O’Connor discovers her roots
Singer embraces Rasta music ‘One of the shows of the year’
There’s a moment in the wonderful movie Ghost World that captures the horror that can potentially ensue when white people get their hands on Jamaican roots music. The film’s perpetually unimpressed heroines, Enid and Rebecca, are discussing the lack of bearable young men in their lives, with the latter trying to muster some positivity in the face of Enid’s bleak fatalism.
Suddenly, a troupe of lanternjawed jocks strolls past. The big, blond doofus at the back pauses, poses and says: “ You guys up for some reggae tonight?” There is a beat of silence. “Okay, you’re right,” Rebecca concedes.
Sinead O’Connor would likely get a good chuckle out of this vignette. The misunderstood Irish singer might not always seem to have her head screwed on all that tightly, but her heart is indisputably in the right place. So when she chose to end a three- year retirement from musicmaking several months ago with an album of reverent Rasta covers, Throw Down Your Arms, she went at it the right way: she hooked up with essential ’ 70s rhythm section Sly and Robbie, flew to Kingston’s Tuff Gong studios and knocked it out as authentically as a 38-year-old mom from Dublin could have done. Without, mercifully, lapsing into a fake Jamaican accent. Were O’Connor’s new collaborators not impressed with her ability to handle the material or her legitimate conviction for the Rastafarian faith, it’s unlikely they would have joined her on this tour. But there were Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare and four fellow Jamaican musicians surrounding the comparatively wee Celtic belter onstage at Kool Haus Saturday night, enthusiastically contributing to one of the most unexpectedly revelatory concert summits to hit Toronto in eons. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t think it would work. And, my word, is it working.
Preceded by a stirring, halfhour instrumental jam featuring Dunbar, Shakespeare and associates to stoke the crowd, O’Connor emerged diffidently from stage right and tore into a spine-tingling a cappella version of Burning Spear’s “Jah Nuh Dead” and a righteous fullband attack on the same songwriter’s “ Marcus Garvey” that instantly set out the night’s ocean- bridging agenda in a union of keening Irish folk and Jamaican protest music that felt neither uncomfortable nor unnatural.
O’Connor’s flinty wail — so powerful she can hold the microphone at her waist and still have you wondering if car alarms are being tripped outside — is a surprisingly close fit for the high-register oscillations and militant bite required to pull off such classics as Peter Tosh’s “Stepping Razor” and “ Downpressor Man,” Lee “ Scratch” Perry’s roiling “ Obadiah” and Bob Marley’s “ War” ( the tune she sang, incidentally,
before ripping up that
picture of Pope John
Paul II on Saturday
Night Live
13 years ago).
Rather than turning
them into Sinead
O’Connor songs on Saturday, she seemed intent on tapping their original spirit and approximating, if decidedly not imitating, the songwriters’ own vocal melodies. In recognition of their importance to the material — some of which they’d originally seen to fruition — Sly, Robbie et al were similarly treated as co-headliners rather than sidemen, with O’Connor sliding offstage periodically to let the band throw down some heavy, heavy grooves to the delight of the supportive, 2,200- strong crowd.
There were a few confused patrons who hadn’t gotten O’Connor’s pre- tour memo about this not being a greatest- hits romp. But while it would admittedly have been cool to hear dubbedout re-versions of promising candidates like “ Fire on Babylon” or “ Troy,” the general consensus was mass audience enrapturement for the entire, twohour duration of the show. Most appeared comfortable to accept her recent assertions that “I need to be doing this.” You really didn’t need to hear “ Nothing Compares 2 U” again, anyway, with O’Connor delicately tackling the ballads “ Riv- ers of Babylon,” Perry’s ageless “ Curly Locks” and the sweetly earnest “ Jah Is My Keeper” — a tune O’Connor says she wants her three kids to play at her funeral — with all the cut- to- thebone emotion one might pray she would bring to them. God, can that woman sing. And in these instances, she really did make these songs hers. The message of unity presented by two outwardly antithetical peoples from downtrodden island nations joining harmoniously in shared love of music and peaceful ideals wasn’t lost, either. If two historical “ have not” nations can find such sweet harmony in the planet’s gifts, what the hell is wrong with the “ haves” who are squabbling us all down the toilet. One of the shows of the year.