Still berry ordinary

THE Oxford Dictionary Of Popular Music defines success thus: "It's when you're driving down Sunset Boulevard in an open-top sports car snorting cocaine, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels and having a supermodel carry out an unspeakable act on you". Put this proposition to the four Cranberries with the rejoinder "Discuss" and one looks at his shoes and smiles, another shrugs his shoulders, one shakes her head and another (Mike, the bass player) says "If we wanted to, we could walk around in the leather trousers, wear sunglasses at night time and get limos to drive us up to nightclubs, but you know....

No, I don't. "It's not that we don't get invited to all these `trendy' places," says Dolores. "It's just that for want of anything else to do, we just end up in pubs with our friends. If all this ends tomorrow, the people in those sort of places wouldn't be there for us then, so why bother with them now?".

Why bother, indeed, when you can always stay at home and roll around naked in all the money you've made in the last few years? Eh, we don't really do that either," says Noel (guitarist). "The whole idea - just to let you know - is to have the success without the hassle," says Feargal (drummer). "If you're going to play the star, you'll soon find yourself running out of choices." And what sort of choices would those be? "Well, presuming I want to, the choice to shop in Dunnes Stores or not."

Enough already about Dunnes Stores, tell me stories about money and sex and stuff. "There's a story about Mexico," says Feargal. Try it. "Well, it was just that when we played there on the cast tour, it was the first time that myself, Noel and Mike - as opposed to Dolores - were getting mobbed by the fans and chased down the street. As everybody knows, the three of us have always been quite, quite happy to stay in the background and let the press focus fall on Dolores but having experienced for a few hours what she has been experiencing every minute of every day gave us something to think about. It made us admire her more." Dolores nods contentedly and says: "The lads really understand now, they've seen what it's like, there's more sympathy."

Sympathy? It's not a word you'd readily associate with the band. The last time we caught up with them, the Limerick band had just left behind the indie ghetto for the mainstream with the release of their second album, No Need To Argue in September 1994. Since then, they've been all over the US, Europe, Australia and Japan, stuffed out the Royal Albert Hall in London, done MTV Unplugged, sung with Pavarotti, been on the cover of Rolling Stone, toured with R.E.M., experienced Grade A celebrity status, sold 20 million albums and earned indecent amounts of money. No wonder their new album is all about ... death and dying.

From the outside, it looks great and it is," says Dolores. "But there are other dimensions to the story and from the inside what has happened to us over the same period of time you're talking about is this; first, the man who discovered The Cranberries and was terribly important to us, Denny Cordell died, then our friend Sylvia Redmond died and my grandmother died also. The album is called To The Faithful Departed and is about these people but it's not a sombre thing. It's about people who have left this earth but have left good things behind them. There are also references to people like John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, and how we can learn from what they left behind."

The album, which was recorded in Dublin last November, sees the band using a new producer for the first time in their career. "We wanted to go for a live, even a trashy sort of sound, so we got this heavy metal producer, Bruce Fairbairn, to do the album," says Feargal. "The music we're at now is very live and very raw, so we decided to get away from all the strings we used on the two first albums," adds Noel, while Dolores says "it was getting a bit too predictable".

"After the last album we toured for 12 straight months and we found that when we were playing in front of big crowds we preferred that heavier, rockier sound and that's what we've put on the new album," she explains.

Funny to think it, but although the band still seem like newcomers, it's only when they refer to bands like Nirvana as "our contemporaries" that you realise how long they've been around and how much they've moved along the musical spectrum. When The Cranberries broke big, they broke out of the U.S. "alterno-rock" system (college radio, indie venues etc;) and interesting to note that they won a Best Song award from MTV (for Zoh-um-bie) in the "Alternative" section. Massive record sales have now lifted them out of that circuit and when the band changed management last year from the quintessentially indie Rough Trade company to the smooth and slick US West Coast team of Left Bank (Meat Loaf, Duran Duran etc;) the letters AOR were in danger of appearing.

"It is possible to be successful and still be credible," says Feargal while Noel says "there is a lot of music out there that is over-produced and I think we've taken a bit of a risk with this album because we've decided to cut the crap and get straight to the point". Mike says the very speed of making the album (three weeks) puts an edge on the new songs. "All the material was written, we had played it live and we just wanted to get it down immediately. That's why even though we were exhausted after the 12-month world tour, we more or less went straight back into the studio". So no fears that The Cranberries will end up doing duets with Mariah Carey? "Nope, we could never be like that," says Dolores.

A recent article somewhere put The Cranberries' success down to the fact that "Dolores like Courtney Love, has the unique female ability to access her feelings and get across her emotions in song". Yes or No? "I think that when Dolores sings, she sings about universal feelings and emotions like being in love or out of love, about standing up for yourself in a bad emotional situation or about a relationship breaking up," says Feargal, "Those are things everybody can relate to and empathise with, and if you can put those feelings over a melody like Linger.

"MAYBE it is specific to being a woman," says Dolores. "It can't and shouldn't be difficult for us to remain true to our emotions despite the amount of pressure women feel to hide them. Overcoming that has got us where we are today. People should rememher that I have two roles in the band. First, I am the only woman and second, as the lead singer, am the frontperson. On one level, it is kind of annoying that I have got, and still get, all the attention. People obviously pick up on the fact that it's a woman fronting a band of three men.

"What happens in these situations is that the media go into overdrive. The press started on this thing ages back that I was going to go solo. Then what started happening was that whenever we did a photo shoot for a newspaper or magazine, they would take the photo of the band, the four of us, but afterwards they would cut out three of the band and guess who got left in all the time. That's what happened with the Rolling Stone front cover, they took photos of the band, but only plonked me on the cover. It happens, and it will probably continue to happen". It happened again this week with Q magazine.

Does bad press affect you? "There was a time when it seemed that whenever anybody wrote about The Cranberries," Dolores says, "they'd always say (l) That I demanded all the attention in the band and (2) that the band was going to break up. It was all bullshit. The more they attacked us, the closer and stronger the band became".

"What's happening with The Cranberries now is this," says Feargal, "we're bringing out the new album and then starting an 18-month world tour, going to places we've never been before like Asia, Africa and South America .. . of course we have some complaints about things that have been written about us, but nobody wants to hear rock groups complaining all the time." Outside of the band, Noel and Feargal have just got engaged, and along with Mike, they still live in Limerick, while Dolores lives in Dingle.

Over the next 18 months, they will have plenty of opportunity to indulge in one of their most favoured forms of behaviour. It happens after the gig, when the fans have gone home, the road crew have left and the manager has gone to bed. "Sometimes, late at night it's just the four of us left sitting there and we start thinking about our early days in Limerick and all that has happened to us since then," says Mike. "And then we start laughing," says Dolores.