Few figures in pop history have deserved a public re-evaluation as much as Sinéad O’Connor. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the Irish singer, then at the height of her fame, was particularly valued by the US music industry for her courageous spirit and clarion voice. But then, as quickly as they raised her up, they pulled her down after she tore up a picture of the pope during a performance on Saturday Night Live, in protest at the Catholic church’s cover-ups of sexual abuse. Suddenly, she was treated as a laughing stock, a recurring punchline for cruel jokes. For much of the mainstream audience she had built up in the US early in her career, she became just a footnote in the annals of pop history.
Nothing Compares, a fiery 2022 documentary by the Irish film-maker Kathryn Ferguson, attempts to correct the record, painting O’Connor not just as a magnet for controversy, but as a ferocious, determined artist and a feminist freedom fighter who provided a mainstream voice for unheard outsiders. It’s a sad coincidence that Nothing Compares aired on Sky Documentaries (and was released on Now TV) just a few days after O’Connor’s untimely death at 56 last Wednesday. Although the film focuses specifically on 1987-93, roughly the period of O’Connor’s rise and fall in the US, it does a remarkable job of weaving together the musician’s life, art and activism, positioning her appearance on Saturday Night Live and the subsequent fallout not as a one-off stunt but as a considered show of defiance in a life that would be full of such incidents.
