And sales would have been even higher if the intensive touring such figures required hadn't taken its toll

And sales would have been even higher if the intensive touring such figures required hadn't taken its toll. In 1996, after the release of their third album, For the Faithful Departed, the Cranberries burnt out, fell out, broke down and nearly broke up. When they cancelled all the remaining concerts on their schedule, O'Riordan's weight had dropped to six stone, not because she had an eating disorder, she avers, but because she was too stressed to think about food. O'Riordan's physique seems to have mysterious links with her band's music. When the Cranberries began, they were an awkward indie combo from Limerick who made jingling, apple-sweet music, and she was average woman-sized, as far as you could make out through the layers of frumpy dress and denim jacket Then she was possessed by the spirit of MTV.

She swapped cardigans for rock-star costumes - she got married in her underwear and a roll of gauze - and as her body grew leaner and harder, her music grew more strident. The single which really transformed the Cranberries into superstars was the anti-IRA anthem, "Zombie". But it also turned them into zombies: bony and inhuman."Zombie" was the bombastic template for much of the Cranberries' subsequent music O'Riordan was now a frowning, self-righteous scold. Her soft, sated sighs stiffened into painful yodels, and her ego stiffened until she believed that she could pontificate intelligently about politics in her lyrics She was wrong.

Imagine Alanis Morissette's last album, except without the long words.After the Cranberries' crisis in 1996, they had a two-year sabbatical, and O'Riordan had a baby. The comeback album is called Bury the Hatchet, so I was hoping that motherhood might have taken some of the sharp edges off her figure and her music. As it is, the Cranberries sound as if the hatchet is still being brandished - and O'Riordan is still skinny. Not worryingly thin, thankfully, but not exactly a vision of feminine sensitivity, either.