"She was on a roll": The Cranberries on the last days of Dolores O'Riordan

THE LAST TIME the Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan saw Dolores O'Riordan was in the Limerick hotel where we are now standing, in November 2017. He had agreed to do an interview with a Chinese journalist: the band are huge in China, apparently, and had a run of arena gigs booked there. O'Riordan was living in New York and she wanted distraction; she decided, in a typically whimsical move, to come to meet the journalist, too, taking the direct flight to Shannon airport. She was in good spirits, although ongoing back problems — a slipped disc, from picking up a guitar — had led to a cancelled tour that summer.