A night of turbulent emotions from pop’s fiercest maverick
Sinéad O’connor
Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London W12 ★★★★★
There were times during the past few years when you could be forgiven for wondering if we would ever hear from Sinéad O’connor again. It’s been four years since the volatile Irish singersongwriter last toured, and five years since she released an album.
During that silence, she has gone through very public mental health struggles involving breakdowns, suicide attempts, family schisms and long periods in recovery.
In 2017, she announced on Facebook that she was rejecting her “patriarchal slave name” and henceforth wanted to be known as Magda Davitt.
Then in 2018, following a lifelong passionate struggle with Roman Catholicism, she converted to Islam and changed her name again to Shuhada Sadaqat.
What all of this might mean for her music was anyone’s guess. But on her return to the UK for a single show at the end of an acclaimed Irish comeback tour, the billboard outside Shepherd’s Bush Empire read Sinéad O’connor. That is the brand, I suppose, but there was some reassurance that an artist so uncompromising and unpredictable still felt continuity with her musical history.
Still, as she stepped out on to the stage, dressed in an elegant hijab that covered her famously shaven head, there was a ripple of uncertainty in the audience. But as guitars picked out a gentle arpeggio and O’connor began to sing John Grant’s vituperative ballad Queen of Denmark, you could feel the room relax.
Her intent delivery of a caustic line about urinating in a lover’s coffee inspired a cascade of relieved laughter, acknowledging that O’connor’s core fierceness remained intact beneath the newfound modesty of her stage wear.
When the five-piece band slammed in halfway through and O’connor’s voice rose from a whisper to a howl of rage, the crowd surged with her. Soon she was hopping up and down on the spot, punching the air with one fist, letting her turbulent emotions manifest in the music, singing as if her life depended upon it.
O’connor did not say much all evening, just offering murmurs of gratitude. In the past, she has often been quite nervously loquacious onstage, almost babbling between songs. On Monday night, her focus was all on the music.
The set was evenly divided between songs from the early and later phases of her career, and she invested every note with intent and meaning. It is remarkable that she is still capable of performing her iconic 1990 cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U as if overwhelmed by grief. That has always been her particular gift, to sing with complete presence. Her unusual voice moved between soft tones of ethereal loveliness and the harsher, keening flow of Irish folk, sometimes fragile, sometimes roaring.
There were a capella performances of high-wire intensity, with the crowd falling silent to follow every nuance and inflection, and there were stirring rock and reggae grooves where the band dug in and O’connor swayed hypnotically through mantras of emotional salvation. Her lyrics have always been very outspoken and direct and still resonate with her, whatever her faith, whatever the state of her mental health.
“I will live by my own policies / I will sleep with a clear conscience,” she declared on The Emperor’s New Clothes from 1990. Thirty years on, it still rang true. During an epic version of crowd favourite These Are the Last Days of Our Acquaintance, O’connor sang the line “I know you don’t love me any more” with heart-rending abandonment. “Yes we do!” shouted a voice from the audience, bringing a smile to the singer’s face.
It is very, very good to have her back.