8 Good Reasons Why Sinéad meant more to me than Prince
Well, maybe nine now
Last Wednesday, July 26, the “entertainment” news cycle started with the much-anticipated 80th birthday of Mick Jagger. While his Glimmer Twin Keef has somehow defied all laws of nature and is also still with us, we always expected Mick to make old bones. He’s someone who has clearly looked after himself, physically and financially, and who exudes – for all the crow’s feet and deep lines on his face - the radiant health of someone who always planned to be around a long time to enjoy his wealth.
Only hours into the day I got an e-mail from my ex. (We were together over 25 years, raised two great kids, had a wonderful time most of the time, so don’t worry about us!) It simply read ‘Sinéad rip’. Given the lower case “rip”, I thought she might have accessed some rare recording, ripped it and was sharing it. But nothing was attached, no text beyond the subject. I replied with a simple question mark. Moments later, I got on my socials, and realized what she had meant. Sinéad O’Connor RIP. Oh.
Sinéad O’Connor was part of our mutual life soundtrack. My ex-wife told me this past week that the moment she heard Sinéad on the radio for the first time – we can assume the song was from The Lion and The Cobra, Sinéad’s superlatively distinct debut - she decided to buy a ticket to see her play at Trenton’s City Gardens, in 1988. And early in our relationship together, she and I attended the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey on August 24 1990; it was the night Sinéad refused to allow the National Anthem to be played before her set. Nobody seemed any the wiser at the event itself; we were all too much enjoying a fantastic concert. It wasn’t until we went on to the Melody afterwards in New Brunswick that we learned that the ‘incident” had created a firestorm, and we weren’t yet to know that the next night, from the same stage, Frank Sinatra, displaying the kind of machismo attitude Sinéad railed against for much of her career, would tell his own audience he’d like to meet her so he could “kick her ass.”
Sinéad’s tours became thinner on the ground after the intense fame generated by the runaway success of that second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, combined with her abusive upbringing, led to her infamous incident on SNL two years later. But later in our own lives, in October 2014, we made a point of traveling from the Catskill Mountains to see Sinéad play at City Winery in Manhattan, where she played almost exclusively from her back-to-back returns to “form” (or successful “formula”), How About I Be Me (and You Be You)?, and I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss. The show was fine – I also seem to recall an all-female or at least largely female band – though it felt a little short. But SetlistFM lists 18 songs, including the idiosyncratic encores, and that’s fine. It was Sinéad. It was intimate surroundings. She was on good form. Her fans worshipped her. She seemed perfectly happy with it all.
I did not see her perform again, but after Sinéad’s death, my ex sent me a photo of a ticket for the last concert she attended before Covid: Sinéad O’Connor at the El Rey Theater in LA, Feb 9 1990, on the opposite side of the USA. Now there is some fandom!
So neither of us will accept any part of this backlash against those accused of mourning vicariously for someone they never cared about, never met, never listened to beyond the big hits. This social phenomenon absolutely exists – witness the UK’s collapse into collective chaos after Princess Di died, long before social media sped the process up – but don’t look at us.
Similarly, I found Morrissey’s well-reported public statement, harshly worded even by his own standards, ultimately disappointing. (Among other things, and I accept that with The Smiths and the song “Asleep,” Morrissey penned the lyrics to what is possibly now only the second-best song on the subject, he presumed O’Connor’s death to be a suicide.) While I encourage you to read it in full, and sense that he was initially trying to take aim mostly at the music business and mainstream media, by making the accusation, “You hadn't the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you,” he nonetheless lumped all of us together.
Listen, Sinéad O’Connor had legions of fans who supported her when she was alive. And she also had a lot of passive fans who bought her second album because of a big hit and, regardless of controversy, were probably not much inspired to stay onboard after 1992’s Am I Not Your Girl?, an underwhelming album of jazz standards, (purposefully?) sabotaged the singer’s commercial appeal. Still, there is only so much that true, dedicated, long-term fans can do from a distance. In more recent years, they could even have been accused of over-caring, of reacting hysterically whenever Sinéad posted one of her suicidal thoughts on social media, creating a hyper-tense feedback loop.
I only met Sinéad once, so I make no claims whatsoever to “knowing” her. It was at the CMJ (College Music) convention in New York in late 1987. The Lion And The Cobra had just been released, was fast on its way to becoming a college radio hit, and Sinéad’s manager was walking her round the vast bar at the hotel where everyone congregated after the day’s panels concluded. I was introduced. I knew who she was and I would have been polite and full of sincere praise. I only recall that she was polite, shy, frail, and so very young. But the music business is a young person’s game: young people don’t have the fear, they haven’t learned to filter themselves, and for that reason they often make the best music with the most powerful lyrics.
And here I will talk extensively about Sinéad’s music and, especially, her powerful lyrics. I have been upset this past week by the number of press headlines along the lines of “’Nothing Compares 2 U’ Singer found dead” as if she only had one hit song – and a cover version at that. I am annoyed at the Observer in the UK for running a story on it under the headline Sinéad’s “Greatest Song” as if that’s not in dispute. It’s frustrating too, that Jon Pareles’s “10 Essential Songs by Sinéad O’Connor” in the New York Times contains six from her first two albums, perpetuating the general theory that she was spent after the firestorm. Nonetheless, it is worth including the following clip and discussing its place in her canon.
I will allow that “Nothing Compares 2 U” is probably Sinéad O’Connor’s greatest cover version. The competition is fierce, however: her raucous rendition of John Grant’s “The Queen of Denmark” on How About I Be Me… is astonishing, and her delicately naked acoustic version of Nirvana’s “No Apologies” puts that group’s own Unplugged rendition in the shade. There are also many high-water marks across her album of Rastafarian reggae songs, Throw Down Your Arms, the many traditional and cover tunes included on Universal Mother, and of course, her remarkable adaption of “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
But, let’s go with it and allow that “Nothing Compares 2 U” is not only her greatest - her most successfully commercial, at any rate - cover version certainly, and let’s up the stakes: it is one of the greatest cover versions by anyone, ever. As Dave Fanning of RTE said on a live interview with Channel 4 on the day of Sinéad’s death, “she owns that song. It’s hers.”
And especially, the video to “Nothing Compares 2 U” is almost without compare. James Brown (he of loaded and my latest Fanzine Podcast) wrote last week on Facebook that one look at the video in a publicist’s office and he offered to put Sinéad on the NME’s cover its week of release. If you were to put together a list of the most powerful music videos of all time – and I know that people have – it would need to be on that list, additionally serving to remind that you don’t need to spend big bucks for a video to work.
But to tar Sinéad as some sort of one-hit wonder, and a one-hit cover wonder at that, not only throws her into a secondary role – almost as if she was just another of the many female protégés Prince was presumed to mastermind, regardless of their individual talents (future Fanzine Podcast guest Jane Appleby had something to say about this in her old fanzine Pussy Rock, archived here) – but completely ignores the quality of her own songwriting. I’ll be first to admit that Prince was a rare all-round genius, himself without compare for his stunning musicianship, his self-confidence, his dress sense, his ability to control his message. Sinéad, on the other hand, needed collaborators, sometimes with songwriting and especially in the studio, but that hardly makes her unique or any the lesser an artist for it. We should all have been saddened by Prince’s own death, himself “just” 57 at the time, back in 2016. He was, again, a singular genius, and there was likely a lot more music left in him.
But, I am going to say it: Sinéad O’Connor meant more than Prince. And here are 8 Good Reasons why.
1) Prince wrote the romantic anthem “Kiss” and it’s universal and it’s wonderful: witness the many excellent cover versions, from Tom Jones to Age Of Chance, plus Richard Thompson (more of whom later) chose to include amongst the just 23 songs he selected for 1000 Years of Popular Music. But Sinéad could make kissing so personal that it sounded like she was actually doing it to you, as on “Kisses Like Mine,” from I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss, which manages to be, in a way that Sinéad was able to master time and again, vulnerable and cocky at the same time.
“You never had kisses like mine
So soft you'll find yourself crying
And after you weep
You'll fall asleep
And while my heart's flying
You'll be dreaming that I'm
The keeping kind.”
2) Prince wrote so explicitly about sex (per “Darling Nikki”) that he was a prime target of early PMRC hearings in the 1980s. But Sinead could also up the sexual stakes and again, in a way that was almost alarming it felt so personal. She sings the lines “I want to make love with you/More than I ever wanted to” in such a way that you knew he was singing not for casual effect but to a certain someone, as Sinéad did on “The Vishnu Room” from I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss. Nor the haunting vignette - “What does it mean when a man's eyes turn black/When you're making love?” that opens “Where Have You Been?” from the same album. Or, indeed, at least to the best of my knowledge, a more effective song about that most painful of loves, the unavailable one, as in “This Green Jacket” also from the same album. (“And even though I know I'm not for you/Is it OK to say I really do adore you?”) Sinéad was in her mid-40s when she made this incredible album; there was a lot of physical loving going on in her life.
And though this next example does not come across as strictly autobiographical the way so much of her work does, I would like to put her back in Prince’s more general air of shock value, and suggest that “Daddy I’m Fine” from Faith and Courage (written with Dave Stewart) contains a more provocative chorus than anything Prince dared attempt, in part because it was coming from a woman, who was not meant to suggest such things: “I get sexy underneath the lights/Like I wanna fuck every man in sight.” It sounds sexy, too.
3) Did Prince write a more bitterly powerful song than “You Cause As Much Sorrow,” which has the audacity to state of someone once close to the protagonist that, “You cause as much sorrow dead as you did when you were alive.” It was a lyric I projected onto my father after his passing managed to have that same unfortunate effect upon myself. Rather than cause more pain, “You Cause As Much Sorrow” brought a lot of comfort.
4) Has anyone else written a greater divorce song (as I hear it) than “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”? I shouldn’t have to describe it; you should know it. But the fact that it follows on from “You Cause As Much Sorrow” is a double whammy of naked emotion and story-telling that helps make I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got one of the greatest albums, period.
5) Prince may have written “Sign o’the Times” and it’s great - don’t get me wrong, for a while back on its release it was my go-to anthem - but he certainly didn’t write a song accusing the current leader of a neighboring country for ordering mass murder, the way Sinéad O’Connor bravely opened “Black Boys On Mopeds,” also from that second album, with an attack on Margaret Thatcher… Nor take that neighboring country to task the way Sinéad did on the monologue “Famine” from Universal Mother, one that not only corrects English imperialist history, but is brave enough to criticize her own home country, Ireland, for how it has failed to absorb said history, leading to “the highest statistics of child abuse in the EEC.” These, evidently, are not your average rhyming couplets, but it’s to the credit of Sinéad’s delivery, the arrangement, the surrounding performance and the production that this polemic is so musically effective.
6) Some people like being superstars, and Prince reveled in his protective bubble. I recently had the fun of watching video of him collect his multiple awards at the American Music Awards in 1985 accompanied by his enormous bodyguard humorously called Tiny, enigmatically leaving the thank yous and speeches to others. But when just about everyone else who was anyone in that building went on from the awards show to an all-night studio session where they altruistically recorded the Ethiopian famine relief charity single “We Are The World,” Prince went to a nightclub instead to revel in his V.I.P. status.
By comparison, Sinéad O’Connor, at the peak of her popularity, boycotted the 1991 Grammys entirely, even though she was up for Record of the Year and three other awards, writing a letter to the organizers that noted, in part, how “they have created a great respect among artists for material gain — by honoring us and exalting us when we achieve it, ignoring for the most part those of us who have not." Twenty years later, she wrote and recorded a song about misplaced celebrity entitlement, a kind of reworking of the old “camel through the eye of a needle” adage about heaven. “V.I.P.” closes out that superb 2012 album How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? and I have no idea if Prince ever heard it.
7) Many people have written songs about parenthood, but few have so consistently nailed the joy, the burden and the unimpeachable love of motherhood, the way Sinéad O’Connor did with such beauty over the years, from “Three Babies” (I Do Not Want…) to “My Darling Child” (Universal Mother) to “I Had A Baby” (How About You Be You…)
8) Of course we know that Sinéad could sing the phone book and make it sound like poetry. Which is why she was invited in by so many other artists to do more-or-less just that. The compilation Collaborations features her voice on tracks otherwise (co) credited to U2, The The, Terry Hall, Moby, Peter Gabriel and Afro Celt Sound System – among many more - though for me and countless others, none of those top the sound of her voice on “Visions of You” by Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, one of the most beautiful chilled-dub tracks of all time, in no small part due to that voice.
So that’s eight good reasons Sinéad was so much more than a one-video, a one-cover version, or a one-scandal artist. Well maybe nine now. Because on “8 Good Reasons” from 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss, Sinéad O’Connor sang the most defiantly, painfully personal song of suicidal contemplations that I have ever heard, one that also returned to the subject matter tackled early on in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” namely her treatment by the music business. I am going to quote the lyrics in full because if you have never heard or read them, they will stop you in your tracks.
“Don't know if I should quite sing this song
Don't know if it maybe might be wrong
But then again it maybe might be right
To tell you 'bout the bullet and the red light
You know I'm not from this place
I'm from a different time, different space
And it's real uncomfortable
To be stuck somewhere you just don't belong
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
I had a dream one night
About a bullet and a red light
You know it felt alright
You know it actually felt quite nice
If I could have gone
Without it hurting anyone
Like a child, I would have found me mum
Like a bird I would have been flown
You know I don't much like life
I don't mind admitting that it ain't right
You know I love to make music
But my head got wrecked by the business
Everybody wanting something from me
They rarely ever wanna just know me
I became the stranger no one sees
Cut glass I've crawled upon my knees
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now.”
As you will know if you’ve heard the song (and if you haven’t, that’s why the video links are here), Sinead delivers this on-the-precipice confession as a half sung, half spoken diary entry that bounces up to the seemingly optimistic chorus. Musically, it works so well that theoretically, she could again be singing the phone book. Except she isn’t, because this is Sinéad O’Connor, and on her albums, that is simply never what she does.
Sinéad did decide to stick around, though sadly, given I’m Not Bossy’s multiple high water marks, we never not get another studio album from her. (Upon her death, it was revealed that the great Belfast ex-mod-turned-electronica-artiste David Holmes had produced the best part of an album with her in recent years, though the project had not been completed, and a release date not yet set.) Still, anyone who lived this deep with Sinéad’s music, and indeed, many of the people who did not, feared she might have taken her own life when they heard of her sudden death – and a song like “8 Good Reasons” would certainly encourage that fear. A coroner’s report will reveal more, we presume, but police are not treating her passing as “suspicious”.
None of this would matter – not her lyrics, not that voice, not her brave stand over the US National Anthem a quarter century before Colin Kaepernick first took the knee at an NFL game, nor her accusations against the Catholic Church long before the rampant pedophilia among priests was finally revealed to be more than vicious rumor or the odd isolated case – if the music was not up to the same standards, but most of the time, it was. Sinéad worked with a vast array of renowned collaborators over the years, from Nellie Hooper to Marco Pirroni, Phil Coulter to Tim Simenon, Dave Stewart to David Holmes. Nonetheless, her strongest collaborator remains John Reynolds. He not only played on and/or co-produced her first two albums as well as on Universal Mother, but also co-wrote some of, played on, and produced her last two albums, and I would argue vociferously that these are the strongest five of her ten (or so) studio releases. Reynolds is also the father to Sinéad’s first child, Jake. It was the suicide of another, much younger son of Sinéad’s, Shane, at the age of just 17, in January 2022, that apparently sent the singer on a further deep spiral. But I don’t know the details and I don’t want to presume. What matters right now is what she achieved while she was here.
Death of course is a fact of life, and not all of us make it to three score years and ten. We should all be steeled for the ongoing passing of The Who’s “My Generation” – the certainty that everyone who changed the face of music as part of rock’s first generation is going to pass (if they have not already), the vast majority of them in the next decade. All the same, it’s the deaths of MY generation that feel so painful, because when I look at how many more years I want to spend here and do stuff, it hurts me that others won’t get that chance. In the past year, the list from my (admittedly UK-only) generation has included Terry Hall, Andy Rourke, and now Sinéad O’Connor. Andy’s passing was especially hard to take as he was a friend, and we are from the same school year. If he could get cancer, so can I - as did my father, who didn’t make it past 61.
But to leave us somewhere positive, it's for these reasons that occasionally I buy a pricey ticket to see someone in concert just because I still have that opportunity, as was the case recently with the aforementioned British folk/guitar/songwriting legend Richard Thompson, who often plays around Woodstock, except the shows tend to sell out fast, and I keep missing him. I decided not to make the same mistake for his appearance at City Winery Hudson Valley on July 27, which turned out to be the day after Sinéad O’Connor’s death. Thompson is 75 now, but as those who have seen him recently assured me (and as my amateur video below confirms), his fingers are as nimble as those of a 25-year-old: a finer acoustic player in his field would be hard to find. Playing solo other than with Zara Phillips on additional vocals for perhaps a third of the set, Thompson was also the consummate solo entertainer, as such troubadours need to be: self-deprecating, funny, immensely personable. It did not quite feel like being in his living room, but with no PA stack in the way and the tables properly aligned toward the stage, sight lines were excellent. And it didn’t harm that the sound was exquisite.
I have a habit of clutching at coincidences, and I found something poetic about seeing Richard Thompson for the first time at a City Winery venue when I was in the midst of remembering seeing Sinéad O’Connor for the last time at a City Winery venue. It’s similar to how I noted last week that I had been busy writing about a photograph taken in Brockwell Park when I found out that Sinéad had been living in a flat right by Brockwell Park at the time of her death. But mostly, as I pointed out to Radio Kingston’s drive time host and fellow Sinéad fan Jimmy Buff, when he kindly invited me on air last Wednesday, initially to promote The Dear Boys but expanded for an hour spent discussing her life and music instead, this is how our lives go. We get up in the morning celebrating an 80th birthday, we go to bed mourning the passing of a tragically over-talented artist at age 56. It’s yin and yan, the good and the bad, and it’s our lot. Not all of us can like this life – Sinéad was bold enough to say that she didn’t, in song – but for the majority of us, there’s enough sweet music to make our passing through it more than worthwhile. Thank you Sinéad O’Connor for providing so much of it.
Lovely words old friend