Old music: Sinéad O'Connor – Nothing Compares 2 U

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Through the summer of 1990 Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O'Connor was not only pervasive but quite inescapable. It was a huge international hit. You could hear it in taxis, shops, friends' houses in London, New York, Berlin, Sydney and O'Connor's home city of Dublin. It was No 1 in them all, and was the biggest selling single of the year in the US. The intitial sounds of strings and the piano notes all warned us to get out the Kleenex.
Every line of the song packs an emotional wallop, from the opening: "It's been seven hours and fifteen days, since you took your love away …" Which of us can't remember being binned by a lover and recalling every hour or even minute since the blow fell? It continues with a series of moods, from anguish, regret. through spitting anger, and finally to something close to resignation and acceptance. It is a lifetime's emotion magically condensed into four minutes.

The song was written by Prince, who recorded it as part of a funk album with his group Family. The album failed. The author's version is all right if you like that kind of thing, but is a feeble throwaway next to O'Connor's majestic, soaring, anthem of loss and regret.
What launched the song was the video. Most of it shows O'Connor's almost shaven head – it's said that she had her hair cropped in response to her record company's demand that she grew it long to make herself look more attractive – her eyes registering every line of the lyric. When she sings "all flowers in the backyard that you planted, mama, all died when you went away" (the "mama" reminding us that the song was written for a man singing to a woman), two tears run down her cheeks. Later it was said that this was because she was reminded of her abusive mother, though who can tell? O'Connor once tore up a picture of the Pope on live television; it's impossible to discern what is real, what is PR, what is reality pretending to be PR.
When she is not shown in close-up, she's wandering round the frost-covered Parc de Saint-Cloud in Paris, in a cloak, so she looks like an androgynous monk. Doesn't matter. The note-perfect performance is immaculate, gut-wrenching, miserable and wonderful, one of those songs that drag us back kicking, screaming, yet thrilled, to what lurks in all of our pasts.

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