Oliver: The Cranberries - Linger/Wanted [Peel Session] (16 February 1992)

"This is another one from The Cranberries, in session.  It's called Linger". And thus the Reverend Peel baptised an inescapable monster hit: like it or not, one of the signature songs of the 90s.  Listening to it stripped of the string section, one is still seduced by the fact that it's a love song for the ages.  Albeit one that's dedicated to someone who is clearly no good for her.  Linger couldn't have been anything other than a smash hit.  It's one of those instances that crops up on the Peel Show through the years where form, feeling, style, melody and intent come together so perfectly that it seems inconceivable that it won't connect with record buyers who wouldn't have known who Peel was, let alone that his show would have been, I'm fairly confident to say,  the first one in the UK to play a tune that would conquer the world over the next 2 years.

If Linger was the snog on the dancefloor tune that the world had been waiting for in 1992, then Wanted comes on more like a Gaelic I Will Survive.  Catchy, throw-away, wearily defiant and refusing to play the victim if the subject of the song won't play fair.  I have a picture in my mind of a dancefloor covered in couples smooching to Linger, bursting into a riot of tango to the poppier, no-nonsense tones of Wanted, which after all is closer to the rhythms of day-to-day relationships than its  more celebrated session-mate.

The video is of the full session.  If you only want to hear the tracks I would have taped go to 3:30.  Both Linger and Wanted are back-to-back from that point on.  Both the opening and closing tracks on the session: Waltzing Back and I Will Always are perfectly fine in their own ways but are ruined for me by Dolores O' Riordan doing that trick with her voice that will make you want to rip your ears off the side of your head.  I feel horribly shallow for writing that, particularly given that part of the raison d'être for the Peel Show was to make you hear things you'd rather not, but honestly there are times when she does it in those two songs, that I'd be happier listening to Throbbing Gristle.

Video courtesy of John Peel