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The Cranberries: A sweet and lingering fruit of the 90s

The Cranberries were a mirror of their front woman. Artistic and defiant, wrapped around a sweet nostalgia of long, lost love.

Dolores O'Riordan died on Monday, 15 January 2018, taking with her another piece of a decade robbed of some of its greatest stars.

Born in Limerick, an Irish town famous for breeding musicians and youth unemployment, O'Riordan came into The Cranberries when the band was already formed, replacing its front man Niall Quinn.

The year was 1990, and the band formerly known as The Cranberry Saw Us had morphed into the much catchier eponym The Cranberries.

But it wasn't just the name that Dolores changed, it was also the songs and the style. At just 19, the short-haired girl with leather pants and a sweet smile presented the band with what would become one of their biggest hits.

Linger is the story of O'Riordan's first love, a young soldier shipped away to Lebanon who stole her a kiss and then moved on.

:: Cranberries singer planned to re-record Zombie the day after her death

She would later recall to the Irish Times how she wished "the moment would linger", but was disappointed when, on the next night out, she found he had fallen for another girl.

It is a sweet and innocent story, something which you would expect to hear from a pre-pubescent pop star today. But O'Riordan's soft vocals delivered it with the mixture of purity and disillusionment which would characterise the band for the next decade.

"We all knew we couldn't write lyrics or sing," guitarist Noel Hogan told Rolling Stone magazine in 1994.

"So when we got Dolores, we knew we had to completely trust her. It was hard at first, a complete stranger. But then we got to know her, and we're all really good friends."

After Linger and Dreams - the two first singles of their sophomore album Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? - The Cranberries caught the eye of MTV, and were catapulted to international stardom.

Most of their fan base was in America, who heard in O'Riordan's tunes a reinvention of Irish folklore, the sound of the old country with the rebelliousness of the new.

Their next albums would become gradually heavier and angrier, losing the virtue of the first as O'Riordan became more of a rock star.

This was the time of Zombie, their hit song inspired by two children killed with an IRA bomb placed in a rubbish bin, and Salvation, a song about the dangers of drug abuse.

And now Dolores' punk rock look and rock star attitude fitted in better with the band's tunes, eliminating the duality of their first hits.

But another duality was always present, between O'Riordan herself and the band, who never really seemed to fit in the same picture.

Rumours of the band's split were always present, and many fans were beating heavily on Dolores pursuing a solo course, as her music matured with her.

Throughout her career, she was compared with many of her peers, from Debbie Harry to Sinead O'Connor, and she had the talent and the stamina to, just like them, become a solo artist.

"I have loads of power in the band," O'Riordan told the Rolling Stone in the early days of success, referencing how she wrote all the lyrics and led her male colleagues to fame.

But no matter how the band evolved, right up to their split in the early noughties, the rebelliousness of Salvation and the politics of Zombie were never so strong as to erase from their fans the early mysticism of her sweeter early hits.

When O'Riordan finally went solo in 2006, she collaborated with many artists and wrote many songs, and even made her Hollywood debut, invited to sing in the ending scene of the Adam Sandler film Click.

The song she sang was Linger.