![]() But the tear that fell during the video for Nothing Compares prefigured a lifetime of pain. With its jaw-droppingly simple Nothing Compares 2 U, written by Prince – it sold seven million albums. We thought of O’Connor as ours, but the truth was that by the time she released her second album in 1990, ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’, the secret was out. I think she knew then that finding ways to get her music out beyond the commercial mainstream would be her salvation. The event was shown during a special edition of BBC ONE's Tomorrow's World called ‘Megalab 99’, and the single sold in aid of War Child. O’Connor in BBC Television Centre in West London, Thomas Dolby playing keyboards in San Francisco and recorded and mixed by Coldcut’s Matt Black and Jonathan More. Around this time, she had taken the same song and made history by recording the first ever single live over the internet. And I have a memory that she also sang Marley’s Redemption Song, which was sometimes in her set list at the time. She was unexpectedly mischievous, hilarious even - but also wise and knowledgeable about what was happening in Sudan. Starstruck and suffering from a Sudanese stomach bug, I can’t remember very much of the interview except that she insisted on sitting with all her (many) musicians in a circle, and made me interview all of them. She was recording a song for the charity War Child – Bob Marley’s ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry) – for the devastating famine in South Sudan, a country I had just returned from reporting on. Volume, our mum said it wasn’t singing it was 1999, when I managed to secure an interview with her, I was lost for words. As she sang: “We were so young then / We thought that everything / We could possibly do was right.” As me and my sister played the album over and over at maximum She tore into Thatcher’s money-grabbing 1980s with her angel’s eyes and army boots, and told us we didn’t need to be our mothers’ andĪs wild as the Irish wind, she didn’t so much blaze a trail as set fire to everything she touched. Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor became from the first moment of that album, an instant hero to my generation of women. One of its songs, Troy, was a reworking of a heartbroken poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Even the album cover, which featured a shaven-haired, roaring O’Connor, was not preparation enough for the searing, haunting, angry, tender, howling vocal power unleashed even on my tinny cassette recorder.Ī snarling blend of pop, folk, dance music, guitars – and inescapably Irish – the originality and honesty was breath-taking. ![]() When Sinead O’Connor’s debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released on November 4 1987, I had just turned 16.
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