Iconic singer and performer Sinéad O’Connor, known for her distinctive voice and uncompromising moral compass, is dead at 56.
O’Connor was also recognised for her shaved head and ethereal beauty, as well as her refusal to play up into traditional feminine sexualization.
O’Connor had a difficult childhood, spending time in Dublin reformatory as a result of her parents’ relationship dismantling. It was a nun who discovered that the only way to keep this rebellious teenager in check was by buying her a guitar and setting her up with a music teacher – unleashing a creative talent that made her a worldwide music star – but also a rebel prepared to be controversial and never play the game of being an image-led pop star, notes the BBC.
The Lion and the Cobra, released in 1987, was a storming success. It featured what would become the typical O’Connor sound, overdubbed harmonies and atmospheric backgrounds held together by her distinctive voice, says BBC. It earned a Grammy nomination for best female rock vocal performance.
One single, Mandinka, did particularly well in the US and was the song she chose to sing on Late Night with David Letterman, her first American primetime TV appearance.
She topped this with her follow-up album, the Grammy-winning I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which featured her most successful single, a cover of the Prince song Nothing Compares 2 U. It was helped to the top of the charts in the UK, Ireland and the US by a striking video that largely featured a close-up of her face as she sang.
O’Connor never backed down from standing up for her personal views, often at the expense of her popularity. She refused to perform at a concert venue in New Jersey unless it dropped its normal practice of playing the US national anthem before she went on. The venue reluctantly agreed but it led to a boycott of her songs by a number of US radio stations.
A month after the release of I’m Not Your Girl, a collection of jazz standards, O’Connor performed a version of Bob Marley’s War on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, substituting some of the words so it became a protest against child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
To the horror her producers, she held up a photo of Pope John Paul II to the camera and tore it in half. NBC received more than 4,000 complaints from viewers and many destroyed copies of her records. At a subsequent live appearance she was booed so much she couldn’t perform. Later, she was ordained a priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, an independent Catholic church, not in communion with Rome. Despite her disdain for the Church hierarchy, O’Connor always remained a devout Catholic. I always say, if you live with the devil, you find out there’s a god”, she said.
Converting to Islam in 2018, she changed her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat, but continued to perform under her birth name.
She released a memoir, Rememberings, in June 2021 and took part in media interviews to promote it, some of them fraught. The singer said she felt „badly triggered” by an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about her mental health struggles and the media’s coverage of it.
In January 2022, her 17-year-old son Shane took his own life. The musician posted a series of concerning tweets in the wake of his death, indicating she was considering suicide and telling followers she had been admitted to hospital.
She left the following message behind for us to consider: „If you have a family member that suffers from mental illness, care for them. Visit them in the hospital, don’t dump them in the hospital and bugger off”.
Tragic, yet strong and brave, Sinead O’Connor will always remain a significant figure of her era.
