Home > Contemporary Musicians > O'Connor, Sinead

Singer, songwriter

Sinead O'Connor's music is as distinctive and startling as her appearance. The debut album by this young Irishwoman, who offsets her feminine features with shapeless workclothes and a clean-shaven head, is a unique blend of pop, jazz, and Celtic sounds. Its title, The Lion and the Cobra, refers to a psalm about overcoming adversity—something with which O'Connor has a great deal of personal experience. After her parents separated when she was nine years old, O'Connor ran wild in the streets of Dublin. She was arrested several times for shoplifting and expelled from a series of Catholic schools before landing in reform school at the age of fourteen. "I have never—and I probably will never—experienced such panic and terror and agony over anything," she stated in Rolling Stone. In this "very Dickensian" place, troublemakers were punished by being forced to sleep on the floor of a hospice for the dying that was also housed in the building. "You're there in the pitch black," she recalled. "There were rats everywhere, and.. .old women moaning and vomiting," she recalled in People.

Ironically, O'Connor's first musical break came out of this nightmarish predicament. She had begun strumming a guitar and making up songs for emotional release; a teacher overheard and asked O'Connor to sing at her wedding. The bride's brother then asked her to cut a song with his band, In Tua Nua. O'Connor was released shortly thereafter and sent to a boarding school in Waterford, where she promptly landed in trouble again—this time for singing in pubs when she was still underage. She ran away to Dublin, where she joined a band and supported herself by busking, waitressing, and delivering telegrams in a French-maid costume.

Nigel Grainge heard O'Connor sing in 1985 and immediately asked the young performer-songwriter to come to London and record a demo tape for his company, Ensign Records. When he listened to the completed product, it was "shivers-down-the-spine-time," he told Janet Lambert in Rolling Stone. While waiting to begin work on her album, O'Connor met U2's guitarist, the Edge, and began working with him on the soundtrack for the 1986 film The Captive. Their collaboration led to her being tagged a "U2 protege," but in fact, O'Connor does not care for the group's music, which she finds "too bombastic." Simplicity, she insists, is her ideal.

When the time came to record her album in the fall of 1986, O'Connor found her plain style at odds with her producer's fondness for lush string arrangements behind lilting Celtic melodies. "I just wanted to keep it as simple as possible, with none of this mucking about with violins," explained O'Connor in People. Friction between artist and producer resulted in an album so terrible that Ensign scrapped it and let O'Connor return to the studio to produce herself. Critics had high praise for the finished product, immediately ranking O'Connor with two other boundary-stretching female vocalists, Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush. Within seconds, wrote Richard J. Grula in Interview, O'Connor's voice moves from "an ethereal whisper hanging over your shoulder" to "a torrid scream raging outside your window."

"[The Lion and the Cobra] covers an unusually wide range of ground," Lambert commented in Rolling Stone. "There's light, Pretenders-style pop on the first single, 'Mandinka,' syncopated dance funk on 'I Want Your (Hands on Me)' and symphonic strings on the six-and-a-half minute Tray.' O'Connor twists conventional song structure and stretches pop singing while maintaining her melodic sense: on 'Just Call Me Joe' her voice is a lullaby croon; on 'Never Get Old' it soars above the jazzy piano chords into ecstatic, wordless cries. There's a faint Irish aura throughout, whether in the spoken Gaelic that dramatically opens 'Never Get Old,' in the occasional snatches of folk airs or in the effective use of drone. But what really holds Lion together is the strong individuality of O'Connor's voice."

O'Connor, who delivered a child by her drummer, John Reynolds, shortly after completing her album, treats her accomplishments lightly. "I'm just a girl ... I'm not different than anybody else," she insisted in People. "I don't ever want to get in the position where I think I'm something special just because I wrote a damn song." She maintains that her unusual hairstyle is a reflection of her love of simplicity, rather than a publicity stunt. "It makes me feel womanly because I feel natural," she explained. "It's just there. I don't wear makeup or jewelry except for a few rings. Inside, I don't feel simple, but I feel I look simple and I like that."

—Joan Goldsworthy