Sinéad O'Connor(1966–2023)

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor was born at Glenageary in south-east Dublin on the eighth of December 1966, third of the five children of John O'Connor, a structural engineer who later qualified as a barrister and served as Chair of the Divorce Action Group of Ireland through the 1980s, and Marie O'Grady. The parents separated when she was eight; she was raised partly at her father's house in Dublin and partly at her mother's, attended the Dominican convent at Sion Hill, Blackrock, was placed at the Grianán Training Centre at the High Park Magdalene Laundry in Drumcondra at fifteen on the basis of small adolescent shoplifting offences, and on her release from Grianán took up the boarding school at Newtown School in Waterford from sixteen.

She was discovered at seventeen busking on Grafton Street in Dublin with the small acoustic guitar she had taught herself at the boarding school by the music producer Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh, who signed her to his Mother Records label in 1985 and brought her to London to record her first album. The Lion and the Cobra was released by Chrysalis Records in November 1987 in her twenty-first year, with the single Mandinka. The album sold over two million copies on the strength of the single, established her as a major new voice in the international rock-and-folk register, and earned her the first of her four Grammy Award nominations.

She recorded the second album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got at the Townhouse Studios in London through 1989, including her cover version of the Prince composition Nothing Compares 2 U (Prince had written and recorded the song for his side-project The Family in 1985 but had never released it as a single). The Nothing Compares 2 U single was released in January 1990 with the John Maybury black-and-white close-up music video of O'Connor's face in tears against a Versailles-statuary background; the single took the number-one position on the singles charts of seventeen countries (the United Kingdom Singles Chart, the United States Billboard Hot 100, Australia, Germany, France, Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere), was the best-selling single of 1990 worldwide, won the MTV Video of the Year, and made her the central single new musical voice of that year. The parent album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got sold seventeen million copies worldwide.

She released across the next three decades the further albums Am I Not Your Girl? (1992, jazz-and-standards), Universal Mother (1994, the Christian-folk record), Faith and Courage (2000, the rock record produced by Wyclef Jean), the Irish-traditional album Sean-Nós Nua (2002, on traditional Irish songs in the unaccompanied sean-nós style), Throw Down Your Arms (2005, the reggae album recorded at Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston), Theology (2007, the two-disc Hebrew Scripture record), I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss (2014), and the autobiographical memoir Rememberings (2021). She converted to Islam in October 2018, taking the name Shuhada' Sadaqat, and continued under that name to her death. She died at her house in south-east London on the twenty-sixth of July 2023 in her fifty-seventh year. The O'Connor name in modern Irish music carries the weight of Nothing Compares 2 U and the seventeen million copies of I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got.