Sinéad O’Connor nominated for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Sinéad O’Connor has been posthumously nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The singer, who died in July, is among 15 acts to be nominated which will be whittled down to an undetermined smaller number April.

The ceremony will take place later this year at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

If she succeeds in being inducted, it will be the second major tribute paid to her following on from the performance of Nothing Compares to You at the Grammy awards by Annie Lennox.

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Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record.

She will face stiff competition from Mariah Carey, Cher, Oasis, Foreigner, Ozzy Osborne and Mary J Blige.

Ozzy Osbourne, who is already part of the pantheon as a member of Black Sabbath, has gotten the nod as a solo artist for the first time.

Cher is nominated despite swearing last year that she wouldn’t join it “if they paid me a million dollars” having been excluded from it for so long.

The large number of women on the list is seen as a response to the firing of the editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner, from the hall’s governing body that decides who to include.

In a now notorious interview with the New York Times last year, Wenner said the absence of women or musicians of colour from a book he wrote called The Masters, about popular music’s most influential artists, was justified.

“They just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wenner said and he dismissed Joni Mitchell as “not a philosopher of rock’n’roll … She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test.”

Before 2019, only 8 per cent of inductees into the Hall of Fame were women. Between 2021 and 2023 a third of inductees were women and 48 per cent were people of colour.

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