Vocal synth9/9/2023 ![]() ![]() Releasing a version of Nirvana’s All Apologies months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide looks like a dreadful idea on paper: its lyrics are filled with self-loathing and regret, the opportunities to come up with something that sounds mawkish seem endless. It takes a certain chutzpah for a white singer to perform Curtis Mayfield’s We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue – the song is an extended howl of pain, alternately urging African Americans on and excoriating them for their failings – but, unbelievably, O’Connor managed it, just as she managed to successfully essay the roots reggae songs that peppered her career: she recorded an entire album of them, Throw Down Your Arms, corralling the cream of Jamaica’s musicians into the studio in the process. That she was never hailed as one of the great – and certainly one of the most fearless – song interpreters of her era seems faintly astonishing. ![]() From the moment she unexpectedly placed a reading of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1977 chart-topper Don’t Cry for Me Argentina at the centre of 1992’s Am I Not Your Girl?, an album otherwise largely comprised material drawn from the Great American Songbook, it became apparent that O’Connor had a remarkable ability to take on the most improbable cover versions and somehow make them work. You can hear it in her 1990 reading of I Am Stretched on Your Grave, which took a 17th-century poem that had been rendered into a hymn in the 1920s, and set it to a sample of the rhythm from James Brown’s Funky Drummer and a fat synth bassline: it shouldn’t have worked, but it did, the dancefloor friendliness of its backing somehow amplifying the starkness of O’Connor’s vocal.Īnd you could hear it, again and again, in O’Connor’s approach to cover versions. She also demonstrated an unswerving ability to take musical risks that matched her ability to cause trouble outside the recording studio. Given how unsparing, even harrowing, her lyrical approach was, the albums should have been hard work, but they weren’t: O’Connor set her words to lovely tunes and appealingly eclectic musical backdrops, sugaring the pill just enough. The career resurgence that began with 2012’s How About I Be Me (and You Be You)?, and continued with 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, demonstrated her ability to harness a pop framework to songs of startling candour and affecting power: on Reason With Me, she inhabited the character of a heroin addict, thieving to support his habit I Had a Baby pondered the lot of her son, Shane, who would die by suicide in 2022 (“I don’t know why you should suffer instead of me over shit that’s because of me”) The Voice of My Doctor and 8 Reasons both picked at the subject of O’Connor’s own mental health. Her reading of Nothing Compares 2 U remains definitive, a single that manages to be both epic and startlingly emotional. The guitar-driven roar of its big hit single, Mandinka, had a once-heard-never-forgotten quality to it, while her vocal on the track was audibly influential on another Irish singer who went on to briefly conquer the US, the Cranberries’ late frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan. Her 1987 album The Lion and the Cobra was one of the most striking debuts of its era, synthesising everything from rock to hip-hop to the global music-influenced atmospherics of Peter Gabriel into a style that was entirely her own. Perhaps that’s because, although her catalogue was uneven, filled with pauses – six years separated 1994’s Universal Mother from its follow-up Faith and Courage, while her last studio album was recorded nearly a decade before her death – and unpredictable turns, her music was often of an extraordinarily high quality. The furore permanently derailed her career in the US, where her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, had sold 2m copies and topped the charts. Pesci threatened her with violent retribution on the same show the following week – incredibly, the audience applauded him. Her 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, during which she ripped up a photo of the pope, was described by the New York Daily News as a “holy terror”, and attracted the opprobrium of everyone from Madonna to Joe Pesci. ![]() Years later, she described her comments as “bollocks”, but further uproar would surround O’Connor on a regular basis: about her conversion to Islam (she called non-Muslims “disgusting”) about Prince, the author of her biggest hit, 1990’s Nothing Compares 2 U, whom she accused of physical abuse and, most notably, about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, a subject which she took up long before it became a mainstream talking point. Almost from the moment Sinéad O’Connor appeared in the mass public consciousness, she created controversy: her first release, a song called Heroine co-written with U2’s guitarist the Edge for the soundtrack to a largely forgotten 1986 film called Captive, was swiftly followed by the singer causing a furore by expressing her support for the IRA. ![]()
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