Sinead O'Connor: C/D?

I didn’t realize this bootleg existed - 8 CD’s of her non-LP work:

https://www.45worlds.com/cdalbum/cd/nc640109xb

Been reading her lyrics online the past few days and this, this morning, made me laugh:

https://flic.kr/p/2oSj39U

Chrissie Hynde posted a nice tribute on Facebook:

Like everyone else, I’ve read many tributes to Sinéad O’Connor in the last couple days. Personally, I felt sadness for her during her life, but my immediate response upon hearing the news was a kind of relief. Every step of the way for her seemed to be a mixture of joy and torture. A true artist.

I was talking to my mate, the singer Helen Terry, about what a laugh she was at our Linda McCartney tribute, arriving every day to rehearsals to hang out with George Michael, smoke pot and just be in the atmosphere of something going on. Helen reminded me of how she kept throwing her knickers at George. I recall she also liked to hold a microphone to her arse and fart in it, possessed as she was of a schoolboy humour.

On the day of the show I was wearing a pair of gold stiletto heeled shoes and Sinead told me how she’d stolen some similar ones when she was a teenager to wear to a Pretenders show. I immediately took them off, gave them to her, and she wore them the rest of the night. Every time I looked over at her she reminded me of a little kid looking down at her new shoes, moving her feet at different angles to admire them. Then during the concert, she made a funny remark about Neil Finn which made headlines the next day. She didn’t set out to steal the headlines but did because she made everyone laugh.

I was also at the Bob Dylan tribute. I listened to her sing Dylan’s I Believe In You at rehearsals. It was absolutely breathtaking and I couldn’t wait to hear her sing it on the night. But when she heard a few people booing in the audience (many were cheering but I guess she only heard the detractors) she apparently just couldn’t start the song. Booker-T’s hands hovered over the keyboards while everyone waited for her to start singing. Instead she pulled out her in-ear monitors, and went into an unaccompanied version of a Bob Marley song. The next day the headlines were about Sinéad not Dylan. She didn’t intend that, but again, it just seemed to happen wherever she went.

Apart from all her other well documented torments, I think starting out in the business at an early age, getting famous and the notoriety she attracted, must have been hard.

People seem to think that anyone who gets on stage is a natural born show-off but I don’t think that’s the case most of the time. I think It’s more often destiny.

I read she reckoned the price of fame is ‘you pay with your life’.

Now she can sing with the other angels.

XCH

both of her records from the 2010s are super fucking good and i regret not listening to them until now

x-post: feel a bit weird about "the news was a kind of relief" part.

Yeah me too - I don't feel the same way, but I think I understand where she's coming from and why some people have that reaction. (Maybe oversimplifying it, but some people don't want to see someone they hold dearly living in constant turmoil.) I thought the anecdotes were great though.

lol @ farting into the microphone
RIP to a real one <3

also Sinead admiring her new gold stilettos from diff angles - deeeply relatable

i want one million stories about her smoking weed with george michael. my people

dream blunt rotation too

The last series of posts from VG and Ivy are extremely otm

Every image conjures a scene I could only dream to witness and feel blessed to have lived through & appreciate

This story has gone viral:

Newstalk host Sean Moncrieff told how the Nothing Compares 2 U hitmaker paid for an anguished mum's counselling after she shared her story live on air.

He told listeners: "I never met Sinead O'Connor but I do have this one kind of story that's kind of related to the show.

"We'd had the parenting slot as usual and one question came in from a woman who was absolutely distraught.

"And then this woman went on to describe her situation, which was absolutely horrendous, she was a single parent, her partner had just disappeared off the face of the map.

"She had two kids as I recall, and I think at least one of them had behavioural difficulties so she was having to cope with that.

"Plus, also, she was broke. She had no money. She had virtually no means of support. She was not really managing to put food on the table and she was feeling the wheels coming off, she was in an awful state."

He continued: "And this woman had said, 'I'd love to go to counselling, I know I need counselling, but I just can't afford it.'

"And within two or three minutes, we got a text in following that, saying 'I'll pay for her counselling'.

"And it was from Sinead O'Connor. And apparently she did this kind of thing, I've heard from people who knew her, she used to do these kinds of things all the time, below the radar.

"They were the kind of things you wouldn't really hear about. And there was a lot we knew about Sinead O'Connor and in the public domain, but perhaps an awful lot we didn't know at the same time.

"And that almost stuck with me as an example of somebody, literally and figuratively, putting their money where their mouth was.

"And I just thought that I might share that with you."

Reminds me of George Michael and George Harrison and Prince and Frank Sinatra (even though the latter two were real assholes to her) and how after they died, you had a flood of stories on all the not-publicized or anonymous donations they’d give to other people in need of help.

Hung out with not one but two friends last night who had no idea "Nothing Compares 2 U" was written by Prince.

Hope you unfriended them

lol

Ha! What's amazing is they each considered themselves fans, and had really strong memories from the late '80s and early '90s of hearing her stuff on college radio. I sometimes appreciate the perspective of regular people, who love music but don't necessarily focus on the details.

Knew that was coming. Espied it way out there on the zing horizon.

from Lou Reed's FB page:

[i]Lou Reed had a copy of Sinéad O’Connor's debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, in his personal album collection. Lou performed at shows with Sinéad O’Connor on a few occasions, beginning with the Bob Dylan tribute shortly after her appearance on SNL.
_________
O’Connor and Reed didn’t really connect that night. But at a similar event held two years later in Carnegie Hall, this time a birthday tribute for Roger Daltrey of The Who, the two once again shared the stage. She writes, “The only other time I remember being starstruck was when I met Lou Reed, a person I didn’t realize I loved so much until I met him. I had fallen in love with his album ‘New York,’ especially the track called ‘Busload of Faith,’ and I had listened to it a lot.” O’Connor put out feelers about singing backup for Reed, whose family name was originally Rabinowitz until his father changed it to Reed.

O’Connor recalls, “… [T]he next thing I knew, Lou Reed came into my dressing room and started talking to me; I could tell that he thought I was cheeky for asking if I could sing backup vocals. But when he said that yes, I could, all I could see was his mouth moving. I couldn’t hear what he was saying anymore; it all came out like a whirl, whirl, whirl sound, as if I were on an acid trip. … It was like having a panic attack…. I did do the backing vocals for Lou, though I can’t remember even what songs because I was not on planet Earth, I was in heaven somewhere. And then I had a beautiful experience with the same beautiful man not long after.”

O’Connor goes on to tell the story about a TV show she and Reed appeared on in London, a kind of round-robin live music show. No one would look at O’Connor, because “the fashion was to treat me like a crazy person, a pariah, because of what I did on ‘SNL.’” Reed, when he came to the dress rehearsal, made a huge point of ignoring absolutely everybody in the room except O’Connor. “He makes it his business to find me, hangs on to me. He hugs me demonstratively warmly as if we know each other really well. It was a really sweet thing to do because he didn’t have to do that, and it changed the way everybody in there reacted to me… I’ve had a very soft spot in my heart for Mr. Lou Reed ever since and I think about him quite a lot.”/i]

.<3

she sold homes & donated proceeds to charity at least twice

1992 donated West Hollywood home sale to Somalians
https://www.deseret.com/1992/12/2/19019219/sinead-donates-house-to-aid-starving-somalis

2003 donated Atlanta home sale to Irish drug & alcohol treatment center
https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2003/10/06/newscolumn4.html

There was a good Washington Post reminiscence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/07/28/sinead-oconnor-appreciation-road-trip/

Based on this and other accounts, she seemed like someone who sometimes just sold everything and started over.

Always a surprise to hear a story in which Lou Reed is not an asshole.

Long, personal piece from my pal Mo:

https://burner-account.ghost.io/sinead-oconnor/

Always a surprise to hear a story in which Lou Reed is not an asshole.

Next thing you know a post will surface from her about how nice Alex Chilton was to her#onethread

Or Jonathan Richman even.

Glenn Frey

Well, yeah.

Was really disappointed that her reggae album is not on Spotify.

"Based on this and other accounts, she seemed like someone who sometimes just sold everything and started over."

I just read about her going in to sell a signed dylan album at a record store; the owner pleaded with her not to do it but apparently she was insistent. she doesn't strike me as someone who had strong attachments to 'things'.

Finally started her memoir last night, it's very well written.

I heard "emperor's new clothes" a few years ago, and I noticed then what I did not in 1990: there is no effort to make the words rhyme…I'm sure we can come up with some other examples of very very big pop songs (this song is absolutely part of the pop gestalt of 1990) in which rhyming does not occur…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c0jxooNClM

1. I noticed at the time that Marco Pirroni was her touring guitarist, and he is present in the above, and I think that's Mike Joyce, but I can't make out whether that's Andy rourke on the bass…also, she's not using a plectrum, and when you go hard playing chords like that, you have to have some serious fucking callouses, or else that shit's gonna hurt…

It's Rourke on bass.

Oh this has really gotten me.🥺😭 I’ve taken #SineadOConner leaving us quite hard. Aside from loving her as a musician, I am hard wired to feel love and kinship for unconventional women. She was fierce and vulnerable and complicated and beautiful and I’m so sorry she’s left us. pic.twitter.com/rRIgmKKq7G

— Laura Nadia Hunt (@LauraNadiaHunt) July 29, 2023

It's a true shame that it's taken this for the collective world to start to seriously assess her as an artist, I think over time she's going to be regarded as one of the actual greats. I hope she heard plenty of this when she was still alive.

Yeah just lots of small acts like this scattered throughout her life, all given to people who needed it the most. xp

Imagine if everyone within shouting distance of her level of fame, most of whom have more fortune, did such things just as often.

It's Rourke on bass.

Indeed.

That video brought tears to my eyes. She was such an electrifying performer. Whatever "it" is, she had it in abundance.

Sinead O'Connor's death is really hitting me and not just for the sadness of her tumultuous life on display for all to see.

My best friend Jennifer Miller introduced 'The Lion & The Cobra' to me when we were teenagers.

They are both gone now and I grieve for them both now.

I hear you. So many echoes with that time. I am feeling my age.

I think over time she's going to be regarded as one of the actual greats

100%.

had a vivid flash of recollection the other day when I saw this photo again

not sure of photographer (Mark Seliger i think?) but it was def circa 1992/1993 for the rolling stone

i did this really elaborate pen & ink project for year 12 art class, and made these 4ft tall handdrawn feathered angel wings with calligraphy over top (i think some Oscar Wilde poem idk) that i framed in like big wooden churchy-type frames

but i only just remembered that my entire inspiration for the texture & style of wings came from this photo of Sinead <3

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/21/a8/d6/21a8d6ba740a14f12bf36f991b3912ec.jpg

I think over time she's going to be regarded as one of the actual greats

100%.

At her best, she was untouchable.

Yeah, I also wasn't a fan of the Chrissie Hynde tribute, particularly "a mixture of joy and torture. A true artist" - the torture was a result of her doing something right and brave, and most of the rest of the world shitting on her, it wasn't an essential quality of her or anything.

what, are we tone policing Christie Hynde now? I thought she was full of love, who cares if a few of her views are dated.

otm please calm down

Sinead talks about the shoes she stole for her friend for the pretenders gig in her memoir, just read that bit this morning. I think Hynde's tribute was nice, certainly not as objectionable as Morrissey's (which was too self serving).

I'm just now listening to the reggae album which I had no idea even existed, wtf this is her third best release after the first two, so amazing.

wow thanks autocorrect for coining “Christie Hynde”.

I saw Buddy Guy last month (his farewell tour) and he talked about the time the governor of Louisiana promised him they’d honor him in some way. Guy’s response: “My mother told me, ‘if you’ve got flowers to give me, give them to me now while I can smell them, because I'm not going to smell them when they're on the casket.’” (They acted accordingly and Guy was able to see them rename La. 418 after him.) That came to mind when video of people literally putting flowers on a makeshift memorial for Sinead came up on my feed.

Bless her for dropping in Yellowman's "Nobody move, nobody get hurt" at the end of Emperor's New Clothes.

Finished the memoir, a few thoughts. The first two thirds are definitely more organized than the last third which she states, near the end of the book, is due to it being written after her hysterectomy which sounds like it may have been an unnecessary surgery with a botched care routine following. What that means for the book is that the first 2/3s are an essentially chronological examination of events and their impact in her art and life; and the last third is basically a series of vignettes plus some chapter length dissections of her last few records. Her writing is conversational through and never seems false or overthought; she is blunt, but her insights are certainly poetic in a sense. She appears entirely gracious , sometimes too hard on herself, and over all, honest. She definitely looks forward at the possible ramifications of her death (given that the ending followed an attempt). But she also sounded hopeful about the world as the pandemic was lifting. She clearly loved her children so much.

I learned a lot about her from reading it, I hope eveyone with a passing interest in her reads it too.

Agree with all of the above.