She emerged as a frightening, snarling, skin head with bovver boots and the kind of miniskirt and leggings combo that suggests an aggressive parody of femininity. On ‘The Lion and The Cobra’ she is a jumble of anger, frustration and a thin veneer of physical hardness that seemed to mask deep vulnerability and even deeper, incendiary rage. In the concert footage she presses up against the mike looking frail and troubled, like a newly shorn spring lamb bleating and shrieking in distress and anger. It’s half way between punk and slightly ropey performance art; more about pain than communication.
The media pegged her early on as a ranter and sadly the import of her stunt with the pope’s photo got lost in the iconoclasm of the moment. It was intended as a protest against the Catholic Churches complicity in child abuse. Years later and the soporific vacuity of the Irish pop of the time (and in the shape of Boyzone, ever since) looks shamefully complacent in comparison. It was the very definition of a sane (if inflammatory) response to an insane situation, one which the world is only just catching up on. It was also the first indication that Sinead was the real voice of Ireland on the world stage; brutalized beyond toleration, haunted by old daemons, insular, yearning, spiritually bereft and desolate.
In the ‘The Year of the Horse’ concert video while singing ‘Irish Ways’ she tries to sound and look just that. The shaved head now looks votive, like a nun or someone in deep mourning. Eyes closed and fingers flickering before her in the follow spot, she enumerates aeons of suffering to a steady, almost martial beat. It’s an enormous but subtly depressing moment that feels like a postcard from the 1980’s, a reminder of that lousy conflict and it’s horribly charmless progenitors; Adams and McGuiness and sodding Ian Paisley. All the grief, the national indignation and the chauvinism that at the time seemed a permanent condition is there, as is the implicit sense of identity crisis from which these dangerous emotions spring. It’s beautiful of course and heartfelt, but it is also nationalistic song with some of the vices of nationalism; parochialism and sentimentality, another attempt to identify herself and find the root cause of her anger.
That same anger illuminates that shows set piece, albeit in a more honest and personal form. ‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ is to an O’Connor fans what ‘Nothing Compares…’ is to everyone else. Her key song. It smoulders through its slow, resentful verses and she sings flat phrases like ‘you have taken me for granted’ with genuinely venom. And my favourite line ‘and we will meet later to finalise the detail’ is self evident; from resignation to dismay to spite to despair in nine words. She slowly gathers herself and the anger grows again, lunges forward, retreats again and finally explodes in a cathartic chord change that lights up the stadium with sheer vitality. This may technically be a musical bluff but it’s viscerally powerful and emotionally correct. It begins in utter defeat and emerges defiant.
On the surface her work appears to be defined by emotional structures rather than aesthetic forms. But it may be truer to say that the forms, or scraps of forms, through which the emotions are expressed are so shredded, mingled together and obscure that the finished product appears formless. Get up close to the music and you can start to catch the shreds and ghosts of Irish folk songs, 80’s stadium rock, Power pop, punk, reggae, touches of Sylvia Plath and Edith Piaf, 50’s radio ballads, Dublin street slang, hymns, mantras, prayers. All of these things emerge with an unpremeditated immediacy which sometimes fails to convincingly cohere and sometimes coheres with such force that it takes your breath away.
Her numerous cover albums seem to be a logical consequence of this approach, leading with the emotion and the need to externalize the trauma, personal and political that she has internalized. She grasps for whatever best expresses the psychic strain, either in writing or in singing songs that express the right emotion. On ‘Am I not your Girl’ this is demonstrated to full effect. The harum scarum track selection may seem wilfully uncommercial but considered individually the tracks are often startlingly effective. The soupy melodrama of a lot of the source material is reinvented by the raw boned insistency of her voice so that the nugatory effects of stuff like ‘Success has made a failure…’ are lent a genuine emotional intensity.
She pulls this trick again on the superficially more cogent ‘Sean-Nos Nua’ (Old Style New). Certainly some of the selections are scholarly (‘The Mourlogh Shore’ is gorgeous) but you’d have to be pretty determined to find real depth in ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’. Because, I suspect, the governing impulse of these selections is not so much aesthetic as psychological. With each album she is mapping out an area of her psyche or her past; giving us piecemeal a psychological autobiography in song; in a deeper sense this is exactly what artists do, refract their pain through deeply adumbrated artistic forms.
And this culminates in the clever, restrained video for Molly Malone from ‘Sean-Nos Nua’ album. In it she reiterates the simple iconic image of the ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ video that made her in the first place; simply her beauty and her unflinching gaze. She makes it implicitly a song about ghosts, all the more haunting for its innocent familiarity, like wandering down a well known street to find a hidden fragment of the ancient city.
A lot of people mocked the ‘farewell tour’ aspect as of Sean-Nos tour as insincere, a ploy to get attention, and she has released albums since. But give her the benefit of the doubt and another truth emerges. She always means what she says when she says it and as a career summation the whole thing is superb; steeped in sinewy, lyrical Sea Nos, with reggae warmth and a knowing homage to her own iconography. She is summing it all up and drawing a line.
In the 1990’s she was ordained as a Catholic priest in the break away sect the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church. The media response was predictably derisive. It was an unambiguous statement of intent. After explaining for many years very clearly what she did not want the church to be (narrow, political, elitist, homophobe, misogynist) she is now attempting to show by example, exactly what she thinks it should be.
Posted by thearcadian 
