The Cranberries admit listening to Dolores O’Riordan outtakes was ‘hard’

The Cranberries drummer Fergal Lawler said he was surprised at how difficult he found listening to old studio recordings of the band’s late singer Dolores O’Riordan.

O’Riordan drowned in a hotel bath due to alcohol intoxication in January 2018 and now her former band mates have delved into the archives for an extended 40-track reissue of their 1994 album No Need To Argue.

Lawler admits revisiting old outtakes was a “bittersweet” experience.

He told the i newspaper: “Dolores is speaking in-between takes. And it was hard.

“There’s a lot of fond memories from that time. But I maybe didn’t expect that to be as difficult as it was.”

Guitarist Noel Hogan described the revisited album as a “lovely legacy” and “a celebration of someone’s life”.

“All the other stuff that happened through all the years, it fades into the background,” he said. “It’s the songs people will remember Dolores for.”

The band from Limerick, completed by Noel’s brother Hogan on bass, sold more than 40 million albums with O’Riordan’s distinctive vocals on hits including Linger and Zombie.

Hogan said her death at the age of 46 was the “biggest shock of my life” at a time when she felt she was happy and settled after a marriage break-up and revealing she had been sexually abused as a child by a family friend.

“That was one of the harder things to deal with, because I felt that the old Dolores had come back,” he said.

“There was a few years in there where even her and I fell out for a while. But we patched that up. And she’d met a guy who was really good for her, really nice.”

The remaining members of the band completed their final album In The End, but Lawler said: “I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever actually get over.”