Sinead O'Connor: a talent like no other

A few thoughts on the passing of a true legend

Shuhada' Sadaqa, aka Sinead O’Connor, was a visionary, an activist and a talent of enormous proportion. I have a core memory from childhood of seeing her for the first time on Top of the Pops in 1994 singing Fire on Babylon, and she was angry, celestial and otherworldly. I had a vague sense that my Mum didn’t approve of her because of the whole ripping-up-a-picture-of-the-Pope thing, but I felt absolutely transfixed.

I was 16 when Faith and Courage came out and it blew my mind. I’d never heard anything like it, because there was nobody like her. I listened back to the whole album a few weeks ago; glorious and brave and angelic. Patchy, yes, in parts, with odd production decisions. But happy. Thankful and fulfilled.

Sinead sang about everything. The bullied crocodile in Dublin Zoo (Red Football). Divorce (The Last Day of Our Acquaintance). Religion. Lots of religion, whether it was Catholicism (Kyrie Eleison), ancient Celtic spirituality, and in later years, seeming to find more peace within Islam, changing her name to Shuhada' Sadaqa and recording herself singing the Muslim Call to Prayer.

As she sang in What Doesn’t Belong to Me: ‘I'm Irish, I'm English, I'm Muslim, I'm Jewish/ I'm a girl, I'm a boy/ And the goddess meant for me only joy.’

She changed her mind a lot. She moved between beliefs in her life, embracing each with gusto and exuberance.

But she seemed to find a home and happiness in Islam.

And I don’t believe the incredible, ethereal voices of these artists come from nowhere. They are born of pain and speak to past trauma. When she opened her mouth and sang, she was opening her heart too.

Her lyrics are at times unbearably sad and honest as she explores the limits of her own motherhood, her complicated grief, and her tumultuous feelings towards the people in her life.

In interviews about her mother and her childhood, she described a woman struggling with her own mental health, unable to raise her family with the love and care they needed because her mother’s illness curdled into neglect and abuse.

She talked of how hard it was to keep singing the songs from her early career because they were reliving the abuse and her grief. And in recent years, Sinead would take to Twitter to give voice to her frustrations and share her own mental health struggles and those of her son Shane, who ended his life aged 17.

Recent interviews revealed a person tortured by her physical and mental health problems, discussing her issues from bipolar to fibromyalgia to addiction. After her son died last year, she became a grieving mother hamstrung by her own sadness, unable to create and use that astonishing voice. Her life was ‘a bardo’ in her own words, an in-between space caught between life and afterlife.

Her memoir, Rememberings, charts her life from rebellious, damaged child to intelligent, creative and searingly talented musician, with a fierce lack of compromise in the face of her own beliefs in an industry that expected women to be mouldable.

Over her career, she partnered her voice with clever and unusual collaborators, from Benjamin Zephaniah to Wyclef Jean to Enya. She sampled Germaine Greer and Jack Lynch and covered Nirvana and ABBA and Cole Porter and Elton John. She earnestly rapped about the Potato Blight in the song Famine against a background of howling wolves and a sample of Eleanor Rigby. She put her son’s poetry performance on her record.

And when she was well, she was clever and witty and engaging, giving soundbite after soundbite in interview. But lots of her followers loved the broken parts too; the anger and the tortured side.

I always remember reading an interview, or maybe some album sleeve notes, where she said that the kindest thing to do if you see a famous person out and about is to just leave them alone so they can get on with their lives. And I took that to heart, and if I see famous people I admire, I leave them alone (except a precious one or two).

She was cheeky and funny, and I hope she’d have approved that I stole the melody of This is a Rebel Song and passed it off as my own for my GCSE music composition piece because I loved it, and guessed the GCSE examiners probably weren’t Sinead O’Connor fans. Maybe she wouldn’t have liked it.

In her song ‘Something Beautiful,’ she sings ‘I couldn’t thank you in 10,000 years/ if I cried 10,000 rivers of tears/ But you know the soul and you know what makes it gold.’

I feel like that about her too. And I hope she is at peace.