Abuses, religion and music: this is the documentary that tells everything about Sinéad O’Connor

Today, denouncing sexual abuse committed within the Catholic Church can be seen as a praiseworthy act. But in 1992, when Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of John Paul II in full broadcast Saturday night Live shouting “Fight the real enemy!” It was media suicide.

The Irish diva, then at the peak of her career, protested the silence surrounding the excesses of the clergy in her native country. And, after the scandal and the complaints that followed that action, her career never fully recovered. now the documentary Nothing Compares portrays a life marked by his enormous musical talent, but also by the mental problems and abuse suffered within and outside his family.

The director Kathryn Ferguson has named his film in honor of Nothing Compares 2 U, the song composed by Prince which was Sinéad O’Connor’s greatest commercial success after its publication in 1990, and which does not appear in the documentary due to rights issues. But her inquiry into the singer’s career goes further.

As Ferguson recalls, the Ireland of the late 1980s was a “gray and miserable” place, marked by the conflict with the United Kingdom in Ulster and by the all-encompassing influence of the Church. Thus, when a very young, striking-looking O’Connor (her shaved head became iconic in a short time) and without mincing words, published her debut The Lion and the Cobra in 1987, the shock was enormous.

“[O’Connor] she looked like an alien”, says Kathryn Ferguson. But she wasn’t: in fact, as the artist herself sometimes pointed out, her profile continued that tradition of Irish artists willing to tackle those unmentionable topics in a country where church and state were, at that time, almost the same thing.

Of course, the roots of that attitude had sprung from a collection of traumas. Sinéad O’Connor had been abused by her mother, and her dalliances as a juvenile delinquent had led her to spend a year and a half in a cupcake Laundry, those reformatories for ‘wayward’ girls whose memory is, to say the least, truculent. No wonder his robes and cassocks inspired so little sympathy.

In this way, although his popularity grew exponentially and his agenda was filled with names of rock stars (starting with some U2 of which he would soon deny, and going through Roger WatersPeter Gabriel either Elton John) who were crazy about working with her, the young O’Connor was not going to be tamed.

His first famous conflict took place in 1990, when he refused to give a concert in New York if the US anthem was playing at the beginning of the show. On that occasion, the very Frank Sinatra threatened to “kick his ass”. And, since then, her attitude became more and more combative.

The incident with the Pope’s photo in Saturday night Live it was both O’Connor’s high point as a protest artist and the beginning of her decline. even one madonna unexpectedly reconciled with the Vatican (the scandal of Like A Prayer had taken place three years earlier) lashed out at her. Two weeks later, her appearance at a tribute concert to bob dylan she was booed to such an extent that the singer left the stage in tears.

Now, Kathryn Ferguson describes the hostility against the singer as something “violent and absurd”. The director recalls episodes like the one in which a Catholic organization in New York used a steamroller to destroy O’Connor records in the middle of Times Square. “All for a 24-year-old girl from Dublin,” says the director. “It was just ridiculous.”

Beginning in 1993, the story of Sinéad O’Connor is the story of decline. Although her successive albums continued to feature good songs, her commercial appeal was diminishing. And, although musicians then in vogue like massive attack they continued to respect her and turn to her for occasional collaborations, her life was becoming more and more chaotic.

Between controversial statements (his opposition to the iraq war in 2003 made enemies for her again in the US), suicide attempts and an unexpected conversion to Islam, the artist seemed to have lost her bearings, perhaps forever. The suicide of one of her four children in 2022, at age 17, has been the latest tragedy associated with her figure.

It is possible that Nothing Compares represents a vindication of the work of Sinéad O’Connor, and that thanks to the film the singer ceases to be seen (by the few who remember her) as a have been of the 90s. At the moment, the film sounds strong for Oscar 2023. The question is whether the artist herself is interested in becoming a star again, or whether her mental health could withstand a return to the limelight. Something tells us that it is not.

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