With Nothing Compares, the Sinéad O’Connor Renaissance May Finally Be Happening

You can almost feel it—the reconsideration, long overdue. There’s that scene in Euphoria where Sydney Sweeney downs a bottle of wine to “Drink Before the War,” and belts out the lyrics. A deeper cut on Peaky Blinders’s last season—“In This Heart,” from 1994—played over a pivotal funeral scene. Olivia Rodrigo covered “Nothing Compares 2 U” at a concert in Dublin this summer to rapturous cheers. And the rising post-punk band Fontaines D.C. claim “Troy” as a central influence on their acclaimed new album. Sinéad O’Connor nostalgia isn’t everywhere in the culture just yet—not like Kate Bush nostalgia—but it's growing and, in the opinion of torch-carrying fans like me, it’s about time.

The buzz that met Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary Nothing Compares when it debuted at Sundance in January was another clue. Nothing Compares, which began a theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and streams on Showtime from September 30, is an absorbing and thoughtfully constructed examination of O’Connor’s skyrocketing fame in the late 1980s and early ’90s–and a depiction of what happened at her peak: a very public fall from grace after she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992.

But Nothing Compares is more than a recounting of that familiar story. Ferguson, who grew up in Belfast listening to O’Connor’s 1987 debut album The Lion and Cobra in her father’s car, has performed a fan’s act of reclamation–ignoring recent tabloid stories (nothing about O’Connor’s suicidal tweets, nothing about the tragic death of her son) and giving us instead a close reading of her music and the brutal Ireland that she came out of, and why she had such an electric impact on the culture.

The truth is, Sinéad in 1990 was simply incredible—a young Irish star with an otherworldly voice, a shaved head, and punk energy, brimming with anger and big-eyed innocence, and with songs that wrapped up traditional Irish melodies, nervy new wave beats, and overwhelmingly raw lyrics. “Nothing Compares 2 U” was an alchemical moment in 1990, inescapable on MTV (that tear!)—the kind of song that stopped you from doing anything beyond attentively listening. It’s still Sinéad’s defining work, but you won’t hear it in Nothing Compares. (As Ferguson’s film notes in an end-title before the credits, Prince’s estate refused to grant her permission to use it.) 

Never mind. The truth is there are so many galvanizing songs on Sinéad’s first two albums, The Lion and the Cobra (1987) and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (1990). To watch her perform “Just Like U Said It Would B” or “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is gripping.

Ferguson’s film (this is her first feature-length documentary) is expressionistic in tone, with no talking heads (though friends, managers and bandmates, and musical peers like Chuck D and Peaches are heard). The bulk of it is archival footage—much of it about Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s; a grim place, especially for women—and it culminates in a persuasive feminist argument that Sinéad would be venerated now for speaking boldly and angrily about abuses in the Catholic Church and racial justice, two of her most consistent themes, in the way a Billie Eilish or a Megan Thee Stallion is venerated. Though very much a time capsule, Nothing Compares includes one recent performance from Sinéad of her 1994 track “Thank You For Hearing Me” and has as its backbone an interview with the star in 2019. Sinéad, who never stopped recording new music and is due to release her 11th album this year, is still forceful and bold as she considers her past. 

I spoke to Ferguson about interviewing Sinéad for her film and about why she wanted to make Nothing Compares in the first place.

Vogue: How did you first encountered Sinéad O’Connor’s music, as you were growing up in Belfast?

Kathryn Ferguson: I became a bona fide fan in the early ’90s with the second album, when I was in my early teens. I suppose then I could really see what she stood for and how she looked and her boldness. You know, me and my friends were these young Irish girls and we were just like, holy God. She was an alien from outer space—so exciting and so what we needed. The Troubles were rumbling on in the north and the Catholic Church was still very influential in the south. So it wasn’t the happiest of countries to live in at that point, especially for women, so she meant an awful lot. I was hugely demoralized when I saw how she was treated only a few years later, in 1992. The seeds for the film were really sowed in 1992 when I was a young teenage Irish girl witnessing what happened to her. It was bad…really bad.

The backlash against her originated in America, with the Saturday Night Live performance. Was there equal backlash in Ireland too?

Yes, certainly. The heavy dose of it was American, but the U.K. press was brutal as well. There were absurd headlines like “Sinéad, She Devil.” And in Ireland I don’t think they supported her—no, they didn’t have her back. Not at all. I think if anything, in Ireland they kept their heads down. I actually think that it wasn’t until maybe five years ago that they’ve really reclaimed her again. Nobody had her back at the time. 

Tell me about convincing Sinéad to participate in the film, and the interview you conducted.

The stars aligned in early 2018 when my co-writers and co-producers put together a one-pager for her team about our concept, which thankfully is pretty identical to the final film. I was expecting a very polite “Not a chance in hell,” but, in fact, they agreed. I think it was timing—because in 2018 the world was on fire and so much had happened: Trump, Weinstein, MeToo, and in Ireland alone we had the equal marriage referendum in 2015, and we were gearing up to the abortion referendum in 2018, and it was like, where was Sinéad in all of this? One of the boldest, most outspoken women, surely, in the last 30 years—where is she? Why isn’t she mentioned? So I think that was why it was agreed. Also because I never set out to do a biopic. I had no interest in doing the birth-to-today, tell-all story. It was a very focused five years: This is the story I want to tell.

The interview was over a weekend at the end of 2019, and it was so amazingly coherent—a clear and honest interview, and it formed the entire backbone for the film. And I suppose what was so important for the me was that even though the media has done such an amazing job of painting Sinéad as flippant, issue-hopping, and non-consistent, to have this beautiful interview where she’s clear as a bell saying what she needs to say became quite profound in a way. The stuff she was saying in the late ‘80s and early ’90s is exactly what she has been saying at every point through the last 30 years. She’s always been rock-solid in what she believed.

I have this sense that there is a lot of latent interest in her out in the culture. What has the response to your early screenings been like?

It’s been wild to see the response—and really the response to the film is the response to her. What’s been so brilliant is just seeing the different demographics: We’ve been screening the film all around the world since Sundance in January, and at every screening I have seen so many wild-eyed teenagers coming up to me and just going…What?! She is not what we thought! The younger ones thought Sinéad was somehow bad or had done something bad, but when you see the whole story play out and you see how cool she is, and how contemporary she is, and how bold, she seems to be touching youngsters in a really interesting way. So I’m really excited to see what happens there. The film seems to be almost lighting a fire under people, and what I hoped was the film would leave people furious and galvanized—and rightly so. A lot of the screenings have been emotional and rowdy and noisy.

Tell me about the decision to leave out the tragedy and turmoil in her later life—the loss of her son, for instance—and the tabloid stories that we’ve seen about her.

To be honest, Sinéad has had such a full life, and there’s so much in there to unpack, that to be able to put together a 90-minute film we had to be very focused on what we were going to look at. The key thing for me with the film was getting a foundation and re-writing the wrongs, and to be able to actually examine the cause and effect around what she did. If you can understand why she did what she did, everything else makes sense post-1993. So we had to go right back to understand the Ireland that had spawned her and why that had created these actions in 1992. To do a 1966-to-today film was deemed impossible without it being a very thinly spread mess. And honestly we weren’t interested in it. We want to go back and clear the air. There could be 10 documentaries made about Sinéad O'Connor—and I hope there will be.