When Sinéad O’Connor’s death at 56 was announced last night, filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson was preparing to go on BBC Radio 4’s culture programme Front Row to talk about Nothing Compares, her documentary about the Irish musician.
“I’m devastated to hear the desperate news about Sinéad. Our film for me was a love letter to Sinead, it was made over many years and made because of the impact she’d had on me,” the clearly shaken Ferguson told the programme. “She is one of the most radical, incredible musicians that we’ve had and we’re very, very lucky to have had her.”
Since the film first played at the Sundance film festival last year, the director said it has been incredible to meet huge numbers of fans in every country she goes to. “I think tonight what we will see is this huge outpouring of love from around the world, because she touched every single country.”
I had spoken with Ferguson, before the news broke, about her documentary covering the extraordinary life of O’Connor – from the music, to the fame, the activism and the public hysteria around her – which is scheduled to air on Sky Documentaries this weekend. She was a child in Belfast when she first heard the Irish musician’s music. Her father would play O’Connor’s debut The Lion and the Cobra constantly in the family car. Later, as a teenager, she and her friends embraced O’Connor’s music, her activism and her feminist message.
“She was a beacon of hope for us,” Ferguson says, speaking from her home in Ireland. “And then soon after, the backlash happened.” O’Connor was vilified, her career destroyed, after tearing up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live in protest at the then unfolding abuse scandal in the Catholic church.
“It all happened very violently, very quickly,” Ferguson recalls. “It left a huge dent on me. It was a story that I couldn’t let go of either: I just could not understand why this thing had happened to this person I admired so much, and someone from my own country.”
Until the protest, O’Connor was one of Ireland’s biggest pop stars. Her spiky punk debut received widespread critical acclaim for her stunning, other-worldly voice and the way she bravely tackled issues of the day through her music, be it the dominant patriarchy or the church’s control over people’s lives in Ireland. All this was long before pop stars spoke out on such topics.
Her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, included the Prince-written mega-hit Nothing Compares 2 U, a song that sent O’Connor’s career stratospheric. Alongside this, she’d been battling her record company who first told her to look more like a pop star (she responded by shaving her hair off) and then suggested she might want to terminate a pregnancy, saying motherhood and music career were incompatible (she ignored this too and gave birth to her son, Jake, in 1987).
In interviews, O’Connor spoke candidly about her battles with mental health following emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her mother as a child, and later, the complex, traumatic grief she experienced when her mother died. She was a passionate activist for women’s rights and spoke out about racial equality long before the Black Lives Matters movement began.
After being unable to shake what happened to O’Connor in 1992, Ferguson decided to make a longer film about the singer’s rise to fame and her subsequent treatment at the hands of the entertainment industry, the media and the church. The result is Nothing Compares.
Ferguson managed to conduct a now-rare interview with O’Connor for the film: the late musician’s voice is heard throughout as she tells her own story from start to end. “For me, having her voice was critical,” the director says, after so many tried to “silence her voice” in the Nineties. “When we were granted the interview, it just became crystal clear that her voice was the film… [Having] her voice was everything because of how hers had been so reduced and mocked over time.”
Hearing the older O’Connor talk about what happened to her, as footage of her as a young woman appears on screen is deeply emotive. She talks movingly about the poor treatment she received by nuns at a care home following her mother’s death; there’s the joy of seeing her electric appearance at the Grammys in 1989 when her career took off and then the pain of the ensuing public backlash – be it from television presenters mocking her shaved head, anti-abortion campaigners for her decision to attend ‘right to choose’ demonstrations and both the public and the entertainment industry after her SNL appearance.
“It was a bit of a gut punch looking back at it,” Ferguson says. “Just the sheer amount of it. It was really shocking. The ridicule on [supposedly] lefty shows like SNL, who were constantly mocking her and having actors coming on and mocking her… Looking at it though a contemporary lens today, I’m just amazed how much women – particularly women who spoke out – were ridiculed.
“I think there was also just a real attitude of ‘Just shut up and sing, that’s what you’re there to do’. Sinéad was really a counter-culture artist who got flung into this superstardom sphere where I think, once you get to that level of fame, you’re expected to be somewhat grateful, or at least play the game. And that’s where the rub really started to happen. She was never really meant to be there in the first place.”
Ferguson says in 2018 when they approached O’Connor’s people about the film, the climate of political change helped to show the musician’s activism in a new, trailblazing light. “So much of the world was on fire, with women using their voices to speak out,” Ferguson says. “We’d had #MeToo, Weinstein had happened. There were so many women choosing to put their head above the parapet and speak out. And it was happening in Ireland too, which is really critical in all of this.”
She continues, “Just a few years prior, we’d had the equal marriage referendum and then we were gearing up towards the repeal of the abortion referendum. With all these active voices and this collective energy, it just felt to me a bit mad that Sinéad wasn’t being mentioned, particularly at home. In the film, we are saying that she undoubtedly inspired many young people that went on to change the world. There is a direct link from them to her.”
Ferguson says it was important for her to show the reasons behind O’Connor’s activism. “In the film, there are two stories,” Ferguson says. “There’s Sinéad’s story, but it is also about the women of Ireland and the people of Ireland, and what they’ve gone through under the control of the church, and the transgenerational trauma and harm that’s had on so many lives.
“I think the biggest thing with the film was that we wanted to really look at cause and effect and go right back to the cause, like where did this come from?”
Those causes are hard to hear about. In one scene, O’Connor talks about being punished by the nuns in her care home as a teenager. She was made to sit alone with dying women who were victims of the Magdalene laundry scandal, many of whom were incarcerated in such institutions after becoming pregnant by rape.
O’Connor remembers the women calling out for help from the nuns, only to be left to suffer alone. “It wasn’t a random act of protest with Sinéad,” Ferguson says. “With the power she had and the audience she had, she chose to speak up about something she felt was deeply wrong.”
Some of the most powerful footage in the film is of O’Connor standing up for abortion rights in Ireland following the case of a young 14-year-old girl who became pregnant and suicidal after being raped. The Irish supreme court tried to block her passage to England for an abortion.
“Women had just had enough,” the director says. “The anger was palpable. After decades of women being treated like second class citizens there was just huge rage across the country… It was an absolute disgrace what women were put though. Sinéad absolutely did the right thing when she spoke out at home about it and anywhere that would let her speak out about it across the world.”
Another notable moment is O’Connor’s performance at the 1989 Grammy Awards. The singer painted Public Enemy’s logo on the side of her head, in solidarity with many black rap artists who’d been snubbed by the Grammys – something that’s still an ongoing issue today. She also appeared with her son’s babygro, taking direct aim at the record label who encouraged her to terminate her pregnancy two years earlier.
“If you think, that was her first major appearance in America and she did all that. She was just a badass,” Ferguson smiles. “It was such an inspirational moment for so many watching at home.”
A year later O’Connor released the song Black Boys on Mopeds, a comment on the police brutality against young black men she would see daily in London. “She was speaking up against the police violence against the black community in England frequently,” Ferguson says. “It still breaks your heart to listen to it today because it’s still unbelievably current and important what she’s saying.”
She was also a strong ally of the gay and trans communities after they supported her during her early career – something Ferguson takes time to examine in the film. Ferguson says O’Connor was “hugely inspirational for gender-fluidity and non-binary dressing” because of her androgynous look.
“Sinéad was surrounded by this incredible queer community in Eighties London,” the director continues. “I think she was welcomed in with open arms and just found this incredibly nurturing, creative community to be part of. They really loved her and looked after her and I think she was eternally grateful for that.”
Ferguson says, “I just think in every single way she was so ahead of her time. And it wasn’t for popularity’s sake, it wasn’t for clicks. It was before all that nonsense. And she just did what she believed in. She was always her most authentic self. She used her voice to speak out in the best way that she could.
“Unfortunately, that was the thing that was really used against her in the end to bring down her commercial career. It certainly didn’t kill any genuine career of hers though. She went on to make so many iconic albums and still has so many fans around the world. She was always on the right side of history despite the shocking backlash she received. And that will always be the case.”
Ferguson reveals that O’Connor had also finished a new album only recently. While she hasn’t heard it, she says that people who have describe it as “the best yet” and “exceptional”. The album was being worked on before the tragic death of O’Connor’s son in 2022, Ferguson says.
“She’s always used her music as catharsis and she does things from the heart. I’m sure what we hear in that new album will be that completely, it’s just going to be the pure essence of O’Connor coming back to us.” Whether or not that work will be heard now in light of O’Connor’s death remains to be seen.
Ferguson says for some time now, people have started to see O’Connor in a different light – she cites the mural at Temple Bar in Dublin which apologises to O’Connor, saying, “you were right”. At a screening in Ireland, Ferguson says she was “absolutely terrified” of what the reaction would be because of how “confronting” the film is, “particularly in the south”.
“It got to the moment that she ripped up the Pope, and the entire room stood up and started cheering for five minutes. And I just burst into tears.”
She says she doesn’t want people to see the story as that of a tragic heroine, but of someone who changed history. “In recent years, for the first time ever, she’s being written into the history books as someone of huge cultural significance and importance in Ireland. I want people to watch and feel galvanised and fired up by what she did. I want it to be a reminder of how important it is to use your voice – particularly as a woman – to make change.
“I want this film to encapsulate the absolute essence of what she has always meant to me, which was always no matter what I read or heard about her, she was always just an absolute warrior to me, who I adored on so many levels.”
In the film, O’Connor herself seems entirely at peace with her past. “I’m an Irish artist and there’s a tradition among Irish artists of being agitators and activists,” she reflects. “An artist’s job is to sometimes creates difficult conversations that need to be had and it’s none of my business what anyone thinks of me when I do that.”
Ferguson says O’Connor always felt on the right side of history. “She didn’t regret a thing. And I love her for that. She’s done everything exactly on her own terms, as it was meant to be. As she said in the film, she regrets how she was treated – but she didn’t regret her work or how she used her voice artistically. That will remain forever.”
