Sinéad O'Connor believed that the success of Nothing Compares 2U was actually bad for her career because it turned her into a "pop star". Photo / Kate Garner
Sinéad O'Connor believed that the success of Nothing Compares 2U was actually bad for her career because it turned her into a "pop star". Photo / Kate Garner
Sinéad O’Connor, the singer who has died aged 56, was best known for her brilliantly simple yet highly emotional cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U (1990), accompanied by a video in which tears spontaneously trickled down her face as she sang.
Her version of the song was to make her career, largely by accident, although she virtually destroyed it two years later when she tore up an image of the Pope on American television.
Briefly a superstar, she spent the following 25 years as an object of curiosity. Either driven by truth or constitutionally unable to hold back, her life was a series of public declarations and retractions, breakdowns and comebacks, bids for attention and escape, and desperate attempts to overcome trauma and mental illness through art, love and religion.
Sinéad O'Connor, pictured here in 1990, the year her hit "Nothing Compares 2 U" was released. Photo / Getty Images
Nothing Compares 2 U set her overwhelmingly emotional vocal against a largely orchestral backing. It would have been a hit regardless, but the video, with the camera tight on her head until the moment three minutes in where tears began to roll from her wide doe eyes, made it even more compelling. In truth, she was in genuine distress, having broken up with her boyfriend and manager Fachtna O Ceallaigh two days before: “My life was really falling apart,” she said later that year. “Also, it’s a pretty heavy song. Don’t Worry Be Happy it isn’t, you know?”
The single sold a million copies in a month, and the accompanying album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, reached six million; but the two were very different beasts. Combining indie rock, folk and hip-hop, the LP was a critics’ favourite but too fierce for most, and none of the follow-up singles came close.
Sinéad O'Connor's raw, emotional music video turned her into an international star. Photo / YouTube
At first, O’Connor embraced fame, moving part-time to Los Angeles, appearing with such aristocrats of rock as Peter Gabriel and Sting for Amnesty International and taking up acting. She even met Prince, saying that “of course” they got on – “He must be pretty happy, the amount of money he’s made out of me” – and then claiming he had effectively held her hostage, screaming abuse at her.
It soon turned sour. Fans taking her picture in the street would often find her running after them, or be told to “just f--- off”. In August 1990 she refused to allow a New Jersey venue to play the American National Anthem before she went on; Frank Sinatra, who played the following night, said he wanted to “kick her in the ass”. Not without a sense of humour, she dressed up in a wig and hat to “protest” outside one of her own shows soon after; she said there were just “two old guys there… mad-looking blokes with the thick glasses and the foam on their lips.”
The next year, she refused to attend the Grammy Awards in protest at the war in Iraq, and announced her retirement from the music industry. This time Jay Leno, the host of America’s Tonight show, joked: “Sinéad O’Connor says she’s tired of being famous. That’s a coincidence. I’m tired of her being famous too.” Even Edwina Currie called her “a bit of a prat”.
Then, in October 1992, appearing on the sketch show Saturday Night Live, supposedly to promote a new album of jazz standards, Am I Not Your Girl?, she chose instead to perform Bob Marley’s War, with lyrics altered to refer to child abuse rather than racism, and then tear up a photograph of Pope John Paul II with the words: “Fight the real enemy.” Coming long before the exposure of institutional cover-ups in the Catholic Church, it was an incendiary act. At a tribute concert to Bob Dylan the same month, she was booed off stage.
"I'm not sorry I did it. It was brilliant," O'Connor said of her protest against abuse in the Catholic Church on Saturday Night Live. Photo / Getty Images
She said later that it had been a bid to kill her pop stardom, that she wanted to “be a voice in the wilderness”; if so, her wish was granted. It was also a cry for help. O’Connor had already spoken lengthily about suffering abuse at home and at a Catholic reform school, and it turned out that the picture she tore up had belonged to her mother, who had died in a car crash in 1985.
She was surely in the grip of a breakdown, but the theme of child abuse – for which she blamed everything from alcoholics and rapists to serial killers and Hitler – remained the one constant in a life of revolving causes, and as recently as 2014, she still called this her “proudest night ever”.
Returning to Ireland, she was unable to withdraw from the public eye, taking out advertisements in the Irish press pleading with the public to “stop hurting me please” and announcing that she was “in agony”. Her brother, the novelist Joseph O’Connor, was dragged into the furore too. A new album, Universal Mother (1994), was a further letting of the wounds, and did nothing for her or her public.
By then she was involved in a custody battle with the father of her daughter Roisin, the journalist John Waters, that forced her to stop working for the rest of the decade. It was just one episode in an intense and complicated love life. After marrying the drummer and producer John Reynolds, father of her first son, she married a further three times, and also had children with the musician Donal Luny and with Frank Bonadio, the ex-husband of the singer Mary Coughlan.
In 2000 she declared herself a lesbian, though later settled on “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”, adding: “I lean a bit more towards the hairy blokes.” Her one constant was O Ceallaigh, who remained her manager until 2012. The end of their working relationship only came after they had rekindled their romance.
Sinéad O'Connor poses at her home in County Wicklow, Republic Of Ireland in 2012. Photo / Getty Images
Sinéad O’Connor was born in Glenageary, County Dublin, on December 8 1966. Her father was an engineer and later barrister and life was comfortable until her parents split up and she went to live with her mother, who, she claimed, beat her, starved her, forced her to sleep outside and encouraged her to shoplift. “Merely the sounds of my mother’s feet on the hearth ceiling were enough to send us into spasms of complete terror,” she later said.
Unable to make friends or work at school, she found some comfort in talent contests, once winning with a rendition of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, but was eventually sent for 18 months to An Grianán Training Centre, Dublin. Her accounts of her treatment there varied over the years but she acknowledged that, “One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.”
Moved by her father to a Quaker boarding school in Waterford, she began her musical career when she was heard singing Barbara Streisand’s Evergreen at a wedding by a member of the folk-rock band In Tua Nua. That connection stalled but she won a contract with the Ensign label while still a teenager, although she remained, in her words, “cripplingly shy” her whole life.
Her first album, The Lion & The Cobra (1987), effectively primal-scream therapy set to alternative rock, suggested a promising indie career was hers for the taking. Her shaven head – “because I didn’t want another boring hairdo” – and outspoken comments in favour of the IRA and against Ireland’s rock heroes U2 (singer Bono was “a stupid turd”) suggested she didn’t want much more. The success of Nothing Compares 2 U was unexpected, but O’Connor stood by it, saying in 2014: “Well, lucky it’s a good song. Jesus, can you imagine if it was The Birdie Song?”
Her relationship with religion was more complicated. In 1999, while continuing to campaign against the abuses of the Catholic Church, she was ordained as a priest of the breakaway Latin Tridentine Church, although she called it “just civil disobedience”. Then, having returned to recording with the over-produced, bland Faith and Courage (2000), and an album of mainly traditional Irish songs, Sean Nós Nua (2002), she proclaimed her new devotion to “spiritual music”, embodied in an album of reggae covers, Throw Down Your Arms (2005).
Sinéad O'Connor performed at New Zealand's Womad in 2015.
With this came an acknowledged diagnosis of bipolar disorder, though by 2011 she refuted this too. By then, the advent of social media had given full rein to her need to “vent”, and the media, in between noting her weight gain and her many garish religious-themed tattoos, reported her online appeal to “get laid”; this resulted, after three months, in her fourth marriage, in Las Vegas, to Barry Herridge, an addiction therapist, which lasted just seven days.
A comeback the following year with the album How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, featuring the gritty rock of her past and a glossily glamorous cover, was taken remarkably seriously, but derailed when problems with medication forced her to pull out of the resulting tour. The blues-based I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss (2014) was also respectfully received, but sold little. More attention was given to an online spat with Miley Cyrus, in which Sinéad O’Connor advised her not to allow herself to be “pimped” by the industry. “It’s more that when you’ve been through grievous things yourself, and you see it happening to other people, you just want to snuggle them,” Sinéad O’Connor later explained later. “I know what it’s like to cry on the street.”
Matters took a more serious turn when she posted a series of Facebook messages suggesting she had taken an overdose and accusing almost all her family of betrayal. It is understood that she had been depressed since undergoing a hysterectomy in August 2015 and that her son Shane had also been unwell. In 2017 she changed her name by deed poll to Magda Davitt, explaining that, she wished to be “free of the patriarchal slave names. Free of the parental curses.” The following year she claimed to have converted to Islam, adopting the name Shuhada and later changing her surname to Sadaqat.
Last year her 17-year-old son Shane committed suicide and subsequently she was admitted to hospital after posting messages on social media about taking her own life.
Sinéad O’Connor is survived by a daughter and two sons.
