#16
Nothing Compares
2 U
Sinéad O'Connor
Album I Do Not Want What I
Haven't Got
Release Date March 1990
Peak Chart Position No. 1
for four weeks (twenty-one weeks on the chart)
Songwriter Prince
Producer Fachtna O'Ceallaigh
The 1990 song that suddenly lifted
the waifish but
intense twenty-three-year-old Sinead
O'Connor from
cult heroine to mainstream star
was not, as was most
typical with her, a warrior soul's
cursing of the
darkness. It was a simple declaration
of longing that
gathered force from O'Connor's beautifully
unvarnished
performance. Penned by Prince in
a moment of unalloyed
sincerity, "Nothing Compares 2 U"
was bound for
obscurity when a copy fell into
the hands of an alert
and imaginative London-based rock
manager, Fachtna
O'Ceallaigh. Also O'Connor's sometime
lover,
O'Ceallaigh had guided her through
her successful 1987
debut, The Lion and the Cobra. In
1988 he presented
her with a tape of the song. Recalls
O'Ceallaigh, "The
raw material was there, and the
feel she gave it was
just fantastic." O'Ceallaigh later
invited Soul II
Soul producer Nellee Hooper to join
them at Brittania
Row Studios in London to help produce
a version for
O'Connor's new album. After several
tries, still
dissatisfied with her work, O'Connor
and O'Ceallaigh
went off by themselves to Eden Studios
in West London,
where she delivered the version
you hear today. By
then their affair was winding down,
and O'Connor's
relationship with her drummer, John
Reynolds, the
father of her young son, was heating
up. A week before
the release of her breakthrough
album, I Do Not Want
What I Haven't Got, O'Connor and
O'Ceallaigh split up.
The tears she summons in the stunning
video for
"Nothing Compares 2 U" are for O'Ceallaigh,
and they
are real.