Earlier this month, it was announced that Kathryn Ferguson’s film Nothing Compares, acclaimed on its January 2022 release in cinemas, was to be shown on television for the first time this Saturday.
The clear aim of this documentary is to re-cast Sinead O’Connor as a criminally under-regarded trailblazer to whom the current generation owe more than they know. Late on, Ferguson flashes to Pussy Riot being dragged offstage, MIA raising her middle finger and Billie Eilish lambasting the concept of body shaming.
The point Nothing Compares is making – and which it makes very well – is that all those causes that record company marketing departments in 2023 are most likely ordering their acts to align themselves with whether they care or not, Sinead O’Connor was supporting, loudly and often to her own career’s detriment, over 30 years ago.
The original hope, surely, was that Nothing Compares would prompt these disciples to celebrate her, to encourage others to discover her. To go and see her sing and to show her the respect she deserved. It is now too late for that. It is now a eulogy.
The film begins, as so many music documentaries do, by cutting to the chase of the moment that defined its subject. But in Sinead O’Connor’s case, said moment is particularly significant: a true before-and-after incident.
Two weeks on from ripping up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live – a protest at the Catholic Church’s cover up of child abuse – and the outrage has reached fever pitch. Having been introduced by Kris Kristofferson at a Bob Dylan tribute concert (“A singer whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity”) she walks onto the Madison Square Garden stage to a cacophony of booing.
Soon after she will become a pariah in the music industry; going on to release a succession of albums that are largely ignored by the radio and the press in a time when being largely ignored by the radio and the press basically meant not existing at all.
Not long before, though, she is arguably the biggest pop star in the world. Any record company, then or now, who witnessed O’Connor as she was in the 1985 live footage we see here – her voice spellbinding, her style unique, her looks otherworldly striking – would have signed her on the spot.
What they were not prepared for, at the time, was just how uncompromising she would be. Her label ask her, as she details here, “to grow the hair long and wear short skirts and high heels and makeup and the whole works”. She immediately shaves her head. She scraps her entire debut album at the 11th hour and re-records it. She is also – at the age of 20 – pregnant with her first child throughout this process, including the shoulder-up cover photo. Her label suggest that maybe she might want to get an abortion. She does not.
Having moved to London, she has already befriended the Portobello Road rastas (“These guys roaring about the pope being the devil, burn the Vatican… like, oh my God, I’m home!”) and the gay scene’s drag queens (“I felt like I had 1,000 daddies… you couldn’t do that in Ireland: you’d have the shit kicked out of you”).
By the Grammies in 1989, she is performing onstage with Public Enemy’s logo painted on the side of her head: a show of solidarity after they had snubbed the ceremony, angry at the organisers’ refusal to recognise hip hop as a legitimate musical category.
Her early life is shown to have shaped her outlook indelibly. During a Late Late Show appearance – there are numerous encounters with toe-curlingly creepy male chat show hosts here – her father, in the front row of the audience, is asked how many schools she was kicked out of as a child. “I’d say five or six,” he says. “And that’s in one year, of course.”
Her mother, meanwhile, she describes as “a beast”. We hear the story, also documented in her song Troy, of how she was banished to the garden of their home for two weeks, screaming at the light on in the bedroom window to be let in from the cold. “You shouldn’t have left the light on,” the song this experience inspired goes, “and then I wouldn’t have tried.”
An even earlier song, Take My Hand, details the abuse she received at the hands of the nuns who ran the care home she was moved to when she was 14. “The Irish fucking constitution” is central, always, to her abuse, her psyche and this film.
With the Prince estate having denied the use of the song that made her a global superstar – she was unkind about him in interviews at various points – we are left instead with the story of the video. In the MTV era of zillion pound budgets and cocaine-fuelled concepts, its simplicity remains breathtaking: and the way it is aired here in silence only heightens the power of those single tears falling. We get to see her mouth the “all the flowers that you planted, mama” line, but that is all. It is more than enough.
Aside from a clip of modern-day Sinead O’Connor performing 1994’s Thank You For Hearing Me single, Nothing Compares compares ends, as it started, onstage at that Madison Square Garden show. “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” Kris Kristofferson whispers in her ear.
“I’m not down,” she retorts. And now just as then, the look in her eyes, the focus, makes you believe her. A eulogy Nothing Compares may now be. But it is a fitting one.
