Sinéad O’Connor has passed away.
The Irish singer-songwriter, who at the age of 20 made a name for herself in college rock with The Lion and the Cobra, was 56 when she unexpectedly became a pop success on MTV in 1990 with her gorgeous interpretation of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and its incredibly moving music video.
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“It is with tremendous regret that we announce the departure of our dear Sinéad”, her family said in a statement emailed to Irish media on Wednesday. Her family and friends are inconsolable and have asked for privacy during this extremely trying time. The reason of death was not disclosed.
On December 8, 1966, Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her difficult childhood was detailed in her devastating 2021 autobiography Rememberings. She was the third of five children. She wrote in her memoir that her mother had physically abused her for years and that her parents had divorced when she was 8 years old. When she was 15 years old, she was expelled from her Catholic school and placed in a Magdalene asylum administered by the Order of Our Lady of Charity called An Grianán Training Centre. O’Connor’s artistic abilities blossomed during her time in the reformatory, where one of the volunteers, Paul Byrne of the band In Tua Nua, came across her.
With the release of 1987’s The Lion and the Cobra, O’Connor first rose to prominence in the alt-rock genre. The album went gold and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. She was a superstar, albeit a very reluctant one, thanks to her second album, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. The song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which Prince had originally written for his protégés the Family, reached No. 1 in 22 different countries. The John Maybury-directed music video for the song, which primarily featured steady, extreme closeups of the singer’s distinctively shaven head, was heavily played on MTV for months. O’Connor later said that the emotions she shed in the video were genuine.
Was Sinead O’Connor vegan?
Although Sinéad O’Connor was frequently featured on lists of well-known Irish vegans, she has never confirmed it. The closest evidence comes from when she went to a café in Derry and ordered a vegan breakfast, though it might have been for her daughter.
While Rememberings and the 2022 documentary Nothing Compares made a strong case that O’Connor paved the way for strong female artists of the mid-’90s like Liz Phair, Courtney Love, Shirley Manson, Tori Amos, and Alanis Morissette, in 1990, she was a divisive and misunderstood figure, due to her political outspokenness and rejection of stereotypical femininity and male-gaze objectification, with her bald head, baggy clothes and righteous anger.
