Noel and Mike Hogan with Dermot Kennedy
Main Stage, Electric Picnic
★★★★☆
The premise of this late addition to the Electric Picnic line-up is bittersweet: Noel and Mike Hogan of The Cranberries teaming up with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra to perform songs indelibly linked to Dolores O’Riordan, their late bandmate.
Since her death, in 2018, most assumed the door had closed. To see the Hogans step back on to a stage with this material, then, is to watch not just a performance but an act of remembrance – and, indeed, before the brothers come onstage the crowd is more subdued than usual.
When Noel Hogan finally addresses the audience he does so with a deadpan air. “We played in a band you might’ve heard of called The Cranberries,” he says, prompting the first eruption of full-throated cheers. “We were asked to sing a few songs. But Mike and I can’t sing, so we invited our friend ... Please welcome Dermot Kennedy.”
The roar that greets this surprise is even louder – and the afternoon now hinges on a fascinating tension. The Cranberries’ catalogue is so ingrained in our cultural memory, songs such as Linger, Dreams, Zombie and Ode to My Family so whole and perfect in the mind’s ear, that any reinterpretation seems fated to disappoint, no matter how considered.
Kennedy approaches the task with humility. “Honoured, and a little flabbergasted, to be up here singing songs that hold such a place in Irish musical history,” he tells the crowd at the start of a set in which he carries himself throughout as though acutely aware of the responsibility.
His voice, rich and powerful, proves both asset and obstacle. Kennedy has a gift for epic scale, for immediately emotive anthemic delivery that fills fields and stadiums. Combined with the sweep of the orchestra, this lends the set a soaring grandeur. It’s stirring, even overwhelming at times, yet some of the original songs’ haunting strangeness, their fragility and passion, is inevitably lost. What was intimate and raw becomes, in this context, something more polished and cinematic.
Still, to dwell on that absence is to miss the point. This concert is never about replication. It’s an exercise in tribute, in honouring a collection of immaculately beautiful songs. On those terms it succeeds. During Dreams, as thousands of voices join Kennedy’s in unison, the arena seems to swell with pride and emotion. This is less performance than shared ritual, a moment of connection rooted in memory and loss but also in joy.
By the time they sing Zombie, their closing song, there are tears in the crowd.
