Would you mind pasting up The Guardian one?
Try the link above, no paywall I think.
The Torygraph one wasnât great either
Written by Poms
Heâs right though.
Some interesting stories from Rob Schneider about the night he shared a stage with her when she tore up picture of the Pope and good one from Russell Crowe as well.
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Jesus, didnât think Russell had that level of penmanship. Lovely
Chat gpt
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Was that McCormick?
Did you get in?
No, but he has an article up as well.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor was a heroic talent who spoke truth to power
Throughout her turbulent life, the brilliant Irish singer found redemption in art. Her music made everything worthwhile
MUSIC CRITIC
26 July 2023 âą 9:19pm
SinĂ©ad OâConnor performing in 1998 CREDIT: SGranitz/WireImage
Poor, poor Sinead OâConnor. The vulnerable, wild, beautiful, strange, combative, empathetic, utterly extraordinary Irish singer and songwriter is dead at just 56.
She was a once-in-a-lifetime musical talent, who had a way of singing right from her heart to ours. She was also a complicated, sensitive, erratic woman from a very difficult, abusive background, who led a life beset by controversy, confrontation, mental health problems and terrible personal tragedies. A life that only made sense through her music.
âEveryone thinks Iâm mad,â she once said to me. âBut I believe you should only make a record for one reason, and thatâs because you are going to go crazy if you donât.â
This was a tribute I hoped Iâd never have to write. Because I have written a lot of these over the years, for great musical talents, some gone too young, some who lived very full lives before finally shuffling off the stage. But Sinead is different, for me.
I knew her (if only slightly) from when she was very young, a preternaturally gifted teenager coming up in the music scene in Dublin in the early 1980s, when it was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that she was something special.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor performing at Paradiso in 1988 CREDIT: Paul Bergen/Redferns
We didnât always get along, and I think that might be true of everyone who came into her orbit. We had some disastrous encounters over the years and some lovely ones. She was a volatile person, passionate, intelligent, contrarian. But I remained a supporter, and an ally, because her music made everything worthwhile.
Sinead became a global star in 1990 with a supernaturally emotional version of Princeâs Nothing Compares 2 U. She cried in the famous video, tears rolling down her face, tears shed for her mother, who had suffered mental health problems and had physically abused Sinead as a child, but who died in a car accident in 1986 with the problems between them unresolved. âI never stopped crying for my mother,â OâConnor would say. She told me that she thought of her mother every time she sang her signature song. It made her joyful even in her sadness. And so she kept on singing it.
By 1992, the world had seen another rather more combative side of Sinead, well known to those acquainted with her. When she tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, her soaring career crashed and burned. She was booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, mocked by Madonna and threatened by Frank Sinatra, who called her âone stupid broad.â
A reputation as a crazy self-destructive person pursued her down decades of erratic and polarising behaviour, whether declaring then retracting lesbianism or being ordained as a renegade Catholic priest whilst campaigning against sexual abuse in the church, then converting to Islam.
Sinead OâConnor ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on the TV show Saturday Night Live in 1992 CREDIT: Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images
She changed her name twice (first to Magda Davitt, then to Shuhadaâ Sadaquat, though she still performed as Sinead OâConnor). There were multiple short-lived marriages and divorces, custody battles, fall outs with fellow pop stars, splits with managers and friends, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, suicide attempts and a full-blown mental health crisis following a hysterectomy in 2017.
Then, in January last year, what may have been a final, crushing blow: the suicide of her 17-year-old son, Shane. We have heard very little from her since, and every time her name appeared in the news, many of us feared the worst. Those fears have come to pass.
Yet no matter how chaotic her personal life, the music was wondrous, the music was glorious. Sinead made ten idiosyncratic, highly personal albums spanning genres from baroque art pop (The Lion and the Cobra in 1987) to Irish folk (Sean-NĂłs Nua, 2002), spiritual reggae (Throw Down Your Arms, 2005) and bravura singer-songwriting (How About I Be Me (and You be You?), 2012). Music was her salvation. Until it wasnât.
And so, we mourn a talent gone too soon. And we pay tribute to someone who made an impact around the world that far outweighed her sales figures, because she cut through the noise of superficial pop culture to present something authentically, complicatedly, originally human. âI never made sense to anyone, even myself, unless I was singing,â Sinead said. And that is how she made sense to those of us listening.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor in Canada in 2020 CREDIT: Andrew Chin/Getty Images
Sinead picked a lot of fights over the years, but that wasnât just because she was contrary. It was because she was brave. We know more now â I hope â about the marginalisation of women in the music industry that she so often railed against, and about the mental health and childhood abuse issues that were such an integral part of her story.
A mural appeared on a Dublin wall a few years ago, after the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church had been exposed. It said: âSorry Sinead, you were right all along.â
Sorry Sinead. And thank you for the music.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor, troubled Irish pop star who sabotaged her career spectacularly after her hit Nothing Compares 2 U â obituary
Her raw, tear-stained music video won her worldwide fame. Two years later, she tore up an image of the Pope on American television
ByTelegraph Obituaries27 July 2023 âą 12:23am
Pictured in 1990, the year of her hit Nothing Compares 2 U CREDIT: Redferns
SinĂ©ad OâConnor, the singer who has died aged 56, was best known for her brilliantly simple yet highly emotional cover of Princeâs Nothing Compares 2 U (1990), accompanied by a video in which tears spontaneously trickled down her face as she sang.
Her version of the song was to make her career, largely by accident, although she virtually destroyed it two years later when she tore up an image of the Pope on American television.
Briefly a superstar, she spent the following 25 years as an object of curiosity. Either driven by truth or constitutionally unable to hold back, her life was a series of public declarations and retractions, breakdowns and comebacks, bids for attention and escape, and desperate attempts to overcome trauma and mental illness through art, love and religion.
Nothing Compares 2 U set her overwhelmingly emotional vocal against a largely orchestral backing. It would have been a hit regardless, but the video, with the camera tight on her head until the moment three minutes in where tears began to roll from her wide doe eyes, made it even more compelling. In truth, she was in genuine distress, having broken up with her boyfriend and manager Fachtna O Ceallaigh two days before: âMy life was really falling apart,â she said later that year. âAlso, itâs a pretty heavy song. Donât Worry Be Happy it isnât, you know?â
The single sold a million copies in a month, and the accompanying album, I Do Not Want What I Havenât Got, reached six million; but the two were very different beasts. Combining indie rock, folk and hip-hop, the LP was a criticsâ favourite but too fierce for most, and none of the follow-up singles came close.
In 1998, recording a track to raise money for victims of the Omagh bombing CREDIT: Peter Jordan/PA
At first, OâConnor embraced fame, moving part-time to Los Angeles, appearing with such aristocrats of rock as Peter Gabriel and Sting for Amnesty International and taking up acting. She even met Prince, saying that âof courseâ they got on â âHe must be pretty happy, the amount of money heâs made out of meâ â and then claiming he had effectively held her hostage, screaming abuse at her.
It soon turned sour. Fans taking her picture in the street would often find her running after them, or be told to âjust fâ offâ. In August 1990 she refused to allow a New Jersey venue to play the American National Anthem before she went on; Frank Sinatra, who played the following night, said he wanted to âkick her in the assâ. Not without a sense of humour, she dressed up in a wig and hat to âprotestâ outside one of her own shows soon after; she said there were just âtwo old guys there⊠mad-looking blokes with the thick glasses and the foam on their lips.â
The next year, she refused to attend the Grammy Awards in protest at the war in Iraq, and announced her retirement from the music industry. This time Jay Leno, the host of Americaâs Tonight show, joked: âSinĂ©ad OâConnor says sheâs tired of being famous. Thatâs a coincidence. Iâm tired of her being famous too.â Even Edwina Currie called her âa bit of a pratâ.
Then, in October 1992, appearing on the sketch show Saturday Night Live, supposedly to promote a new album of jazz standards, Am I Not Your Girl?, she chose instead to perform Bob Marleyâs War, with lyrics altered to refer to child abuse rather than racism, and then tear up a photograph of Pope John Paul II with the words: âFight the real enemy.â Coming long before the exposure of institutional cover-ups in the Catholic Church, it was an incendiary act. At a tribute concert to Bob Dylan the same month, she was booed off stage.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor performing in Berlin, 1990 CREDIT: Action Press/Shutterstock
She said later that it had been a bid to kill her pop stardom, that she wanted to âbe a voice in the wildernessâ; if so, her wish was granted. It was also a cry for help. OâConnor had already spoken lengthily about suffering abuse at home and at a Catholic reform school, and it turned out that the picture she tore up had belonged to her mother, who had died in a car crash in 1985.
She was surely in the grip of a breakdown, but the theme of child abuse â for which she blamed everything from alcoholics and rapists to serial killers and Hitler â remained the one constant in a life of revolving causes, and as recently as 2014, she still called this her âproudest night everâ.
Returning to Ireland, she was unable to withdraw from the public eye, taking out advertisements in the Irish press pleading with the public to âstop hurting me pleaseâ and announcing that she was âin agonyâ. Her brother, the novelist Joseph OâConnor, was dragged into the furore too. A new album, Universal Mother (1994), was a further letting of the wounds, and did nothing for her or her public.
By then she was involved in a custody battle with the father of her daughter Roisin, the journalist John Waters, that forced her to stop working for the rest of the decade. It was just one episode in an intense and complicated love life. After marrying the drummer and producer John Reynolds, father of her first son, she married a further three times, and also had children with the musician Donal Luny and with Frank Bonadio, the ex-husband of the singer Mary Coughlan.
In 2000 she declared herself a lesbian, though later settled on âthree-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gayâ, adding: âI lean a bit more towards the hairy blokes.â Her one constant was O Ceallaigh, who remained her manager until 2012. The end of their working relationship only came after they had rekindled their romance.
In 2019, at the ITV Studios CREDIT: GC Images
SinĂ©ad OâConnor was born in Glenageary, County Dublin, on December 8 1966. Her father was an engineer and later barrister and life was comfortable until her parents split up and she went to live with her mother, who, she claimed, beat her, starved her, forced her to sleep outside and encouraged her to shoplift. âMerely the sounds of my motherâs feet on the hearth ceiling were enough to send us into spasms of complete terror,â she later said.
Unable to make friends or work at school, she found some comfort in talent contests, once winning with a rendition of Donât Cry For Me Argentina, but was eventually sent for 18 months to An GrianĂĄn Training Centre, Dublin. Her accounts of her treatment there varied over the years but she acknowledged that, âOne of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.â
Moved by her father to a Quaker boarding school in Waterford, she began her musical career when she was heard singing Barbra Streisandâs Evergreen at a wedding by a member of the folk-rock band In Tua Nua. That connection stalled but she won a contract with the Ensign label while still a teenager, although she remained, in her words, âcripplingly shyâ her whole life.
Her first album, The Lion & The Cobra (1987), effectively primal-scream therapy set to alternative rock, suggested a promising indie career was hers for the taking. Her shaven head â âbecause I didnât want another boring hairdoâ â and outspoken comments in favour of the IRA and against Irelandâs rock heroes U2 (singer Bono was âa stupid turdâ) suggested she didnât want much more. The success of Nothing Compares 2 U was unexpected, but OâConnor stood by it, saying in 2014: âWell, lucky itâs a good song. Jesus, can you imagine if it was The Birdie Song?â
Her relationship with religion was more complicated. In 1999, while continuing to campaign against the abuses of the Catholic Church, she was ordained as a priest of the breakaway Latin Tridentine Church, although she called it âjust civil disobedienceâ. Then, having returned to recording with the over-produced, bland Faith and Courage (2000), and an album of mainly traditional Irish songs, Sean NĂłs Nua (2002), she proclaimed her new devotion to âspiritual musicâ, embodied in an album of reggae covers, Throw Down Your Arms (2005).
In 1999, after her ordination into the Latin Tridentine Church as Mother Bernadette Mary OâConnor CREDIT: MICHAEL CRABTREE
With this came an acknowledged diagnosis of bipolar disorder, though by 2011 she refuted this too. By then, the advent of social media had given full rein to her need to âventâ, and the media, in between noting her weight gain and her many garish religious-themed tattoos, reported her online appeal to âget laidâ; this resulted, after three months, in her fourth marriage, in Las Vegas, to Barry Herridge, an addiction therapist, which lasted just seven days.
A comeback the following year with the album How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, featuring the gritty rock of her past and a glossily glamorous cover, was taken remarkably seriously, but derailed when problems with medication forced her to pull out of the resulting tour. The blues-based Iâm Not Bossy, Iâm The Boss (2014) was also respectfully received, but sold little. More attention was given to an online spat with Miley Cyrus, in which SinĂ©ad OâConnor advised her not to allow herself to be âpimpedâ by the industry. âItâs more that when youâve been through grievous things yourself, and you see it happening to other people, you just want to snuggle them,â SinĂ©ad OâConnor later explained later. âI know what itâs like to cry on the street.â
Matters took a more serious turn when she posted a series of Facebook messages suggesting she had taken an overdose and accusing almost all her family of betrayal. It is understood that she had been depressed since undergoing a hysterectomy in August 2015 and that her son Shane had also been unwell. In 2017 she changed her name by deed poll to Magda Davitt, explaining that, she wished to be âfree of the patriarchal slave names. Free of the parental curses.â The following year she claimed to have converted to Islam, adopting the name Shuhada and later changing her surname to Sadaqat.
Last year her 17-year-old son Shane committed suicide aged 17, and subsequently she was admitted to hospital after posting messages on social media about taking her own life.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor is survived by a daughter and two sons.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor, born December 8 1966, death announced July 26 2023
Too many to choose from really, the detail in this is exquisite
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What a horrible fucking title.
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There was nothing wrong with what he said tbh. He was pretty close to her.
I was surprised to learn that she faced such vitriol over ripping up the picture of the pope. Was America really that religious in the 90âs? Nowadays sheâd probably gain a fair bit of support for such an act.
Her brother used to do witty rhymes on Drivetime in the evenings back around 2009 didnât he?
Yes
Even worse now
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Her brother is Joseph OâConnor, he has more strings to his bow than the witty poems on drivetime 
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I suppose that wouldnât have gone down well in the bible belts alright.
I was surprised to read that almost 25% of US citizens identify as Catholic