ALMOST EXACTLY 30 years ago, on 21 October 1992, a 30-tonne steamroller travelled slowly across the tarmac outside New York’s Rockefeller Centre.
The people on board – William Fugazy and Arnold Burns – smiled as the Dynapac vehicle approached a large pile of cassettes, CDs and vinyl records. The smiles got even wider as the steamroller travelled over the pile, crushing each item to tiny plastic bits.
The albums were all by one artist: Sinéad O’Connor. The venue was chosen because it was outside her record company Chrysalis Records’ headquarters. News reports at the time said the CDs and tapes were all donated by people to the National Ethic Coalition of Organizations, of which Burns and Fugazy were the president and chairman of the board respectively, and which promised to donate $10 to charity for each one sent in.
Controversy
Just a few weeks earlier, on 3 October, Sinéad O’Connor had performed an a capella version of Bob Marley’s song War on US TV show Saturday Night Live. It was broadcast to millions. She sang on a dim stage, a collection of lit candles to her left-hand side.
At that time, the Glenageary-born O’Connor was one of the world’s most famous and feted musicians. She had defied stereotype and music industry tradition at almost every step of the way since the recording of her first album, 1987′s The Lion and the Cobra.
She shaved her head in response to industry pleas to be more ‘feminine’. She had her first child at the age of 20, again defying presumptions that she would have a termination. She performed at the Grammy Awards with her son Jake’s babygro hanging from the back of her jeans, the slim cotton arms tucked into her belt loops.
By 1992, she was globally famous, but her behaviour was as a result getting more pushback. In 1991, she had angered some by boycotting the Grammys in protest against its commercialism. In 1990, she had refused to allow the American national anthem be played before her set at a festival in New Jersey, at a time when the US was involved in the Gulf War.
These decisions drew a lot of ire, but it was her SNL appearance that had the biggest impact on her career.
At the conclusion of her performance of War, O’Connor calmly lifted up a picture of Pope John Paul II – taken from her late mother’s bedroom wall – and held it out to the camera, obscuring her face. Then she tore it to pieces. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, before throwing the pieces to the studio floor.
The backlash was fierce. The steamroller was just one of the ways people showed what they thought of what she’d done. She was mocked on TV shows, was called a ‘She-Devil’ in headlines. Her explanation – that she did it to protest abusive actions by the church – didn’t hold weight with some.
We know now that O’Connor was ahead of her time: it was another decade before the full extent of the abuse within the Catholic Church started to be laid bare. But to be an outspoken woman like O’Connor in 1992 was to be treated as outspoken women tend to be in the music industry: like you’re hysterical, unwelcome, a troublemaker.
Reassessment
Now a new documentary, Nothing Compares, takes a look at the five-year period where O’Connor’s career burned and blazed, casting a fresh eye on her legacy and how she was treated at the time.
Using archive footage, interviews with O’Connor and some of her peers – like Chuck D of Public Enemy, Peaches, and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill – as well as dreamlike recreations and original music by sisters Linda and Irene Buckley, it’s an empathic and invigorating assessment of how O’Connor was treated by the press, and the impact she made on music.
In the intervening years, O’Connor has shifted identity and approach, and has had an at times fractious relationship with the press, making and retracting statements. She’s also written a memoir, Rememberings, which explored in particular her relationship with her mother, who abused her emotionally and physically. She has suffered devastating personal tragedies, dealt with mental health troubles, and at different times made conflicting statements on her intentions for her career.
When she first emerged in the late 1980s, she was a revelation. Listen to her debut album The Lion and the Cobra now and you can clearly hear the influence it had on people like Tori Amos and PJ Harvey.
One of those listening to O’Connor in the early days was the director of Nothing Compares, Belfast woman Kathryn Ferguson. This is her first feature documentary, but she has a long history in making short films.
She was introduced to Sinead O’Connor’s music through her dad, who bought The Lion and the Cobra in the late 80s. “And he literally played it on repeat. As we were driving around really miserable, Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland, The Lion and the Cobra would be blasting in the car, super loud and intensely, and her voice really became this visceral soundtrack to my childhood,” Ferguson told The Journal earlier this week.
As a teenager, she and her friends got into O’Connor’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (1990). They were captivated, said Ferguson, by “her music, her look, her boldness. I mean, we just thought she was amazing, and so exciting”.
But they witnessed their musical icon suffer “this horrific takedown” in 1992 after the SNL performance. “It just honestly… it made such a dent on me, and it was just so demoralising,” said Ferguson. “To have this radical icon from our island be treated the way she was, I honestly can say that that’s where the seeds for the film were really sown, because it just had a huge effect, a profound effect.”
She couldn’t understand why a film hadn’t been made about O’Connor, though countless bottles of ink have been spilled analysing her career and its trajectory. While doing her Master’s in 2011, Ferguson approached O’Connor’s team for permission to use some of the singer’s music in a film project. That led a year later to her directing the video for O’Connor’s 2013 single 4th and Vine, and years later helped her get back in touch with them about making the feature documentary.
Against the norm
The doc wasn’t commissioned by O’Connor, but she was happy to do an interview in 2019 for it. Nothing Compares contains many clips of interviews with the musician while she was very young, and it’s remarkable to see how the softly-spoken, thoughtful woman dealt with spurious and misogynistic comments about her shaved head, among other topics. By going against the norm, it seemed interviewers expected her to want to argue about her choices.
“I feel that many iconoclastic women that have put their head above the parapet have been treated in this way,” said Ferguson of O’Connor’s treatment at the hands of the press. “So many people I love and adore. It just was really demoralising.”
She said that what happened to O’Connor after the SNL appearance was “a really harrowing example of what can happen, and really affected a huge amount of people”. The documentary opens with footage of O’Connor taking to the stage at Madison Square Garden for a gig celebrating Bob Dylan on 13 October 1992. The sound coming from the crowd is an eerie mix of boos and cheers.
Ferguson said that what demoralised her also demoralised “many people across the world who are very much rooting for Sinéad and delighted to see the story being told hopefully in the right way”.
She added: “It’s great for somebody to be alive when stories are told the right way, as often that happens later.” Indeed, it’s a relief to know that O’Connor got to see this herself, rather than her career receiving a reassessment after she has passed.
At a screening at the Galway International Film Festival, the SNL moment sparked the crowd to get up and start cheering, said Ferguson. She links this to how Irish society has changed in recent years, and how people are looking at O’Connor’s actions with fresh eyes.
“Honestly, it was spine-tingling. It was like here we are, this is where we are now in this country. Thank God. You know, it’s just amazing that it’s taken this long. I mean, of course, there’s been a lot of reclamation in the last decade, which is fantastic. And I think a lot of that has to do with activism really, with equal marriage and Repeal the Eighth.”
Cause and effect
There was never a question of Nothing Compares being a biopic that took in every aspect of O’Connor’s life, which is why details from the last few years are not mentioned, such as the tragic loss of her son. Instead Ferguson, producers Eleanor Emptage and Michael Mallie, and editor Mick Mahon, wanted to keep the focus tight.
“We really wanted to create a film that sets a foundation and really looks at the cause and effect, because I think the issue in 1992 is just that so many people didn’t understand why she was saying the things that she was, and why she was speaking out against the church particularly,” said the director. “And to be able to make sense of that we had to go back to the Ireland that spawned her and even beyond that, to really get a sense of where she’d come from, to then make sense of why she does what she does.”
The archive footage is key to bringing the audience back in time, and some of the standout moments are those of a pre-fame O’Connor performing at a wedding, or rehearsing with her first band in London. She had no idea what was coming down the line, and she says herself she didn’t even want to be famous.
Many of the “golden nuggets” of archive footage emerged late in the editing process, said Ferguson: “It was this wild goose chase to try and uncover these really special pieces of film.”
The timing of Nothing Compares is meaningful in many ways – post-MeToo, post-Covid, post-Repeal. But there have always been people analysing and fighting back against the way women were treated in the music industry, and there have always been women fighting their own way through the misogynistic mire.
What really comes through in Nothing Compares is how Sinead O’Connor is always herself, even when that’s not what others wanted or expected of her. She could be a bundle of contradictions, but that is really only proof of the fact she is human, and she is deeply affected by what happens to her in her life.
The New York Times said in its analysis after the Madison Square Garden incident in 1992 that O’Connor “draws real outrage because she doesn’t know her place”, pointing out that anti-authority sentiments at the time were suffering backlash. It also said that O’Connor baffled other stars because she made her gestures “without game plans or tie-ins”.
It might be the younger generations who are key to a reassessment of how O’Connor was treated. “We’ve been screening the film for eight or nine months since it launched at Sundance in January, and the amount of flashing-eyed teenagers I’ve got coming up at the end of the screenings is phenomenal. It’s actually very exciting,” said Ferguson.
“And particularly in America, with everything that’s going on there right now. You know, being able to see the bravery of Sinéad… I think it’s actually an accidental call to action.
“We hadn’t really planned that, but I just think they need examples of this type of bravery and how important it is to speak out.”
It’s not as though O’Connor has been ignored or forgotten about – she holds a major place in the pantheon of Irish arts and culture, and was due to do a tour before the pandemic. Ferguson was at the Electric Picnic recently and noticed that the Fontaines DC, who were all born long after the singer’s 90s heyday, played O’Connor’s song Troy before their set. But for those born after the millennium, she might be due her Kate Bush moment.
Above all, what Nothing Compares gives is a compelling look at how one hugely talented young woman confronted tradition, and suffered because of her actions. You watch it and realise that O’Connor came into adulthood in the public eye, having suffered damaging experiences in her childhood. She might never do what people want, and she may be as her friend David Holmes said, a complex person, but she is never anything other than true to herself.
This realisation makes you – as a viewer, a fan, a music consumer – question what it is you want and expect from musicians. The answer is, of course, complicated.
Sinéad O’Connor’s talent is not in question, but what can we learn from how she was treated by fans and the media in the past? That’s what Nothing Compares wants us to ask.
Nothing Compares is in cinemas from 7 October.
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