Linger

The Story Behind The Song

Having started life in 1989 as the all-male Cranberry Saw Us, Mike and Noel Hogan and Fergal Lawler were dismayed when only a year later their singer, Niall Quinn, left to concentrate on the other Limerick band he was in, The Hitchers. Feeling guilty that he was leaving them in the lurch, Niall asked around to see if there were any other vocalists in need of a group – and came up with the name of 18-years-old Dolores O’Riordan, who was still at school and about to sit her Leaving Certificate exams.

She’d sung in Irish traditional music competitions and the school choir – word had it she did a mean ‘Ave Maria’ – but she’d never been to a rock gig, let alone fronted a Smiths-loving bunch of indie hopefuls. The lads weren’t overly impressed when Dolores turned up for her audition wearing a vivid pink tracksuit, with a Casio keyboard tucked under her arm. As soon as she plugged in, though, and performed a cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, the vacant singer position was hers.

Although she’d never come up with a set of lyrics before, Dolores agreed to take home a cassette of an instrumental song Noel had crafted, but just couldn’t find the words for. After a few days messing around on the piano – bought for her by her mother Eileen when Dolores was a kid – the newcomer presented the lads with the completed ‘Linger’. Two years later, it was to become their international breakthrough hit. Despite her tender age, Dolores’ heart had been comprehensively broken by a former soldier by the name of Woggie. All the shock, hurt, disappointment and anger she felt over the breakup were channelled into couplets like: “If you, if you could get by/ Trying not to lie/ Things wouldn’t be so confused/ And I wouldn’t feel so used/ But you always really knew/ I just want to be with you.” It was a song which cut painfully close to the bone.

Then there’s that plaintive chorus, which in 1995 Dolores got to sing with one of her teenage pinups, Simon Le Bon, at Pavarotti’s Children of Bosnia concert in Italy. “That line: ‘I’m just a fool for you…’ – the way she sings it makes your ears prick and gets through any armour,” the Duran Duran man says. “You know exactly what Dolores meant when she sang that.” And so, perhaps, did Princess Diana, who was in the audience that magical Modena night.

But all that came later. After a major bidding war, the newly abbreviated Cranberries signed to Island Records who’d already succeeded in turning Ireland's U2 into one of the biggest bands in the world.

After a couple of false starts they teamed up with, joy of indie rock joys, producer Stephen Street, best known then for his work with The Smiths. Street presided over their debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? , to outstanding effect. Released on March 1st 1993, the record wasn’t the immediate hit that both the band, and their label, had been hoping for. Indeed, such was the lukewarm response from critics that when The Cranberries went off to tour Europe with fellow Irishmen Hothouse Flowers, they fully expected it to be their last hurrah before being dropped. “We went off with the Flowers without a penny to our name, relying on their catering for meals and the promoters for a few beers after the gigs,” Noel Hogan recalls. “A few weeks into the tour we got a call from somebody in Island’s New York office saying, ‘You need to drop what you’re doing and come to the States’. Basically, ‘Linger’ had taken off mainly through college radio, and MTV had picked up on it too. We left the Flowers a week early, and flew straight from Spain to our first US show in Denver. Everything changed overnight.”