Despite her shaved head, army boots and edgy high-wire vocals, few who witnessed Sinéad O’Connor emerge into the national spotlight, bobbing along to her first hit ‘Mandinka’ on Top Of The Pops in 1988, would have imagined the lion and the cobra that had been let loose on pop culture. O’Connor, who died yesterday (July 26) aged 56, was an immediately striking talent, but her voice was to become as loud and renowned for its uncompromising politics and humanitarian passion as for its melodic brilliance and wracked emotion.
Her story, as told in Katheryn Ferguson’s heart-breaking recent documentary Nothing Compares, was that of an artist of integrity, intensity and honesty, rising astronomically and falling just as fast on her own unbending terms. At her peak, 1990’s second album ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’ earned her seven million global sales and made her a Stateside sensation, the world recognising its own hidden pain in the single tear rolling down her stoic face in the video for her magnificent, haunted cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. But her bold and confrontational protest against child abuse in the Catholic church, ripping up a photo of the Pope live on Saturday Night Live in 1992, saw her star cruelly and unfairly crushed by the media establishment and – despite maintaining a healthy recording career for a further twenty-five years – decades of mental health issues and familial tragedy plagued her until her death.
Though often shy and withdrawn in interviews and public appearances, O’Connor was always a rebel at heart. Born in Dublin on December 8, 1966, she would come to accuse her parents of abusing her at a young age – her mother, she said, had “no capacity for love” – and by fifteen her truancy and shoplifting had seen her placed for eighteen months in a Magdalene asylum, run by a Catholic charity. Here, amidst no little trauma, her singing and song-writing found focus, and it was through a volunteer at the institution who’d heard her singing Barbra Streisand songs that she was brought to the attention of Irish rock band In Tua Nua and made her first recording with them.
O’Connor’s voice proved unignorable. Forming her first band Ton Ton Macoute via an advert in Hot Press in 1984, she quickly caught the attention of the Irish music industry at the band’s well-received Dublin shows and signed with Ensign Records ahead of her 1987 debut album ‘The Lion And The Cobra’. Inspired by Dylan, Bowie, Bob Marley, Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Pretenders, the record weaved together pop and dance elements, Irish folk, pre-shoegaze atmospherics and cathartic personal and political fervour (‘Jerusalem’ hinted at Catholic violence; the rage of ‘Troy’ was directed at her mother) and stood as testament to O’Connor’s uncompromising determination to be in charge of her own life and career. Unhappy with early sessions, she fired the album’s producer, scrapped the recordings and produced the record herself, running up over £100,000 of debt. When the label suggested she abort her first child (with her drummer John Reynolds) to concentrate on her career, she went ahead with the pregnancy. That ‘The Lion And The Cobra’ sold 2.5 million on the back of ‘Mandinka’ was a deeply personal victory.
Given a platform, she howled from it. In interviews she espoused anti-war, anti-religious and anti-racist beliefs and was vocal on the issues of sexism in the music industry and child abuse, even campaigning for the arrests of paedophile Catholic church officials. At the 1989 Grammy Awards she performed with the Public Enemy logo dyed into her crewcut in protest at Black rap artists being shunned by the awards. In 1990 she said she wouldn’t perform if the American national anthem was played before the shows, prompting Frank Sinatra to threaten to “kick her in the ass”. And yet it was the universal anguish of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ that would come to define her, evidence that the passion of her activism went hand in hand with deep personal pain.
‘I Do Not Want…’ was an international sensation, thrusting her into a rarefied rock echelon that saw her feted in the US and working with the likes of Pink Floyd, Bono and Peter Gabriel. Her ascent was to be short-lived however. Following her heartfelt protest on SNL in 1992 – tearing up her mother’s own photo of Pope John Paul II during an a capella performance of Bob Marley’s ‘War’, then flinging the pieces at the camera with the words “fight the real enemy” (nine years before the Pope admitted to child abuse within the church) – she was shunned by the American media and booed off after another defiant rendition of ‘War’ at Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary tribute concert. 1992’s album of largely jazz standards ‘Am I Not Your Girl?’ stalled; that year, while on tour with her then-partner Gabriel, she suffered a sleeping pill overdose which was – erroneously she’d claim – reported as a suicide attempt.
The following decades grew increasingly turbulent. There would be four marriages and divorces, custody struggles, diagnoses of PTSD, agoraphobia and borderline personality disorder and attempted suicides. Yet she would release a further eight albums, her voice of protest undimmed by her experiences. 1994’s ‘Universal Mother’ tackled feminist themes, the song ‘Germaine’ featuring Germaine Greer talking about alternatives to the patriarchy, while 2007’s ‘Theology’ referenced her complex religious journey – she was ordained as a priest under the name Mother Bernadette Mary in the late ‘90s, and would later converted to Islam in 2018, taking the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat and performing live in a hijab. She also released albums of traditional Irish folk music (‘Sean-Nós Nua’, 2002) and reggae covers (‘Throw Down Your Arms’, 2005), but would come back around to rock music by the time of her final record ‘I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss’ in 2014.
Her final years were particularly troubled. Worrying social media posts detailed her family and relationship problems and her struggles with mental health; at one point she asked fans for somewhere to stay and there were periods of silence amid serious concerns for her well-being. Her proposed 2021 album ‘No Veteran Dies Alone’ was shelved when she announced a short-lived retirement from music, then scrapped altogether upon the death of her 17-year-old son Shane, who took his own life in 2022. No amount of troubles could ever overshadow her talent, however; O’Connor was that rare artist who was determined to use her platform for retributive good, and she will be remembered not just for the beauty of her voice, but for its power.