Travis: Tonight, Tyler and Travis return after a long absence to discuss the debut album from Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor, The Lion and the Cobra.
Before getting to anything musical, first things first: Sinead O’Connor was right. When she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live following an electrifying a capella performance of Bob Marley’s “War,” her action was widely mocked. Soon after her SNL appearance, she was booed offstage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert. The only one of the very strapping manly tough singer-songwriter men to stand up for her was Kris Kristofferson, who at times faced similar reactions to his own activism and left-wing beliefs, though he was never met with the same vitriol O’Connor was as a woman.
Sinead O’Connor was raised in the very Catholic, very conservative Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s. A rebellious teenager, she was locked away in a Magdalene laundry workhouse for 18 months, alongside many girls whose only crime was to show evidence of the rapes committed against them in the form of children they could not abort. The Catholic Church under John Paul II presided over those laundries, as well as decades of systematic child sexual abuse and resulting coverups. When she said “Fight the real enemy,” she was right. Everyone laughed at her. The controversy destroyed her career as a commercial artist in the United States. Which is a shame, because she was a unique songwriter with a powerful voice and an unparalleled willingness to lay her soul bare on record and onstage.
The first taste the wider world got of her powerful pipes and soul-baring lyrics was on her 1987 debut LP, The Lion and the Cobra, the album we’re discussing here today.
I picked this one, and have many thoughts about it, which I’m sure I’ll share as we go on. Did you have any idea what to expect from this one?
Tyler: I knew of O’Connor as a provocateur, as well as a tender human who seemed at least a little tortured. I recall her appearances in the pages of, say, Rolling Stone, mostly news and notes about her wandering path as both artist and, on occasion, spectacle. She’d come onto the scene with a supernova of a breakthrough single, but the photo-tearing moment and its aftermath left her banished from America. Hell, the week following her appearance, Joe Pesci hosted SNL and cracked with real seriousness that he “woulda given her such a smack.” The poor woman!
It is that breakthrough that I want to highlight here before we jump back to her debut. From her second LP, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, came a stunning, stunning rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The performance is stratospheric, and the song’s accompanying video—a close-up of O’Connor’s face as she sings, a tear rolling down her cheek as the song crests—is provocative in its simplicity. It’s a heartbreaker, and she absolutely crushes it.
That, then, is what I knew of Sinead going in—an all-time single and video, pieces of her journey, and the awful response to her bravery on live TV.
So I enter this curious about how O’Connor broke out, three years before “NC2U.” I admired her, and may she rest in true peace. It seemed to elude her too often in life.
Travis: It’s hard to talk about Sinead O’Connor without mentioning “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The song, video, and the pope picture incident are the quick talking points about her, probably what just about everyone our age and adjacent to it remembers about her. It was pretty much what I knew of her, too, until college when my musical tastes expanded.
I Do Not What What I Haven’t Got uses “Nothing Compares 2 U” as a centerpiece. It’s an intense album. On The Lion and the Cobra, O’Connor is still working through her influences: a little Prince here, some Peter Gabriel there, Irish traditional songs, post-punk Big Music like Big Country, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, and her countrymen U2. I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got solidifies those influences. It’s dark, grueling, and all of a mood. “Nothing Compares 2 U” is probably its lightest moment. George Michael once commented that he listened to the album once, found it brilliant, and could never listen to it again. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s an emotionally draining piece of music, mostly about her breakup with John Reynolds, the father of her child, who drummed on both I Do Not Want… and The Lion and the Cobra. It also features, on its second track, “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” (you can kinda get the vibe from that title), perhaps the most haunting possible use of the “Funky Drummer” sample in music history.
So while I Do Not Want… is probably O’Connor’s crowning artistic achievement, I find myself revisiting The Lion and the Cobra far more often for its varied moods, and for its snapshot in time of an artist figuring out who she is, and creating some pretty damn good songs in the process.
So, Tyler, do you Lion and Cobra?
Tyler: Curiouser and curiouser. I have found this one to be somewhat challenging. I love her voice and there are tracks on the album that I enjoy, or rather find haunting, when listening. And it finishes really strong, a wildly catchy carnal ode followed by a concluding pair of political (I believe?), quite memorable songs. I dig that stuff.
That praise given, I can’t say I love the whole thing. There’s a little Hugh Padgham-esque drum sound in places, that Phil Collins PAHPPP distraction, which often leaves me cold. Actually, that isn’t a terrible descriptor for much of what’s here—things are a little chilly to my ear.
It’s brave, though! She’s playing with “Jackie O” and emphatically demanding good sex and including a song called “Jerusalem,” to name but three bold moves on Lion and the Cobra. I don’t think I love it. But I damn well respect it.
Travis: I can understand the production being a distraction, especially the drum sound. This is a very 1987 album in that way.
Tyler: It’s not the best, but it doesn’t make me dislike the idea of further O’Connor listening. I’d like to hear her chops and her thoughts in a warmer environment.
Maybe not warmer. More organic.
Travis: The second album is definitely more organic, more lush. Probably colder in terms of emotional (and political) bleakness. I was trying to think of a movie to compare it to, something well done and emotionally honest but really hard to watch. The Deer Hunter is too extreme. I kept thinking of that Blue Valentine movie, except Sinead’s album is actually good.
I’ve also never seen Marriage Story. But you get the idea.
It’s interesting you highlight the end of the album for your strong points, as I tend to feel the opposite. I find “Troy” pretty hard to follow, and the last three tracks are more of an afterthought for me (though I really like “I Want Your (Hands On Me)” as a complete and total vibe shift from the rest of the album).
I see “Troy” as the album’s highlight, almost like a trial run for what she’d be doing on the second album. It’s spare until it isn’t, lyrics full of literary and classical allusion, a vocal showcase, synths and strings rather than guitars and drums. Also a classic in the “we are breaking up as we record this” fiery relationship song canon.
Tyler: Like No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom!
I kid.
Travis: You haven’t lived until you’ve been at a bar, drunk, where a girl sings “Don’t Speak” and her friend starts crying because she just got dumped.
But I digress. My other album highlight is the run of three songs to open the album. “Jackie” feels like a timeless traditional song but Sinead wrote it herself. A live performance video of it, posted by someone I follow on Twitter on the anniversary of her July, 2023 death, spurred this latest Sinead binge. “Mandinka” is probably the most conventional track on the album, and fits neatly in with the college rock of the time, but Sinead’s odd lyrical touches make it a little more left field. And “Jerusalem,” which you mentioned before, is damn good.
Maybe the next time a friend of mine gets dumped, I’ll take them to a bar and sing “Troy.”
(I cannot sing “Troy.” I do not imagine anyone other than Sinead O’Connor could.)
Tyler: Have you explored any of her later albums?
Travis: I have done some exploring. Like I said, the second album is great but a bummer. Still, worth it even for the bit of light that “Nothing Compares 2 U” provides. The third album, Am I Not Your Girl?, which is incidentally the one she was promoting with that Saturday Night Live performance, is a hard right turn from the first two, an album of mostly jazz standards with a full orchestra. I don’t much care for it, but it’s worth checking out if you’re curious what “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” would sound like as done by a banshee.
The fourth, Universal Mother, is sort of a back to basics, dark folky record. It features a cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, which rules, and another song I really like called “Fire On Babylon” written with her ex-husband/ex-drummer. There’s a heartbreaking song on it by Irish songwriter Phil Coulter called “Scorn Not His Simplicity,” about a child with Downs syndrome. So yeah, also good, also not an easy listen.
The most immediately pleasurable release beyond the debut is probably the EP Gospel Oak, released in 1997, which is a collection of a half-dozen acoustic songs, five by O’Connor and one traditional, that showcase her voice over mostly acoustic instrumentation.
I haven’t heard any material beyond that, though I’m very curious about two covers albums she’s done that aren’t available on streaming and that I look for in record bins, just in case. The first is 2002’s Sean-Nos Nua, an album of traditional Irish folk songs, and the second is 2005’s Throw Down Your Arms, a roots-reggae album featuring songs by Burning Spear, Peter Tosh, The Abyssinians, and the Wailers recorded at the Marley family’s Tuff Gong studios in Kingston, with none other than Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare and as the rhythm section. It could be amazing, or it could be a disaster, it doesn’t really feel like there’s any possible in between.
Tyler: That pedigree!
If only it were 2009 and we were shamelessly pulling sketchy-blog-linked albums off of, like, Rapidshare.
Travis: Yeah. I could probably find the whole thing on YouTube but it feels weird to listen to things that way to me, still.
Tyler: It isn’t ideal.
Travis: Sinead Reggae Covers Album Blogspot
Tyler: The gall!
Travis: I don’t know, I don’t have a ton more to say about this album or any of her others. I will say I heard some The Cranberries recently and was like “oh yeah this wouldn’t exist without Sinead O’Connor.” I’m sure there are plenty of other artists who were influenced by her musically, politically, lyrically, and probably some who got some of the success she threw away because she couldn’t keep herself from speaking out about injustice.
Tyler: I’m glad the States grew out of scorning outspoken human rights activists. All is now well.
Writers' Loom 