17 Aug, 2009 Queen of Hearts!
In response to my asking, many people recently tweeted the opinion that Sinead O’Connor was indeed the humungous talent that I had recently made her out to be.
However there is always one that sticks out – and wouldn’t life would be dull without them? In this case, it rather glibly offered the notion that Sinead was akin to marmite of all things, in that you either loved her with a passion or could not hack her at all!
This is surely the case with much music as it is with art in general, but of course this time it presumably meant that O’Connor had somehow over the years not escaped creating a larger amount of polarity than most, and that it was lingering still somewhere out there in the backwoods of the firmament. If so, it registers not a jot with me or for that matter the countless thousands I have recently witnessed delight in the Dubliners on stage presence.
Sinead being the all round class act that she is, elicits plenty of praise from both myself and Charlie Burchill, all of which is easy to do considering the depth and breadth of her body of work – as well as her clear cut views on just about all worth commenting on. You may not always agree with everything Sinead has offered to the world within her outlook. But I have found that for the most part I do.
Sure, some of her opinions may have gone against the (un) natural grain, but at least she has something to say and is as sharp as a diamond used to cut glass when taken to task, or for that matter put in an uncomfortable corner.
It’s a quality I find particularly impressive in a certain kind of female, and in this she reminds of so many Scots/Irish girls that I went to school with. You would not want to f**k with them basically! Or perhaps you would, but not in the sense of which I am speaking. Hopefully you get my drift!
But all of that is merely the extra stuff, the thing that got so many chit chatting like fishwives on a quiet Tuesday morning, when it fact it is the splendour of Sinead’s music and the effect of her voice that renders me speechless in fact.
Yes, that is how good she is both as a singer and songwriter, and with that being so I would ask the culprit with the marmite fixation to hold off. Because far from being an ordinary everyday product that one can find on any run of the mill supermarket shelf, Sinead O’ Connor is more akin to a rare and precious jewel. A veritable Queen Of Hearts in fact!
Jim Kerr