How Sinéad changed our bad attitude
Does a daring new film succeed in showing how the ‘visionary’ singer made Ireland a better place? Yes, says Danny McElhinney
It’s been 55 years and 298 days since she came our way. We’ve been party to the talent, trials and tribulations of Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor for the most recent two thirds of her life. The title of a new featurelength documentary Nothing Compares references the hit that made her a superstar. Director Kathryn Ferguson’s 97minute film mostly focuses on the period from 1987, the year of her first hit Mandinka, to late 1992 and the aftermath of her tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television.
The film opens with her being greeted by boos at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in Madison Square Garden. Two weeks previously she made her protest at clerical sexual abuse in Ireland on Saturday Night Live. Full acceptance of O’Connor’s contentions and that of many thousands of victims was decades in the future.
In an audio interview recorded for the film, offscreen O’Connor recalls the formative events of her life presented in dimly lit tableaus. Her father John singing Scarlet Ribbons to her: ‘My earliest musical memory’.
We see her in First Holy Communion dress at which point she says she was a devout Catholic. She has spoken often about the cruelty inflicted on her by her mother in their Glenageary home but that is not shown graphically. ‘I was made to live outside in the garden for two weeks,’ she says. ‘My mother was a beast and I was able to soothe her with my voice.’
Other family members have challenged her version of events. They would not be the first or last to present an alternative narrative to a victim’s recollections of abuse. They are nowhere to be seen in the film and little reference is made to them. She recounts again how her brother Joe playing Bob Dylan opened her ears to the possibilities of music.
Previously unseen footage of O’Connor singing Barbra Streisand’s Evergreen at the wedding of one kindly teacher at the school to which she was sent for being ‘out of control’ is significant as Paul Byrne of In Tua Nua was at the ceremony and later approached her about singing with the band. Members of her first proper band Ton Ton Macoute are featured and testify to her talent but there’s no mention of her time under the tutelage of Bel Canto teacher Frank Merriman who helped her find that astonishing singing voice.
John Reynolds, the father of her first child Jake and with whom she maintained a working relationship throughout her career, is the only one of her partners we hear. However, this is not a typical musical documentary where all the main protagonists contribute and comment on events in the life of the star or stars.
O’Connor’s voice is the driver of the narrative, whether in interviews at the time of her most significant career events or in that well-used conversation recorded recently. What Ferguson does well is juxtapose the attitude and actions of the trailblazing singer with the expectations on women in Ireland in that period. The contrast in the footage of the shaven-headed force of nature with that of the women in RTÉ’s Housewife of the Year and the Rose of Tralee contests is marked. The clips of interviews she did with Gay Byrne on The
Late Late Show through the years are also telling. We see her progress from star-struck ingenue to incisor, bitingly correcting Byrne’s perception of Irish and world events.
The film closes with a gallop through events such as the legalising of same-sex marriage and abortion, and the long overdue recognition of the suffering of the victims of abuse by clerics.
Ferguson’s mission was to present O’Connor as a visionary in relation to how Irish society should progress who has been vindicated by time. This film succeeds in doing that.
Nothing Compares is out on Friday
CLIPS OF LATE LATE INTERVIEWS SHE DID WITH GAY BYRNE ARE ALSO VERY TELLING...