When a long black limo pulled up outside Sinéad O’Connor’s LA home one night in 1990, she imagined it was her Cinderella moment. A grand carriage, dispatched to whisk her to her Prince. When she told friends that The Purple One had called earlier that night to suggest a meeting, and then sent a car to pick her up, they got romantic ideas. “We all thought maybe me and him would fall in love,” O’Connor wrote in her 2021 memoir Rememberings. Or that at least they’d get along. “We thought ‘He must be wanting to celebrate the song doing so well. There’ll be cake!’”
“The song” had done very well indeed. O’Connor’s lustrous, synthetically orchestrated version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”, released on 8 January 1990 – 35 years ago this week – had broken the world’s heart with just two tears on a young woman’s cheeks.
