Sinead O'Connor performing in Vancouver in the 1980s. Photo: AFP/ Mandel Ngan
By David Cohen*
The internet has been awash in tributes to Sinéad O'Connor, the turbulent Irish singer and activist who died suddenly this week aged 56.
As others have noted, however, probably the most poignant words on O'Connor's passing may have already been shared by the artist herself, writing about the death of her son, Shane.
Responding last week to a tweet asking how her life was going, she shared crying face emojis and the hashtag #Lostmy17yrOldSonToSuicidein2022.
"Been living as undead night creature since," she added, describing her third child as the "lamp of my soul".
That last phrase happens to be lifted from a relatively obscure song from the late 1970s by Bob Dylan, to whom O'Connor also dedicated her recent memoir Rememberings.
The elfin singer with the big eyes and even bigger voice was born the third of five children in suburban Dublin to Sean and Marie O'Connor, whose marriage foundered when she was eight. By Sinead's own account, her behavioural health deteriorated along with it.
Eventually she was placed in a residential institution run by nuns. It was here she also discovered the personal possibilities of music.
All this is recounted in her memoir - fabulously amusing in places, angry in many others and bursting with well-chosen detail throughout.
The memoir traces her origins as a diminutive kid who endured frequent beatings from her mother. O'Connor recounts how she subsequently fell into committing petty crime. But she also, by great good fortune, stumbled into music, too.
Diminutive in size, she nonetheless possessed a commanding voice - as pure and supple as a naked Irish flame - which she first began musically exercising on the watch of the nuns.
O'Connor performing in New York City in 2012. Photo: Jason Kempin / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP
She began thinking of herself as a "protest" singer after discovering Dylan - not his well-known folk recordings from the early 1960s, mind, but the provocatively evangelical Slow Train Coming, which she later described as the best record album "of all time" and the one album that "changed my life".
Among O'Connor's most satisfying cover versions is of a song from the same Dylan recording, 'I Believe in You'.
Her best-known recording of another artist's work, though, will forever be 'Nothing Compares 2 U', the song composed by Prince but actually improved on by O'Connor in what would become her global breakthrough single.
In New Zealand in the early 1990s, it was almost impossible to move sideways without bumping into the atmospheric ballad playing on a nearby radio.
Just as hard to miss over the years was her frequently jagged media profile.
In 1992, she famously ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul ll during an appearance on what was supposed to be a late-night American comedy show. The next decade was studded with sometimes eccentric public antics, theological pronouncements and feuds with other artists.
The music remained generally first-rate, as evidenced in a harmonically powerful, self-penned song such as this from the 2000 album Faith and Courage. Her gorgeous handling of the Irish standards was also something for the ages.
And why not? In a documentary filmed shortly before her struggles finally overwhelmed her this past week, O'Connor said there had been no therapy when she was growing up, "so the reason I got into music was therapy".
* David Cohen is a Wellington journalist and author who writes frequently about music
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