After a six year break, ’90s rockers The Cranberries are reuniting for a North American tour starting this month. Their first show in six years at Rams Head Live! in Baltimore on Nov. 12 has already sold-out to fans eager to chant ‘Linger,’ ‘Zombie’ and ‘Dreams.’
In an exclusive interview with The Commonwealth Times, guitarist Noel Hogan discusses what the band has been up to all this time and what brought lead-singer Dolores O’Riordan, drummer Fergal Lawler, bassist Mike Hogan and himself back for more head banging Zombie rock.
The CT: Why did The Cranberries decide to take a break in 2003?
Noel Hogan: What happened was we did the greatest hits (album). We toured a little bit on that and we then started the following album. I guess that would have been our sixth proper studio album. We were in there and, I don’t know, it started to feel a bit the same, like there was nothing fresh coming from anybody.
We had been doing it, at that point, for 13 years because we started quite young and we hadn’t done anything else. In our own personal lives we had all gotten married and started to have kids and we felt that we were never at home to kind of be with our families and ideas wise, we had different ideas of where we wanted the band to go-particularly Dolores and myself with the songwriting.
Between one thing and another we decided ‘You know what? Look, maybe if everybody goes off and does these other things you want to do for a while and then hopefully when we come back it will help with the next album, help bring different elements that we haven’t used before.’
Now, we didn’t really have a time scale on this. It could have been six months or six years, so that’s why we all waited until we were happy enough to come back to it again.
The CT: Why did you decide to get back together this year?
NH: I think we’ve all kind of done what it is we went off to do at that point. Earlier this year, Dolores had a thing in Dublin where she asked myself and Mike to go and play. It was an acoustic set for a thing in Trinity College in Dublin . Then over the last few months, from that point on, we spoke a lot on the phone-bits and pieces about maybe doing it again.
I don’t really think any of us thought it would happen this year. I thought, just me by myself, maybe next year for sure. It just started to feel like we were just wasting time and kind of putting off the inevitable. So we, back in August there, decided ‘maybe let’s try it and see what would happen.’
The CT: Did you have any reservations about getting back together?
NH: No, because I guess the fact that we all kept in touch. It wasn’t a case that we haven’t seen each other in that whole time. We probably saw less of each other than we would’ve of when we were in the band six years ago but we spoke on the phone and e-mailing.
Even I’ve been sending bits and pieces to Dolores, song-wise, for the last few years. It wasn’t really a bunch of people you hadn’t seen in all that time and it made it a lot easier. There was no kind of weirdness that there could have been maybe if you don’t see somebody for a long time.
The CT: What was it like to rehearse with The Cranberries again?
NH: The older (songs) came very quickly but the (songs) we did later on, that we wouldn’t have played as much; they’re the ones that gave us a bit more difficulty. In the end, the band’s rehearsed 40 songs now. Not that the set is 40 songs because we’ll be chopping and changing but we’re all really, really happy with it now.
The CT: Are you playing any of Dolores’ solo songs on the tour?
NH: Yeah, there’s two (songs) we’re doing. It’s two of the singles. ‘The Journey’ and ‘Switch Off the Moment’ are the ones we’ve been rehearsing.
There’s one piano song that (Dolores) does on her own that she’s going to do maybe for an encore or something like that, but we’ve done our kind of version of it, you know what I mean? Because Dolores gave us the recording and said, ‘Look, here’s what I’ve done, but now do a Cranberries interpretation of that,’ which is kind of what we’ve done.
The CT: In ’96, you guys burnt yourselves out on touring. How do you avoid over-working yourselves this time around?
NH: The touring is definitely harder than doing anything else because you’re away, there are long days and you’re traveling. If we do that again for a year or two then you’re just kind of going to end up disliking the thing anyway so we’re definitely trying to do a month at a time, maybe take three or four weeks off and go back out again.
The CT: Why do you think your fans can still relate to you?
NH: I guess a lot of the people who are going to go to these gigs are people who are the same age as us and grew up listening to us when we were back in the ’90s. What we used to get from a lot of people is, ‘Well, I love this song because I did such thing at this point and it reminds me of that.’ Maybe that’s why a lot of people do relate to it because it reminds them of certain moments in their lives when they were younger that it still kind of clicks with them. Hopefully there will be some new younger fans there as well.
The CT: You’re on Twitter and Facebook. How does social media help you connect with your fans?
NH: It took me a while to kind of get into it . In the ’90s when we were touring a lot of the time-there’s a distance there between your fans and yourselves. You get letters sent to the office and stuff but you barely had time to read those. Now, the fact that people can just contact you directly on Facebook, I think it’s great.
I try to keep it updated as much as possible because I was surprised at how many people wanted to know what’s going on. Even when we weren’t working together, the amount of e-mails you get every day is scary. It’s sometimes a little too much where you look and say ‘I can’t answer all these,’ but you try and get through what you can.
I think it’s great, especially for doing something like what we’re doing now, where you’re coming back again and you judging what the reaction for it is. Is there a demand for it or are you just mad? Is anybody going to want to see this after this much time? It’s been a great help to judge where it might go.
The CT: A lot of bigger bands are against playing their old songs live. Why do you still incorporate your old songs into your set list?
NH: That’s what we’re about; that’s The Cranberries. They’re songs that we wrote. We were always quite picky about the songs that we chose that would end up in an album. We never tried to follow any trends and we said, ‘Look, this is what we’re doing.
We’re writing this, we’re going to put this in the album,’ and hopefully that will stand the test of time. Playing the songs over the last month where we’ve been rehearsing, to my ears, they still sound as good as they did 10 years ago. Sometimes if a band follows a trend, big bands come and go and the music starts to sound kind of dated a year later and it might be hard to be able to pull that off 10 years later.