How old was dolores oriordan when she died

London(CNN) Dolores O'Riordan, the lead singer of Irish band The Cranberries, died in January by drowning due to alcohol intoxication, an inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court heard Thursday, according to Britain's Press Association.

The death of O'Riordan at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane in London was an accident, coroner Shirley Radcliffe ruled at Westminster Coroner's Court, PA reported.

O'Riordan, who was 46 when she died, was in London for a short recording session, according to a statement from her publicist at the time.

Police officer Natalie Smart, who attended the scene, told the inquest that O'Riordan was found in the bath in her hotel room, PA said Thursday.

Five miniature bottles and a bottle of champagne were found in the room along with containers of prescription drugs with a number of tablets inside, according to PA.

Cranberries releasing final album with Dolores O'Riordan

Toxicology tests found O'Riordan had "therapeutic" amounts of medication in her blood, but more than four times the legal alcohol limit for driving.

The Cranberries rose to global fame in the mid-1990s with a string of hits, including "Linger," "Zombie" and "Dreams." The group, from Limerick, has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide.

In 2007, O'Riordan launched a solo project with her album "Are you Listening?" before reuniting with the group in 2009. She also teamed up with The Smiths' bassist Andy Rourke and DJ Ole Koretsky to provide the vocals for the group D.A.R.K.

In 2017, The Cranberries released "Something Else," an acoustic album featuring some of the band's most popular hits, along with three new recordings.

But they canceled many dates on their 2017 Europe and North America tour, with the band citing O'Riordan's ongoing back problems as the cause.

In a statement in January, Irish President Michael D. Higgins said O'Riordan's death was "a big loss" to the Irish arts community.

How old was dolores oriordan when she died

Dolores O'Riordan, singer of The Cranberries, passed away in January 2018.RollingNews.ie

Dolores O’Riordan’s death in January 2018 has officially been ruled a tragic accident, and the days and weeks before the singer’s untimely death further corroborate those findings.

O’Riordan was in London at the time of her death working on a remake of her hit song ‘Zombie’ with the band Bad Wolves. The new version of the song was released after the singer’s death, and the band is donating the proceeds to O’Riordan’s three children.

Around 2 am local London time on the day of her death, O’Riordan phoned her friend, record label executive Dan Waite.

"Hi Dan, it's Dolores!” O’Riordan said in the voicemail she left for Waite. “I'm in London, I'm at the Hyatt Park Hilton.” O’Riordan said how she was in town recording a cover and that Waite should come by the studio.

"Send my love to Irene... love that leather jacket,” O’Riordan said.

Waite later recalled that O’Riordan “sounded full of life” and that she “was joking and excited to see me and my wife” later that week.

Social media posts from the Irish rock star and notes from her doctors showed that O'Riordan seemed to be doing well in the lead up to her untimely passing.

On December 20, 2017, only a few weeks before her death, O'Riordan shared a cheery Facebook update with her fans saying how she was "feeling good!":

The Facebook update came a few months after The Cranberries canceled the remainder of their reunion tour. O’Riordan had not been recovering well from an ongoing back injury, so the band was forced to call off the show under doctor’s orders.

American psychiatrist Robert Hirschfield spoke with O’Riordan on the phone on December 26. He said in a statement after her death that “She was doing well, she was not drinking, she was a little sad on Christmas Day … no thoughts of suicide.”

O’Riordan did not spend the Christmas holiday with her three beloved children but did fly to see them on December 26 in Toronto, where they lived with their father, O’Riordan’s ex-husband Dan Burton.

On January 3, O'Riordan shared what would become her last social media post. It was a picture of her and her cat Gio saying how she was heading home to Ireland.

Psychiatrist Dr. Seamus O'Ceallaigh met with O’Riordan on January 9 and reported afterward that his patient was in “good spirits, no thoughts of suicide, no evidence of self-harm.”

It was less than a week later that, while heavily intoxicated, O'Riordan died in her hotel bathtub.

Things seemed to be on the up-and-up for O’Riordan in the lead up to her passing. Her death will, indeed, be remembered as a tragic accident.

Dolores O’Riordan, who found international fame in the 1990s as the lead singer of the Irish band the Cranberries, died by drowning, according to a coroner’s inquest.

The singer had been in London for a recording session when she was found dead on Jan. 15. She was 46.

The cause of her death was unknown at the time. The inquest, usually conducted in Britain in the case of sudden or unexplained deaths, concluded that O’Riordan died by drowning in a bathtub after drinking alcohol, the Associated Press reported.

“There’s no evidence that this was anything other than an accident,” coroner Shirley Radcliffe said, the AP reported.

Witnesses told the inquest at Westminster Coroner’s Court that O’Riordan had drunk excessive amounts of alcohol, and empty bottles of alcohol and containers of prescription drugs were found in her hotel room, the BBC reported.

A toxicology report showed O’Riordan had “therapeutic” amounts of medication in her system, and 330 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood, four times the legal limit for driving, BBC reported.

The inquest was held on what would have been O’Riordan’s 47th birthday.

“Today we continue to struggle to come to terms with what happened,” the Cranberries said in a statement released Thursday. “Our heartfelt condolences go out to Dolores’ children and her family and our thoughts are with them today.”

The band added that “Dolores will live on eternally in her music” and that “to see how much of a positive impact she had on people’s lives has been a source of great comfort to us.”

The Cranberries reached stardom in the 1990s, with hits including “Linger” and “Zombie.” The band went on hiatus in 2003 and reunited in 2009. O’Riordan also released two solo albums.

Her sudden death hit Ireland particularly hard. Irish President Michael D. Higgins noted the “immense influence on rock and pop music in Ireland and internationally” that O’Riordan and the Cranberries had. “To all those who follow and support Irish music, Irish musicians and the performing arts her death will be a big loss.”

In 2017, the band had to cancel the remaining dates on their tour, citing O’Riordan’s “recovery from her ongoing back problem.” Over the years, O’Riordan has spoken publicly about her mental health and physical problems, including her bipolar diagnosis and depression.

Her survivors include three children she had with ex-husband, Don Burton, a former tour manager for Duran Duran.

The members of the Irish rock band Cranberries, singer Dolores O'Riordan (R), bassist Mike Hogan (2ndR), drummer Fergal Lawler (2ndL) and guitar player Noel Hogan (L) pose on January 18, 2012 in Paris. The Cranberries will present in February 2012 their sixth studio album 'Roses'. AFP PHOTO / JOEL SAGET (Photo credit should read JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

How old was dolores oriordan when she died
Show captionDolores O’Riordan onstage in Cognac, 2016. Photograph: Guillaume Souvant/AFP/Getty Images

The Cranberries

The Irish band are piecing together their final album following the recent death of their lead singer. They talk candidly about her troubled life and the challenges of working without her

Thu 13 Sep 2018 08.11 EDT

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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.

Christmas came and went, but the Cranberries were still recording. O’Riordan would send Hogan vocals by email. On 14 January, she emailed him new songs: she had flown to London to mix an album with her side project D.A.R.K. At 1.12am on 15 January, calling from the Park Lane Hilton, she left a friend an excited voicemail in which she said a new recording was sounding “fucking terribly good”. At 2am, she spoke to her mother. Later that night, she died. I meet the band four days before an inquest ruled that the 46-year-old had drowned accidentally in the bath, with high levels of alcohol in her blood. Hogan looks around the lobby and says it is hard to believe that the last time he saw her it was somewhere so mundane.

How old was dolores oriordan when she died
Letting it Linger … remaining Cranberries Fergal Lawler, Noel and Mike Hogan. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Guardian

On the top floor, with its views out over the Shannon river, three Cranberries bear the mark of men still coming to terms with bereavement. Like many bands who lose a member, they threw themselves into activity. Their new album was nearly finished, so they completed it; April and May passed by in a blur. The strangest thing, they tell me, was that working in the studio was not all that different. The three of them would always record by day and Dolores would come in to sing at night, alone, with producer Stephen Street.

“We’d pass each other in the corridor,” says bassist Mike Hogan, Noel’s brother, who was only 20 when the band achieved international fame. “Dolores would say: ‘You know that thing you recorded?’ I’d say: ‘You mean the thing that took me five hours to get right?’ She’d say: ‘Yeah, it’s not working!’ This time around, there were nights when we were waiting, looking for her to come in the door.”

“Waiting for her to come in, like,” echoes his brother. “I found that, at night, I was so exhausted. Not physically, but mentally; those months from when Dolores passed away were intense.”

When she first sang, I wondered how and why she wasn’t already in a band. I didn’t want to question our luck

The pair, along with drummer Fergal Lawler, are a close-knit circle, managed by one of O’Riordan’s five brothers. She grew up 10 miles out of Limerick in Ballybricken, but they are from the town and met when breakdancing in their teens in the mid-80s. They first saw Dolores when she was 19 and tried out for their band; she was painfully shy and quiet, they all agree, but “when she sang”, says Noel, “I wondered how and why she wasn’t already in a band. I didn’t want to question it. We were lucky enough that she had come into this room.”

While the four of them shared a love for the Smiths and the Cure, O’Riordan’s vocal style stood alone: it was described by a Melody Maker journalist in 1991 as “the voice of a saint trapped in a glass harp”. She learned her yodel from her dad, a country music fan, and there were church influences, too. The music mag went to her family home to meet the band and painted an intriguing, kitsch picture: a Jesus clock and holy water from Lourdes, with Christmas turkeys being bred in a shed in the dark. She adored her father, a farm labourer who was injured in a motorbike accident that left him unable to work; she is buried alongside him in St Ailbe’s Church, Ballybricken.

Click here to watch the video for the Cranberries’ Zombie.

O’Riordan recalled an idyllic childhood – warm beds, hearty dinners, a fair dose of spirituality – but, in 2013, she told the Irish Independent that between the ages of eight and 12 she had been sexually abused by a family friend. Throughout her life she would flip, in interviews, between poetic positivity and confession.

The heady combination of raw, emotional lyrics and evocative Irish flavours quickly caught the attention of the wider world: the very first song O’Riordan wrote for the band was Linger, and it remains their biggest hit. Although their debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, tanked the first time round, after two US tours Linger was put on heavy rotation by MTV and upon its rerelease the album went to No 1 in the UK. By 1995, it had sold 5m copies in the US. It is being reissued in a box set next month.

Despite their huge commercial success, the Cranberries were never exactly cool in a UK smitten with Britpop; the US was always their second home, where Irish connections were felt so strongly. O’Riordan wrote an international protest song in Zombie, her response to the IRA bombing that killed two children, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, in Warrington in 1993. Its lyric was so powerfully abstract that Parry’s father, Colin, only realised, on O’Riordan’s death, what had inspired it. Their label was wary of the track’s politics, but the band were not.

How old was dolores oriordan when she died
Noel, Mike, Dolores and Fergal at an Irish music awards in 2002. Photograph: Paul McErlane/Reuters

“In the 30 years with Dolores, what she wanted to do lyrically was her thing; we never interfered,” says Noel. “That first album was all about relationships that she’d had through her teenage years, and to stand there and spurt that out to everyone, you could open yourself to ridicule – but she didn’t care. That remained with her always. She wrote what she felt was right.”

When fame hit, they were all about 20. It was always tougher for Dolores, says Mike, being on the front of the local paper, buying fish fingers at the supermarket. She broke her leg badly on a group ski trip during the recording of their second album – she wrote songs from her hospital bed – and, during her protracted convalescence, she began to struggle with depression and anorexia. By 1999, she was listed as the fifth-richest woman in the British Isles, but fame was wrecking her nervous system. By 2003, the band were “burned out”: they saw very little of each other for six years, with O’Riordan living in Canada with her husband, Don Burton, and their three young children. There was a reunion in 2009, but you get the sense of a band kept on their toes by an unpredictable leader.

She always said she found it hard to write songs when she was happy. Put a bit of misery in her life and it was easier

“She would say we needed some time off and a week later she would be bored,” says Noel. “Her emails were like text messages. Fifteen of them, but they’re all like two lines, at two o’clock in the morning …”

“Sometimes when you did want time off you’d be dreading seeing her ringing,” his brother smiles.

After her split from Burton, she spent a period living in hotels in New York. In 2014, she had a manic, paranoid episode on a flight from JFK to Shannon and assaulted the cabin crew, reminding them who she was. Shortly afterwards, she invited the Irish journalist Barry Egan into her home and told him how much trouble she was in; it was a cry for help from someone who had grown up in the public eye and who possibly struggled in periods of relative obscurity. “My life has no control,” she said. Shortly afterwards, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. How much did the band know about her problems in her later years?

“It was only the last few years that she started talking about psychological problems, because she didn’t know herself,” says Lawler. “She saw a few different therapists and realised what she had and she started getting treatment for it.”

“She was a lot more herself,” says Noel. “Especially last year, when we were rehearsing: you wouldn’t even know, because they had found the right cocktail of whatever it was she needed to be on. There wasn’t even a case of having to ‘work around it’. The hardest thing was her back, because playing live she could not move as freely as she used to.” The new album gave her something to focus on, he says. “She was really psyched about getting back out and really looking forward to China, because that was a big tour for us.

Cranberries vocalist Dolores O'Riordan – a life in pictures

“Dolores had an awful lot going on and she was on a roll of being able to write,” he continues. “Lyrically, the new album is very strong. She always said she found it hard to write songs when she was happy. She always said: put a bit of misery in her life and it was easier.

“We will do this album and then that will be it,” he adds. “There is no need to continue.”

The band step out on to the balcony to do the photoshoot. Noel stood out here with O’Riordan the last time he saw her. This is new for them: no frontwoman, no idea how to stand, to pose, without their focal point.

“With Dolores, doing pictures was so easy, because you knew exactly what to do,” he smiles. “Just all get behind her.”

The box set of Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? is released on 19 October on UMC. The Cranberries’ final album, In the End, will be released next year

• This article was amended on 13 September 2018 to correct three errors. The flight incident occurred in 2014, not 2016; a court heard that O’Riordan had been suffering a manic episode, not a drunken one. At the time of her death, O’Riordan was in London to mix a record with her side project D.A.R.K, not to record vocals for Bad Wolves.

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