Sinéad O’Connor had one of the most remarkable voices in popular music. She could bring it down to a slow whisper and audiences would be rapt. Her speciality was the lament, but she also channeled the friction and fury of hip-hop music and the Irish rebel tradition, and could sing a Christmas tune like Silent Night and make you believe.You were never sure what you would hear and when it might arrive, but Sinéad had the capacity to lift the listener right out of their skin.
She grabbed the attention of the western world in 1990 when she released her version of the Prince song, Nothing Compares 2 U. The author wrote it for his protégées The Family but Sinéad got inside the threads of the song and made a classic. She sang about the vacancy after an epic break-up. The doctor tried to prescribe a dose of fun, but the singer didn’t care for a tonic. The flowers in the back yard were dying of neglect. Everything was broken.
Then she made a video for the song with director John Maybury and cried actual tears as she sang. The camera was tightly framed on her face, fine-boned like Audrey Hepburn. Her hair had been shorn for many years but this was the first impression for millions of MTV viewers. Sinéad ruled the music channel for months and the song was an unavoidable radio fixture. It spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, four weeks at number one in the UK, and topped the singles chart in Ireland, Australia, Germany, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and elsewhere. When she finally met Prince, sometime after the fact, he chided her for using swear words in interviews.
“I don’t work for you,” Sinéad responded. “If you don’t like it, you can fuck yourself.”
