Sinead O’Connor and “Nothing Compares 2U”: A perfect record, and near-perfect video

The moment that we all fell in love with the Irish pop thrush.

It's been seven hours and 15 days

Since you took your love away

I go out every night and sleep all day

Since you took your love away

The screen fades in on footage of a dark clad figure in a long coat and heavy boots, walking through gothic ruins on a winter’s day. You immediately think, “What’s with the faux Bergman crap?!”

Then that face fills the screen.

Beautiful, pale Irish skin and a square jaw. And those eyes: Steel grey, long lashed, expressing every emotion the singer is conveying through the song, beneath a Number 2 crop. Against the dark background and the black turtleneck, that head almost seems as if it’s floating in space.

Since you been gone, I can do whatever I want

I can see whomever I choose

Over a sustained, synthetic drone the head intones Prince’s lyric of loss, with a deep understanding of the blues. Her interpretation puts the lie to the Minneapolitan maestro’s original intention for the song: A fare-thee-well to his recently departed housekeeper Sandy Scipioni, according to Prince’s longtime recording engineer Susan Rogers. But Sinead O’Connor, found dead last week at age 56, found the emotional ballast the libertine savior of R&B couldn’t invest into what he saw as a throwaway track, a gift to former members of The Time, now reconstituted as The Family. 

I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant

But nothing

I said nothing can take away these blues

'Cause nothing compares

Nothing compares to you

Under any other circumstances, you don’t cut Prince at his own game. But the two versions of “Nothing Compares 2U” for which he’s responsible are rare instances of him not owning his own material - not The Family’s first recording, nor the auteur’s own rendition, unearthed from his legendary vaults at Paisley Park after his passing. The Family’s version is pretty hamfisted, all queasy synths and an overly emotive vocal. The tick-tock keyboard motif underpinning Prince’s rendition is an interesting hook, but the info that he hardly wrote this as an actual breakup ballad now makes it feel disingenuous. Was it always? Or are any perceptions now colored by this tidbit? 

O’Connor was all emotion when she bit into this lyric. She and manager Fachtna O’Ceallaigh had been dating when he suggested it as a cover possibility. By the time she entered the studio with it, the romance was falling apart. She stepped before that mic as one big, raw, exposed nerve.

“She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song,” engineer Chris Birkett recalled in a piece for Sound on Sound. “It mirrored her situation.”

From line-to-line O’Connor moodswung over that solitary synth drone, those muted “ah-ah” backing vocals, and those cannons-going-off-in-a-canyon ‘80s drums, which for once do not overpower the song. She goes from pleading to defiance to vulnerability to resolve, every shade of a breaking heart, literally from line-to-line. The magic of the video is that you see it in her face, up close and personal, even shedding two tears – one from each eye – on the way to its climax. Or actually, that is the video’s climax, isn’t it?

From this moment, “Nothing Compares 2U” was no longer a Prince song. It now belonged to Sinead O’Connor.

It's been so lonely without you here

Like a bird without a song

"I thought Prince would fall in love with me and it would all be lovely, but he was the most frightening human being I ever met in my life, even more frightening than my mother," O’Connor told The Belfast Telegraph in 2019. She reported in her 2021 autobiography Rememberings that a command visit to Paisley Park for an audience with The Man Himself degenerated into a physical altercation, with O’Connor running out onto the highway in the middle of the night, being chased by the man whose song she took to Number One the world over.

Much has been made in the days since her death about the negative emotions and controversy that seemingly clung to O’Connor like iron filings to an electromagnet. Ripping up that photo of the Pope, extracted from her mother’s house after her death in the ‘80s, as a climax to an acapella rendition of Bob Marley’s “War” on SNL was a thrilling punk gesture that nevertheless turned what felt like the entire world against her. After “Nothing Compares 2U” instantly catapulted her to total worldwide chart domination, her protest against Vatican inaction against pedophile priests felt designed as career suicide. She never wore stardom comfortably, nor did the spotlight flatter her as she very publicly grappled with several demons.

The music remained artistically sound, intensely creative. None of it achieved the artistic and especially the commercial triumph of “Nothing Compares 2U.” It was if Elvis Presley released “Suspicious Minds” two years into his career, astonished the whole world, then walked away. But only if he continued making brilliant records that the old fans were too pissed off and miscomprehending to listen to. “Fight the real enemy!” she shouted to an SNL audience, shocked silent, after tearing up her mom's Pope photo. You have to wonder if she meant John Paul II, or the music business?

Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling

Tell me baby, where did I go wrong?

Truth of the matter is, there is no way you could follow up anything as achingly, perfectly beautiful as “Nothing Compares 2U,” either the record or the video. Still, the video would have been vastly improved without the mock art film shots of the singer walking through that cemetery in that long black coat. If the entire clip had been nothing but 5:08 of that tight closeup of O’Connor’s head, floating as if disembodied in outer space, it would have been more effective. Yes, the clip is unforgettable. But it’s because of that tight close-up. The woman had a mesmerizing face, and those eyes just bore through you every time she focussed them on you from the TV screen.

Now the woman who sang that perfect record and shed those tears in that near-perfect video is gone. Such was the power of “Nothing Compares 2U” and Sinead O’Connor’s subsequent violent retreat from the spotlight – most know her for that record/video. And it was so airtight, it’s all most need to understand her artistic power. It does not matter that she continued to make fine art unto her death. She made “Nothing Compares 2U.” That’s more than most can or will do. And we all fell in love with the Irish pop thrush the minute those tears streamed down her cheeks on MTV.

Rest in peace, Ms. O’Connor. Hope you finally find the peace you apparently did not have in life.

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