You clear your lungs, girl. You’ll feel better for it. - John Peel after playing Dreams on this edition of John Peel’s Music.
My intricate plans for this blogpost all came crashing down around my ears once I started doing the research on it. I had assumed that Peel playing one of the Cranberries best known hit singles was one of those examples in which he held hands with mainstream opinion and skipped gaily across an open field with it while acknowledging, “They’re good these, aren’t they?” But I found that I’d misremembered the chronology of the Cranberries story. I was sure that they had arrived, pretty much as overnight smashes through late 1992/early 1993 with Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? sitting astride the top of the album charts for 2 years, top 10 hit singles all over the world and huge crowds attending their gigs in next to no time. But the reality was that the huge success that the band enjoyed was a much more slow burning affair and rather than running hand in hand with mainstream opinion, Peel was, once again, metaphorically waving to it from a distance and pointing it towards the band, who would find it eventually catching up with them within a year. He had, lest we forget, been playing tracks from their earliest EP and had them in for a Peel Session, making him possibly one of the first DJs outside of Ireland to play them.
The jigs and the reels of it are that Dreams was released in September 1992 and entered the charts with a bullet at...(checks notes)... did not chart. That was followed by Linger, which just sneaked into the Top 75 UK hit singles chart. The Everybody Else...LP was released in March 1993 and did respectable business until MTV started playing the videos for Dreams and Linger on heavy rotation, at which point sales went into the stratosphere, especially in the United States. Dreams and Linger were both reissued in early 1994, though, again contrary to memory, neither broke the Top 10 in the UK. Indeed, no Cranberries single ever did. Dreams peaked at Number 27, which may be one of the reasons why for a long time I regarded it as good, but inferior to Linger which topped out at Number 14. Over a year after it was released, Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? topped the UK album chart, just in time for the band to release their second album, No Need to Argue. In 1994, they were probably the most exposed “new” band in the world. But in late 1992, they were preaching to a small congregation outside of Ireland, and John Peel was one of them.
In a sense, Dreams is a song we’ve grown up with over the last 25 years or so. It’s opening guitar washes and circling riff were a staple of “Coming up on Grandstand...” musical beds for many, many years. Listening back to it again over these last few days, I’ve been reminded of just how good a song it was in a way which its ubiquity at the time didn’t allow me to fully acknowledge. I don’t consider it as Linger’s pretty but lesser talented sister anymore. Dolores O’Riordan described it as being about the first time she fell in love. If we consider Dreams as being about the thrill of falling in love and Linger about dealing with the messiness of love turning sour but keeping you bound to it, then I now see both tracks as equals and a smart piece of sequencing.
Video courtesy of TheCranberriesTV
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