Nothing Compares to Sinéad

Ireland lost one of its most talented singers yesterday. Sinéad O’Connor was a great performer and artist, there were very few like her.

However, she wasn’t always known for her music, she had many controversial moments. She leapt to international fame with the release of her first record, The Lion and the Cobra in 1987, but her career catapulted in 1990 with her iconic cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U. O’Connor and Prince didn’t meet until after her version of the song was recorded and released, apparently the pair didn’t get along when they finally did. It’s not clear what kind of relationship the singers had, but O’Connor alleged that Prince once locked her in his home and suggested they have a pillow fight, only to reveal that he had a hard object in his pillowcase. O’Connor said she ran from his property and he followed her in his car.

Prince had recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” on 15 July 1985, but Sinéad O’Connor made that song her own.

Nearly from the moment Sinéad O’Connor appeared in the mass public consciousness, she created controversy: her first release, a song called, “Heroine,” co-written with U2’s guitarist the Edge for the soundtrack to a largely forgotten 1986 film called Captive, was swiftly followed by the singer causing a controversy by expressing her support for the IRA.

In 1991, she boycotted the Grammy Awards and refused to accept her award for Best Alternative Album, explaining that she believed that the ceremony was steeped in commercialism.

Her 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, during which she ripped up a photo of the pope, was described by the New York Daily News as a “holy terror,” and attracted harsh criticism from everyone—Madonna to Joe Pesci.

In April 1999, a month after O’Connor attempted suicide, she was ordained as the first-ever priestess in the Latin Tridentine Church, a dissident Catholic group in her native Ireland. In 2007, she announced she had become a Rastafarian and also hinted she was bisexual. She later cancelled a tour because, she said at the time, she had learned she was bipolar.

Sinead came out as a lesbian in 2000 saying most of her life she’d gone out with “blokes because I haven’t necessarily been terribly comfortable about being a lesbian.”

She told Curve Magazine that she wanted to eventually become celibate.

In 2005, she said that she considered herself to be “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay” during an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

In 2018 she converted to Islam and changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat but she kept performing as Sinead O’Connor.

Finishing up with that iconic rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U.”