1990 Sinead O'Connor: Nothing Compares 2 U

In 1990, your writer was gainfully employed as an injection moulding technician working a continental shift system in a Japanese owned factory; not the worst job he's ever had, but top three. After a particularly tiresome nightshift I was driving home in the early hours with the radio on when the DJ announced he was about to play 'the new Sinead O'Connor single'. I knew of O'Connor from a previous single ('Mandinka') I'd liked enough to buy its parent album ('The Lion And The Cobra') which I liked rather less - the work of an enthusiastic Patti Smith wannabe aiming higher than her talent would allow her to reach, I thought. So I wasn't expecting much from my radio that morning. And yet from as the opening bars gave way to O'Connor's vocal it caught and pulled me into its swirl like a paper boat in a whirlpool. At the one minute mark when the Linn drum almost apologised for the anti-climax of its entry, I pulled over into a layby to listen properly.

And my initial reaction remains the source of my overall impression of 'Nothing Compares 2 U'; if there's one thing it demands of the listener, it's that they listen. Because there's not much else to be done but listen to O'Connor take a can opener to her psyche in the aftermath of a relationship gone wrong with a genuine sense of instability in grief that scored a dead centre bullseye with me long before I'd seen the celebrated twin tears in the accompanying video. Yet as personal as she makes it, the lyric isn't hers - 'Nothing Compares 2 U' was written by Prince and originally recorded by his offshoot band The Family who serve it up with doilies on a platter of multi-layered, tri-partite vocals, cod dramatic bursts of synth gasps and an overly fussy saxophone riff that all carbon date its 1985 origins as surely as if it pulled up in a DeLorean. And yes, like the blight that afflicts most eighties AOR productions, they also make for a detached, emotionless and dryly impersonal listen, like hearing an overly loud drunk confiding with a nonplussed mate one table over in the pub. Yet although O'Connor's delivery managed to stop me in my tracks, in reality she's singing her song to no-one but herself; the lyric remains an open letter to the departed, but it's clear that as far as this relationship goes they're nowhere in earshot and O'Connor is railing at her own demons - "It's been seven hours and fifteen days": a statement of cold fact from The Family, but I bet Sinead would be able to count off the minutes and seconds too if you'd asked her, such is the intensity of her grief.

And taking it even further from The Family's version, there's a sombre sparseness to the funereal pace of O'Connor's arrangement that doubles the running time and generates a mood of critical self awareness that wouldn't have been too out of place amongst the confessional primal screams on John Lennon's 'Plastic Ono Band' album; O'Connor's voice takes centre stage and the music hangs warily in the background waiting to catch her should she fall. And fall she does - her honesty was fine when she was counting the virtues of the single life ("Since you been gone I can do whatever I want, I can see whomever I choose"), but by close there's the acknowledgement of a space that won't be filled by eating in "fancy restaurants" and then a falling away of pride on "I know that living with you baby was sometimes hard, but I'm willing to give it another try" where it all gets too much and her voice breaks off key and off tune and the words and syllables tumble into each other as inarticulate sounds of pain, their meaning now forgotten. Intense, yet it's neither corn nor pantomime - what's gone before has laid groundwork enough to allow that, when the facade of strength tumbles to the ground, the sincerity of what remains is beyond question.

Because there's more to her sincerity than that I think - when I made the comparison earlier with the Lennon's album I was thinking particularly of its closing track 'My Mummy's Dead' ("My mummy's dead. I can't explain. So much pain"). O'Connor herself is on record as saying that her tears in that video weren't staged but came spontaneously at the "All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the back yard. All died when you went away" line as she remembered the abusive relationship with her own mother, a heartache that, if true, spills over into her vocal too. But I'm not going to presume as to second guess what was going through O'Connor's mind in the studio, and in truth it doesn't matter anyway - 'Nothing Compares 2 U' remains a bare nerve of a single; O'Connor climbing beneath it's surface, shoveling out the garbage and investing the bare husk with a personal emotional impact that Prince probably never even realised existed within his own throwaway tune. I've consistently argued throughout the decades that a good cover version should add something to the song so that it identifies with the covering artist to make it unique to them rather than a lazy carbon copy. On 'Nothing Compares 2 U' O'Connor does that and more. The Family's version was little known prior to this, but even had it been a major hit I believe there's no doubt that 'Nothing Compares 2 U' would still have been regarded as O'Connor's song in exactly the same way it is now. A stunning achievement.