An Open Letter To Gert

Dear Gert
A few weeks ago I promised you a CD as your prize for winning the Character Assassination competition. The delay in getting it to you was caused in part by life having become rather busy recently and in part by the need to make a careful, thoughtful choice.
In the end, after a couple of weeks the answer was blindingly obvious. I had to send you the CD that I myself have been playing virtually non-stop since I bought it – Sinéad O’Connor’s She Who Dwells In The Secret Place Of The Most High Shall Abide Under The Shadow Of The Almighty. Hopefully it arrives today.
I’ve liked O’Connor for a long time, though during her dark years of the mid-1990s I found some of her output painful to listen to. Her 2000 album Faith And Courage was a stunning return to light and confidence and I played it non-stop for a very long time after its release. Knowing that she had turned a corner also helped me to go back and listen to some of her more troubled songs, their fragility tempered by the knowledge that a happier ending was on its way.
Last year she released an album of traditional Irish songs called Sean-Nós Nua, which means “Old-Style New”. It was her reinterpretation of many of the songs that she had grown up with. I’m a fan of all things Irish, but I was wary of it. Sometimes it can be impossible to convey the impact of one’s formative music to a different audience. I bought the album, played it for a few months, loved one or two of the tracks and was indifferent to many of the others.
Then, last October, I saw her perform a live set of most of this material. Her performance made the music come alive and I saw it in a different light. I went back a few months later to see a second show of the same material, which turned out to be the final day of the tour. I didn’t know at the time that it would apparently be her last tour ever, following her mid-year announcement that she was withdrawing from the music industry. Part of this announcement was that she would be releasing a retrospective CD of rarities and live material, plus a DVD of a full live performance.
So, this is that CD. It’s a double disc set and the first disc is a mixture of cover versions (ABBA, B-52s, Aretha Franklin), collaborations (Massive Attack, Asian Dub Foundation) and out-takes from Faith And Courage. In this sense it lacks coherence and you have to focus on each song individually rather than the body of work as a whole. Nevertheless, there are recurring musical and lyrical themes. There is a religious overtone obvious in the first two tracks, but persistent throughout. This also manifests itself through her love of Rastafarianism and dub reggae – nearly half of the tracks are based on dub in one way or another.
What do you know about O’Connor, I wonder? Unless you’ve taken a special interest of which I’m unaware, you probably know as much as everyone else. You’ll know that she sang Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U and took the song to number one in the charts. Also you’ll possibly share the commonly-held view that she’s a shaven-headed, startlingly beautiful, opinionated gobshite who should really concentrate on singing and give up the insane pronouncements that the Pope is the Devil and Ireland is an abused child. If you’ve paid attention over the past few years you’ll know that she has mostly given up these pronouncements, has become ordained as a renegade Catholic priest, proclaimed her lesbianism and continued to marry, produce children and to divorce at a steady pace.
With this knowledge, some of the material on the first disc won’t surprise you. In Brigidine Diana she sings sweetly about Diana, Princess Of Wales, referring to her good works and making a characteristic reference to “the Goddess… in you”, before dropping in the steely phrase “… and British armed aggression is dead because of you.” It’s a reminder that she has an eclectic, impassioned view of the world, which is reinforced later on the penultimate track Big Bunch Of Junkie Lies, where she appears to castigate an unknown TV interviewee’s killing of her best friend with heroin. However, I hope you’ll also enjoy the breezy A Hundred Thousand Angels, the good-natured humour of the cover of Chiquitita and the bitter-sweet twisted smile of the line “I liked your colour TV, but you looked at that colour TV more than me” in the B-52s cover.
The real treat, though, is the second CD, which is where I suggest that you should focus your initial attention. The live performance is mostly based on, though doesn’t limit itself to, the traditional Irish material. O’Connor is absolutely in her prime as she inhabits these songs and brings them to life with a blood-pumping, nape-raising urgency that demonstrates exactly why I find music one of the most sublime – possibly the most sublime – forms of art. O’Connor’s voice is a superb mixture of power and frailty, ragged howl and bell-like clarity. These songs have stood the test of time and their themes are universal. In my humble opinion, music doesn’t get much better than this.
There’s not much more I can write, apart from the fact that if you love this on CD you’ll be blown away by exactly the same performance on DVD. (By the way, if you want to sing along to Óró Sé Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile and you don’t speak Irish, this might help.) In the documentary The Song Of Heart’s Desire on the DVD, she explains her motivation for recording Sean-Nós Nua as follows:
“This is a record I’ve wanted to make for a very long time and it is very much my own voice in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to do with pop records and stuff, you know? And I feel creatively, as a songwriter or singer, that I won’t be able to move forward until I sing these songs and do this record, you know what I mean, that… it’s something that… it’s like it’s all in there just BURSTING to come out.”
It’s telling that once it had all “burst out”, she appeared to have no further desire to “move forward”. It’s a miracle that music has that life-changing power. However, whatever her thoughts this year, I have no doubt that in time she’ll be back. When you see the intensity of her singing, or even talking about music, it’s just impossible to conceive of her saying “ah well, that’s that done with, I think I’ll bake some cakes now.”
Apart from the generic excellence described above, this CD’s join-free, eclectic mixture of Irish trad and dub reggae seemed to be a neat mixture of your past and present. Its honesty and straightforwardness reflects your own. Combining spiritual purpose with astute political comment, it strikes me that this is the perfect record for the thoughtful, passionate, multi-cultural world that I’m sure you’re proud to inhabit. Thus I send this CD to you in the hope that it will give you as much pleasure as it has given me.
Regards,
Hg