even the really crappy ones that you get given for free. It was worthwhile hanging on to them – I had a massive library to choose from when I got into sampling. And I have old cassettes of early demos that we did with the band, songs that are now well forgotten. Once in another house I tried to put things into alphabetical order but it didn’t last long. I’ve recently fallen prey to the whole i-Pod thing. I have one of those multi-room systems so I can set up the i-Pod and hear music all over the house.”
Hogan is a huge fan of the silver screen and devours DVDs – both movies and TV series. “When DVD came out first I went completely nuts on it,” he says. “The quality was so unbelievable compared to video. A few years ago my wife bought me a present of a 52-inch plasma screen with the surround-sound speakers. I watch a lot of different stuff but I like sci- fi things like The Matrix, horrors and thrillers and the odd comedy. I love getting an entire TV series like The Sopranos or the first series of 24 and watching it through from the start.
“I don’t have a whole lot of music DVDs – we tend to watch those on the tour bus. For instance, I remember we had the REM Tourfilm, which I must have watched about 100 times. And we used to watch things like The Office and Phoenix Nights. We had a bunch of Canadians on the bus with us once and I didn’t think they’d get The Office, but they absolutely loved it.”
After almost 13 years of relentless touring and sales in excess of 38 million albums worldwide, The Cranberries have been understandably quiet of late. The birth of Dolores O’Riordan’s third child means they’ll be off the road for the immediate future. But for Hogan – guitarist and co-writer of many of the band’s hits including ‘Dreams’ and ‘Linger’ – this sabbatical has presented him with the opportunity to get down to work in his home studio on a solo project, which goes under the title of Mono Band . An album is due at the end of May, with a handful of gigs also in the pipeline.
“It’s just me with a bunch of different people singing,” he says. “There’s about seven different singers in all. I didn’t think calling the project ‘Noel Hogan’ would make any sense. Out the back of the house we’d built a garage with a room overhead, and I was thinking at some point it would be some kind of studio. I had bits of gear I’d bought over the years and I got it into one space. The album was largely done on a laptop, although we did bits in the studio, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. I taught myself how to program through trial and error. I spent a lot of time on the phone talking to friends, looking for advice.”
The band recently appeared at the SXSW industry showcase in Austin, Texas and will be doing some more live gigs over the coming months
“I was a bag of nerves and I got pretty drunk afterwards but it was really good fun and I got some interest going,” says Hogan. “We’re going back to LA for some more gigs, including one in the Viper room, and there’s been a bit of radio interest too. But it’s not the end of the Cranberries, we’ll get going again when everyone’s ready – we never put a time limit on it.”b

Mono Band ’s debut album is out on May 20. They play Whelan’s, Dublin on June 4.