Cranberries’ Noel Hogan talks about band’s reunion

By Deanna Rilling

Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009 | 1:43 p.m.

The lingering is over. Rising to international fame in the mid-‘90s, The Cranberries have returned after taking a self-imposed hiatus and are back on the road for a North American tour. Before stopping in Vegas for their concert at The Pearl on Thursday, guitarist and co-songwriter Noel Hogan discussed the reunion, the infamous couch featured on their early albums and if he even likes cranberries as a food.

How is the tour going thus far?

It’s been brilliant, really, really good. After being away for seven years, I guess you kind of wonder, “Will anyone remember you? Is there still an interest there?” Every gig so far has been sold out and the reaction from the crowd has been amazing.

What can concertgoers look forward to as far as new material versus old favorites?

At the moment, it’s all the singles mixed with old albums and tracks that a lot of the fans would know. We are writing and we do have some new stuff already, but it’s still a bit rough to be putting in the set. I would imagine it would be another few weeks before we actually start adding new stuff.

Does that mean a new Cranberries album is on the way?

Yeah, we’re hoping to have it in the bag by the summer of next year.

To dispel speculation, what prompted the band’s hiatus and then reuniting?

I guess it was around 2003 and we went in to start what would have been the sixth album at the time. We started it, but it was a case that I don’t think any of us really wanted to do it. We had done The Cranberries non-stop for 13 years and I think, individually, we’d all grown interests in other directions… We decided, “Look, let's maybe now before we go off and do another album that we don’t really want to do and then tour it, let’s everybody go off and do what they actually want to do.”

There was a combination of that and also we all around that time had kids, little babies that were just born so it was a case of we maybe need to spend some time at home for a while as well… We never set a time scale on it, we’d just decided that we’d do what we had to do and when we decided the time was right, that we would come back to it. So then obviously six, seven years have passed and back in January of this year, [singer] Dolores [O'Riordan] called me and [bassist] Mike [Hogan] about doing an acoustic thing with her in Dublin. She’d been given an honorary doctorate at Trinity College and asked us if we’d do a few songs. The thing is, we’d always kept in touch through the whole time with each other, so it wasn’t an unusual thing to get a call like that. We went up, we did it and it felt really good to be playing the old songs again. Then we just remained talking since then about maybe now is the time to do it. Before you know it, here you are, back on tour again.

What was up with the sofa featured on the earlier album covers?

We had this photographer we used to use, Andy Earl. We were at his studio in London doing the first album cover and we had spent the whole day doing tons and tons of shots. This is a true story, honestly, the couch was just in his studio, it was just part of the furniture there and he just said, “Oh, look, let’s pull that across.” … We dragged it across, he took a whole bunch of photos on there and when they sent us everything… that was the one to us that felt the most natural. When we went to do the photo shoot, that wasn’t the concept at all, and it just from there grew to be on the second album cover because Andy did that as well, and it lived on for a while on a few different covers and it became kind of a thing really until I think it was the third album where we set it on fire and destroyed it.

Was it the actual sofa that was sacrificed?

I don’t think so. I actually saw it in a video once later on because apparently it was sold to some company that supplies props to TV shows and I saw this video by a band, Supergrass, and there’s one of the videos [“Alright”], they’re all sitting on a couch that’s being driven around. It’s a really quick shot but you can see it’s the same couch. So where it is now I don’t know. I know they got a replica made and set that on fire for the third album.

You’ve said the name The Cranberries, originally The Cranberry Saw Us, came about because you couldn’t think of anything else. Do you ever wish you had come up with a different name for the band?

No, it was just one of those things. There was so little time spent getting that name, that it’s not something we gave a second thought to again. We had a guy singing with us for about six months when we first began way back. It was him that came up with The Cranberry Saw Us originally. But everybody around Limerick [Ireland] where we grew up used to just call us The Cranberries anyway, even then. So when he left, we just lost the second part and just lived with The Cranberries and it was just one of those things where again we never really thought of.

Do you even like cranberries as a food?

I had actually never tried them until I think when we first came here [to the U.S.] because it’s not really a big thing in Ireland. But here you get turkey and cranberry sandwiches… It was one of the first times I tried it and thankfully liked it.