Kitty Empire 

Sinead O’Connor live review – a tigress tamed?

The extraordinary, tear-jerking force of Sinead O'Connor at her best is undermined by too much mid-tempo pop rock, writes Kitty Empire
  
  

‘Sheer force’: Sinead O’Connor at the Roundhouse.
‘From sublime to workmanlike’: Sinead O’Connor at the Roundhouse. Photograph: Christie Goodwin/Redferns Photograph: Christie Goodwin/Redferns via Getty Images

Sinead O'Connor walks on stage, barefoot and shorn, looking far more like herself than the image on her latest album cover. Released last Monday, I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss borrows its title from the recent Ban Bossy campaign aimed at empowering young girls, started by Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In polemic and proselytised by Beyoncé. According to a recent interview, the campaign struck a particular chord with O'Connor, who was struggling to take control of her own business affairs. Her accountant, she says, wasn't letting her do internet banking, lest she press the wrong button and spend all her money.

Like O'Connor at her best, I'm Not Bossy's cover image is full of confident mischief. It features the singer in a wig, skin-tight clothes and glam makeup, hamming it up as a sexy pop star. A wheeze to get people talking, it also works as pointed commentary on image-making in the wake of the singer's entanglements with Miley Cyrus last year. Cyrus, you will remember, paid tribute to Sinead's Nothing Compares 2U in one video for her Wrecking Ball single; another featured the singer in the buff astride a demolition ball. Concerned, O'Connor took Cyrus to task for getting her kit off. Cyrus responded with slurs on O'Connor's mental health. It wasn't pretty.

Like so much about O'Connor, this gig launching her latest album swings from one extreme to the other – from sombre to dryly funny (she's intimate with some monks who didn't take a vow of celibacy, she quips), from sublime to workmanlike. Someone throws a Gaza T-shirt onstage. O'Connor jokes that this is her first ever costume change, peels off her tank top and puts the T-shirt on. It is the night of the day the news breaks about Robin Williams, and a heartfelt O'Connor dedicates her entire set to the departed comedian. Later she specifically directs two tracks towards anyone else contemplating Williams's way out.

8 Good Reasons is a potent song from O'Connor's new record that addresses the desire not to stick around in this life. "If I coulda gone/ Without hurting anyone," she whisper-sings at one point. The song concludes, albeit obliquely, that love is worth hanging on for.

Its thematic partner tonight is an electrifying a cappella I Am Stretched on Your Grave, the Irish traditional that found a home on O'Connor's second album, 1990's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Tonight it's utterly gripping, with O'Connor taking each line down to a whisper by its end. It could seem an affected technique, but instead it feels like a purposeful inversion of the logic of crescendo.

O'Connor's voice can be so mighty, she seems to have developed a singing technique to spare the microphone the full force of her vocal cords. She whips her head away sideways again and again. It's a harsh movement, full of precise denial: she seems to be saying "no" continually. Whoever is doing the monitor mix is constantly being instructed to turn something up or down. (She's not bossy, Sinead, she's just being the boss.)

At times tonight you well up because the combination of song and voice is so moving, or because the sheer force of her presence is so heroically defiant. This woman was the first public figure to say the Catholic church presided over the wholesale rape of children. Not for nothing does O'Connor have an old song called The Emperor's New Clothes, which deals with her compulsive truth-telling. "They laugh because they know they're untouchable/ not because what I said was wrong," she sings.

There are moments, though, when you seriously wonder about her musical judgment. A bunch of mid-tempo pop-rock songs played by an OK band are not, perhaps, the best vehicle for this extraordinary singer. The buzz on this latest album has revolved around its title and its art. There was some talk of O'Connor rediscovering the blues again, the Chicago variant, more party music than dirges. But there's little evidence of that tonight. For every riveting song like Queen of Denmark (a John Grant cover that featured on her last album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, there's a pudding of a rock tune.

New single Take Me to Church is one that doesn't serve the singer particularly well. The sentiments are riveting, but after a tense build-up in which O'Connor declares: "I don't want to love the way I loved before/ I don't want to love that way no more", the song relaxes into a chugging morass that defuses its power. Similarly, Kisses Like Mine has a winning vocal melody and some killer lines ("I'm special forces/ They bring me in after divorces") but its bloodless rock'n'roll could be so much more arresting. The nicey-nicey keyboard accompaniment on Streetcars just doesn't do her devastating lyric justice. O'Connor still looks and sings like a radical; this middle-of-the-road stuff ill suits her.

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