Mother superior

The elfin, naturally zero-figured Dolores O’Riordan leans over the balcony railings outside her spacious rehearsal room at Dublin’s Factory, and lets a white spit dribble slowly from her mouth into the stagnant water several metres below.
Standing right beside her, her 10-year-old son Taylor giggles, hawks up a big one, and follows suit. It’s quite a funny sight – mother and son gobbing into the Docklands.
“Are you making a wish?” I ask.
“No,” the raven-haired singer laughs, looking slightly embarrassed. “When we were kids, we used to always spit in the water, and then the fish would come up and eat your spit.”
Her Canadian husband, Don, laughs heartily. “Good luck!” he says. “I’ve been looking into that fuckin’ water all week and I haven’t seen one fuckin’ fish! Not even one!”
It’s a beautifully sunny day in mid-April, and O’Riordan and her band are currently deep in rehearsals for an upcoming world tour to promote her debut solo album Are You Listening?
She’s taking half-an-hour out to talk to hotpress but, before that, the 35-year-old singer wants to spend a little quality time with Taylor, the eldest of her three kids (the rest of her brood are at home in Howth).
“This is Olaf from hotpress magazine,” she tells him. “He’s a journalist and he’s going to interview mammy about her new album. When you grow up, you could be a journalist too. You could travel around meeting all sorts of different people and writing articles about them. You could even write books.”
Taylor takes a long hard look at me, but doesn’t seem overly impressed.
“You don’t want to be a rock star like your mum?” I ask him.
“Oh God – no!” Dolores interjects. “I don’t want him to be a rock star! It’s far too tough! No life for anyone.”
She’s certainly qualified to know. Although the world of rock 'n' roll has ultimately been extremely good for the Limerick-born singer, her fame and fortune were extremely hard won.
16 years ago, she was thrown in at the deep end when the Cranberries became overnight sensations on the back of ‘Linger’. 40 million albums and probably as many air-miles later, she finally seems to have come to terms with it, but she’s had more than her share of long dark nights of the soul.
“I was very unhappy for a long time,” she says, as Don leads Taylor away to leave us in peace. “Being in a band, I mean. Just constantly on tour. Always moving, never settling, never stopping.”
Are you still in touch with your old bandmates?
“I don’t really see them that much,” she shrugs. “Sometimes Noel would e-mail Don, but that would only be if something was up. Like, recently, I gave Noel a Cranberries gold disc – he’s trying to do something with the Irish Cancer Society, I believe – to help them to raise cash. That was a couple of weeks ago. So I’m not really in touch unless it’s something like that – something in connection with the band. But otherwise, to be honest with you, we didn’t really hang out with each other. But I don’t think most bands do.”
Well, I suppose you spend so much time together on the road...
“Yeah, we were always on the road. And I didn’t join the band because they were my friends. We were complete strangers, but they were great musicians. That’s why I went with them. They were all boys and I was always a girl. So you know, you’re not really gonna go hang with the boys when you’re off the road. I’d always go and hang with the girls.”
Although her solo album is almost two years overdue, she says that she’s glad she took her time over it. And for once, she’s actually looking forward to going out on tour.
“It was going to come out last year. It just got delayed really. But I’m glad it did now, because my youngest is two years old and I think, if I’d released it last year, I don’t think I would have been ready. I’ve now had the extra year, you know, to get my body back in shape. And the little one’s a bit bigger – she can talk a bit now so I don’t feel so bad. I think it’s harder to leave them when they’re 12 months, so I think it’s a good thing really.”
Are you planning on having any more kids?
“I don’t really know,” she says. “I often think three is plenty but, then, you never know. You can’t tell the future, can you? You never know what happens. So many people say, ‘Oh, we’re not having any more kids ever again’ – and then something happens. So we’ll see. But I’ve no immediate plans.”
You’ve got a couple of songs about your kids on the album.
“Yeah. ‘Ordinary Day’ was inspired by the birth of my daughter, but it’s more like for both girls really. It’s really about the girls growing up and the challenges that life presents them and the unpredictability of life. There’s so much that they don’t know that I can’t really tell them, that they have to figure it out for themselves. So sometimes you look at them and you have a flash of yourself when you were a kid and you see yourself in them and its quite an emotional thing as they grow older.”
You were saying you didn’t want Taylor to go into rock 'n' roll...
“If he wants to, he can,” she laughs. “They can do whatever they wish. But I think rock 'n' roll is a very difficult lifestyle, and I think you have to have a very strong head on your shoulders. You know, it’s fantasy, it’s not real.
“And it does make your life difficult in that you’re always on the move, and whether you can deal with that or not depends on the individual and the character. And also there’s the whole drugs thing on tour, and there’s all that pressure and the lack of sanity because you’re travelling so much and living out of suitcases, you don’t know what time it is or even what time zone you’re in, and all that stuff.”
You never really got into the drug scene, though, did you?
“No, not really.”
No, not really – or just not at all?
She laughs. “No – never! I never did any kind of drugs. When I was a teenager I’d puff the magic dragon, but that was about it, you know. It’d help you sleep. But that was it.”
Can you hold your drink?
“It’s amazing. I’m kinda on the dry now because I’m rehearsing. I think with drinking you can build up your immune system to it. I find after pregnancy and breastfeeding, you don’t drink for a year-and-a-half and then you go out and it’s ‘Whoo!!’ Ha, ha! Then you have one drink and you’re so off your face. So you really have to build up your tolerance, like everything else.
“After having a baby, my skin is so clean and lovely and you’re just high on life and you don’t need it, so you just forget about it. Then, of course six to eight months down the road go ‘Whoo!’ or whatever. You get bored sitting there sober, you know. Ha, ha!”
While Dolores never really had a reputation as a wild child, she did hit the red-top headlines on a couple of notable occasions. 14 years after her high profile wedding, does she now have any regrets about getting married in her knickers?
“No – definitely not!” she laughs. “I was a 21-year-old and I was living the life I was living. And you know what – it got people talking. Ha, ha!”
Is that important to you?
“No, but it did get people talking and gave people something to talk about, so it meant that it was something. And if people liked it or didn’t like it, it didn’t really matter. It mattered how I felt, it was my wedding day, I think that’s what they say for all women getting married – ‘It’s her day!’”
A lot of people thought that your marriage to Don (who used to tour-manage Duran Duran) wouldn’t last because you were so young...
“Yeah, I know, but it just shows there’s a lot of judgemental people in the world.”
Do you think that’s particularly the case in Ireland?
“No, I don’t think so. Human beings are the same wherever you go. There’s people who point the finger, and there are those who choose to be open-minded and not to judge so much. There are those who have interesting lives themselves so they don’t really have to probe into other peoples lives so much.”
Dolores and Don also wound up attracting a lot of negative press when their nanny accused them of unfair dismissal.
“Yeah, but luckily that all came clean in the High Court,” she says, when I remind her of it.
Is there a sense that you won’t be screwed over by anybody, even though it going to end in bad publicity?
“The thing is that way back then, I didn’t really know about signing all these contracts with people so I didn’t really have any. I had no contract or anything like that so the assumption was obviously that I was going to settle outside of the court, but I wouldn’t because it was the principle that got to me.
“It’s like you cannot mess with my family, so the truth came out at the end anyway, but we had to go through a lot of grief. I wouldn’t settle out of court, though, because inevitably it would have been leaked to the media – you know, ‘Oh, Dolores settled out of court so maybe she has something to hide.’ I just wanted to prove I had nothing to hide. I wanted to go through the courts. This had been hanging in the background for six years. I thought eventually it would go away but it wouldn’t – and I knew that settling wasn’t the right thing to do. Some things you have to stand up for in life and if you can’t stand up for your family, you know, you might as well throw your hat in.”
But enough of the past. Back to the new album. With one or two rocked-up exceptions, most of Are You Listening? doesn’t sound remotely like the Cranberries. There’s even a Moroccan influence on a couple of tracks. Dolores’s beautiful voice, though, is the real star of the show. At times, she sounds like a young Sinéad O’Connor.
“Thank you, that’s flattering,” she smiles. “I always find it flattering when people give you comparisons to great singers – whether it’s with Björk or Annie Lennox or Kate Bush or whatever. People say so many different things and it’s always nice to hear. But, luckily, I know I have my own unique sound. That’s a great thing to have, but it’s always complimentary to me to be compared to such great female singers. So thanks!”

Photographs by Graham Keogh