A fascinating and often quite moving insight into the life and music of iconoclastic Irish singer Sinéad OʼConnor, Nothing Compares examines how her traumatic childhood influenced her music and how she used her voice at the height of her stardom to issue political statements that eventually led to her exile from the pop mainstream.
While relatively straightforward in structure (it largely follows a chronological format), this allows for proper reflection on, and contextualisation of, the massive changes in her life. A recording of her talking about her life provides the spine of this enthralling doc which is punctuated with archival footage, photographs and filmed interviews.
The tragedy of her son Shane taking his own life so recently adds an additional sense of sadness to a life story that already features massive highs and harrowing lows, and while the film largely focuses on her words and deeds from 1987 to 1993, it offers up a powerful portrait of this fearless trailblazer and sometime icon.
The film opens in 1992 at the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. Two weeks earlier she had appeared on Saturday Night Live, and sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s War as a protest against child abuse of children in the Catholic Church, ending the song by facing the camera and tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II. The reaction in the US especially had been brutal, and at Madison Square Garden she was greeted with a mixture of cheers and boos. The footage shows her staring out almost sadly – but with obvious inner strength – towards the audience, before the film switches back to her early years.
“I didn’t mean to be strong,” she says. “I did suffer through a lot because everyone felt it was okay to kick the shit out of me…I regret I was so sad because of it. I spent so many years lonely and isolated. There was no therapy when I was growing up – it is why I got into pop music – as therapy. I just wanted to scream.”
She talks pragmatically about her early years when she was beaten by her mother (“My mother was a beast…but I was able to sooth her with my voice,” she says) and in her mid-teens her truancy and shoplifting led to her being placed in a Magdalene asylum, the Grianán Training Centre, run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity. “It was not acknowledged what had happened to me – I was unmanageable at home,” adding that the nuns at the asylum were also abusive.
Her singing skills were soon spotted after she sung Evergreen at a wedding, and after a brief stint in Dublin as singer for Tonton Macoute she moved to London, signing with Ensign Records and started work on her first album. When the record label wanted her to ‘conform’ a little bit more, it was then she decided to cut off her hair and started sporting the skinhead look she became known for.
Her first album The Lion and the Cobra was a hit, earning her a Grammy nomination, while her second album, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got received even more critical attention as she also began to refine the look and facial expressions that she became known for.
She talks about her shyness and how singing enabled her to have a strong ‘voice’ and personality, and while building her musical career over the years she also encountered moments of controversy down to her frank statements and gestures. She converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat, though continued to perform under her birthname.
Director Kathryn Ferguson’s audio interview with O’Connor provides an illuminating narrative spine to the film, and the lack of traditional talking heads helps make the film all the more intimate and personal. What shines through is both Sinéad OʼConnor’s immense talent and passion but also her vulnerability and determination to be true to herself.
Impressively edited and structured, Nothing Compares is an enthralling delve into an artist who is unapologetically forthright and willing to speak from the heart but who remains a singer who has had a massive impact on both the music scene and on millions of listeners around the world.
Ireland, 2022, 97mins
Dir Kathryn Ferguson
Production Tara Films, Ard Mhacha Productions
International sales Submarine Entertainment
Producer Eleanor Emptage, Michael Mallie
Editor Mick Mahon
Music Irene Buckley, Linda Buckley
