RIP Sinead O'Connor / appreciation thread

"Sinéad O'Connor invites The Heaven and Earth Show's Alice Beer into her Monkstown home, for a chat about fame, singing, communication and the nature of an artist's job."

BBC broadcast 17 November 2002

11m 31s

 
Simple Minds & Sinead O' Connor / Belfast Child

Night of the Proms - Antwerp, Belgium, 2008

7m 34s

 

"That is so exemplified in “Black Boys on Mopeds.” It’s such a simple recording. The thing about covering her is that she makes the hardest things to sing sound so easy. I had to practice “Black Boys on Mopeds” so much to even do a for-idiots version of it. Her vocal styling is like unlike anything else. She does that Irish folk thing with her voice, the same way Dolores O’Riordan did, that is just so hard to do. I think you have to grow up doing it, and it’s ****** incredible."
 
"After the early sessions for her debut album, Sinead O'Connor went home and studied the peak meter on her personal recording device, singing to herself, alone. The green light meant she was in the proper range to be recorded; yellow meant she was in danger of clipping; red meant she was too loud. Because the label had paired her with a producer she did not trust, or particularly like, the teenage songwriter from Dublin realized she would have to internalize these metrics in order to preserve her music the way it sounded in her head. “So I’ve made my voice into its own master fader,” she wrote in her memoir, Rememberings.

Even after she fired the producer and took his place—scrapping the sessions and starting over, putting herself in a hundred-thousand pounds of debt before the album’s release in November 1987—this would be an important lesson in control and self-reliance. These were songs that lived in extremes. The accompaniment was often barely there: a wash of ambience, layered acoustic guitars, a Bible passage recited in Gaelic by Enya. Or it was a full-on attack: shoegaze drones, blaring strings, military drums, and dance beats."


 
Awesome opening lines from The Emperor's New Clothes:

"It seems years since you held the baby
While I wrecked the bedroom"

(lyrics by Sinead O' Connor)
 
“If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are. It ain't easy being green - maybe they don't know they are the reason I get to be who I really am. Onstage, I can always be who I really am.

Offstage, not so much. I never made sense to anyone, even myself, unless I was singing."
(Page xiii)



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"Sinéad O’Connor biopic in the works produced by company behind Slow Horses

The film about the Irish singer who died in 2023 will be directed by Josephine Decker, with involvement from Slow Horses producers See-Saw"


"A biopic of Sinéad O’Connor is in the works, with its backers including the company involved in Nothing Compares, the acclaimed 2022 documentary about the singer.

According to Variety, the film will be directed by Josephine Decker, who made a much-liked biopic of horror writer Shirley Jackson, starring Elizabeth Moss, in 2020. The script will be by Stacey Gregg, who has credits on TV series Mary and George, Little Birds and The Letter for the King.

Production companies behind the project include See-Saw Films, whose past output includes The King’s Speech, Shame, The Power of the Dog and Slow Horses, alongside Nine Daughters (God’s Creatures, Lady Macbeth) and ie:entertainment, which acted as executive producer on Nothing Compares.

O'Connor died in 2023, aged 56, after a string of hit records including the huge-selling Nothing Compares 2 U in 1990, and a tumultuous life marked with outspoken protest and controversy. In 1992 she ripped up a picture of the pope on US TV; in 1999 she was ordained as a priest by an independent Catholic group, and in 2018 she converted to Islam.

According to Variety, the film will follow O’Connor’s early years in the music industry, “tell[ing] the story of how one young woman from Dublin took on the world, examining how her global fame may have been built on her talent, but her name became synonymous with her efforts to draw attention to the crimes committed by the Catholic church and the Irish state."

 
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