Sinead O’Connor, the Irish artist who put her pain, and the pain of others, into song

O’Connor shot to fame in 1990 with her cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, confronting the nation with all her trauma and vulnerability. Helen Brown pays tribute to a complicated, brilliant artist

Music was ‘my therapy, I just wanted to scream’ (The Washington Post via Getty Im)

Hearing the awful news of Sinead O’Connor’s death (aged just 56) will transport many of us back to her culture-shocking appearance on Top of the Pops in 1990. Surrounded by a spellbound sea of young women in stone washed denim with big blonde hair, she stood there in a black polo neck singing “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Alone, but for that drum beat and the dry ice that surrounded her.

I don’t think the teatime nation had ever seen so much vulnerability expressed with such unflinching confrontation. That elfin face and those huge, doe-lashed eyes were at compelling odds with the shaved head, defiant jaw and perfectly controlled but desolate gaze. The voice was strangely soft, yet O’Connor reached deep into the awkward corners of every consonant like she was gouging at scabs. There was a scowl and a punch thrown as she ripped into the chorus.

She was singing a love song, written by Prince in 1985. The same year O’Connor’s mother died in a car accident when she was 18. But what the message amounted to was: “I’m in unbearable pain, and I need you f***ers to know the width, depth and breadth of it so we can carry it together.” Her past – removed from the custody of a violent mother with, she felt, “no capacity for love” – was held aloft like a coffin. A TV audience of pallbearers was unsteady and uneven beneath the load.