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Sinéad O’Connor at the Olympic: Dave Fanning reviews the most eagerly awaited concert of 1988

From The Irish Times archive: ‘As waif-like as we imagined, she seems a lot friendlier than the persona suggested by the songs on her album’

Olympic Ballroom: Sinéad O'Connor on stage in Dublin on March 4th, 1988. Photograph: INM/Getty

Dave Fanning
Fri Jul 28 2023 - 05:00

Originally published on March 5th, 1988

It’s the sign of healthy times that the most eagerly awaited concert on the 1988 rock calendar is the debut hometown appearance from a young Dublin female performer who released her self-penned, self-produced debut album just six months ago. With the second single going top 20 in Britain, the album has attained gold status in Canada and the top spot on US college radio. Most significantly, this weekend sees the album The Lion and the Cobra enter the US album charts at No 46. As I say, healthy. Needless to say, the concert sold out weeks ago.

With few hometown nerves on show, some of the finer points were, nonetheless, understandably forced to take a back seat. This is not to suggest for one second that this wasn’t a triumph. It was. The five-member band (including, on bass and drums, the “other two” members of Britain’s most famous 1980s band, the now-defunct Smiths) were dab hands at the spicy mixture of subtlety and power, and Sinéad O’Connor has a smile which more than compensates for the lack of between-song patter.

Clutching the mike stand with both hands throughout and as waif-like as we imagined, she seems a lot friendlier than the persona suggested by the songs on her album and the videos of Troy and Mandinka which enjoy heavy rotation on the video channels. Although she played the crowd-pleasing Mandinka twice, the new numbers, especially solid-based rock thumpers like Jump in the River, augur well for the future.

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Her songs are full of quirky little stories which change gear as abruptly as she rears her shaved head, and the simultaneous vocal sidesteps hark back in theory to the vocal polar opposites of 1960s Cilla Black. Except that Sinéad is always soothing, always impassioned and usually aloof, vulnerable and defiant. If that’s a contradiction, then so be it.

Sinéad O'Connor