The juice on The Cranberries

EM: Was she an influence on you?

DO: For an Irish woman to get up and sing rock 'n' roll made me want to do it.

EM: Didn't you also cut your hair In a gesture similar to hers?

DO: I've had short hair since I was a kid. I have a weird thing against long hair. I put bubble gum and paint in my hair before my first communion, at age seven, so my mother had to cut it. I've always been a short-haired girl in a group of five brothers. I've always been a tomboy. I used to go to the extreme of trying to go to the loo like boys and wetting my pants when I was three. It just didn't make sense being a girl.

EM: But you wear dresses onstage now.

DO: I've gotten over it by now. I discovered men. I discovered the beauty of being a woman, in a different way. But the hair still didn't grow.

EM: The Cranberries' sound seems tougher on this album.

DO: It's just a growing-up thing. I became more experimental. On the first album, the songs I wrote are acoustic-based. On the second album I wanted "Zombie" to be a really aggressive song because it was about an aggressive subject: a child's life being taken by violence. For "Daffodil Lament" I had all these ideas about tempos changing like a symphony. Musically, everybody got more adventurous.

EM: You had a bad skIIng accident while recording this record, right?

DO: In the French Alps. I broke the main ligament in the knee that joins your femur onto your fibula, your thighbone onto your shinbone, I had a fiberglass one put in. It's much more complicated than breaking a bone, because you have to have your flesh cut open and fiberglass stuffed in and holes bored in your bones and screws put in. And when you wake up, your leg's all sore and huge. It's like someone else's leg, You have to relearn how to walk.

EM: Did the recording get put on hold?

DO: For about six weeks. I did a lot of the vocals on one leg, and I like to perform in the studio in pitch darkness and close my eyes, and sometimes I'd wobble and lose my balance, The producer would hear a huge bang, the lights would go on, they'd all come running, and I'd be getting up off the ground. So there were some really nice sound effects, but we took them out.

EM: Why do you like to perform in darkness?

DO: I think your mind wanders a bit more when there's nothing to look at. Your imagination is freer, there's nobody intimidating you. You can drift into what you're singing about more.

EM: When you said before that you don't think you could be in a band with women, is that based on experiences you've had?

DO: I've never been in a band with women, but I always get on well with boys. Boys are more easygoing. I think women are easy to get upset and offended. We're just different creatures than men.

EM: But you've also said before that you think it's tough to be a woman in a band with guys.

DO: It's tough either way. It's easier as time goes on and you can afford to behave like a female and have the privacy a female requires among males. But once upon a time that couldn't be afforded and I had to sleep in a very tight van, thrown across their laps, and sometimes share bedrooms with eight boys and sleep on the floor. It's just not nice.