These days, quite a lot compares: the challenge to gender conformity, the Repeal the 8th movement, the protest against Ireland’s Magdalene laundries and against the pope’s readiness to cover up child abuse by priests. It was singing legend Sinéad O’Connor’s fate to be ahead of her time with her style and her political views, but also to command the world in the late 80s and early 90s with her beautiful keening, yodelling voice, her amazing shaven-headed charisma and her stunning cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U. But she differed from the modern world in one crucial respect: her refusal to play nice, to read the room – that sin which terrifies the social media age most of all.
It’s a story recounted in this absorbing documentary by Kathryn Ferguson – incidentally revealing the media world’s hypocrisy. All the people who would solemnly agree now on the issues O’Connor popularised are those who would mock her at the time. And if O’Connor had suffered an actual Amy Winehouse death, as opposed to career death, she would have been canonised long ago. Above everything, O’Connor blasphemed against the ethos of success, a transgression which appalled the music world in 1992 as much as I suspect it would astonish the players of today. O’Connor had it all, she had stadium-level success within reach and threw it away by speaking out in ways that U2, say, would never dare. First: by effectively barring the American national anthem before a show in New Jersey because of her loathing of nationalism, and then by ripping up a photo of the pope on live TV, for reasons which, to be entirely fair to the hated mainstream media, might have been a little opaque.
