Sinead O’Connor’s greatest hit was written by Prince. When they met, there were fisticuffs

achieved quite a decent success after the release of their debut album “The Lion and The Cobra”. But that wasn’t even a fraction of what happened after she covered the 1984 song for her second album. The single “Nothing Compares 2 U” reached the top of the US Billboard Hot 100 and became an international hit. The music video shot in Paris set standards in the music industry for many years, and the song itself remains the biggest hit in the Irish singer’s career to this day.

Sinead O’Connor after meeting Prince: I never want to see that devil again

Prince wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1984 for the funk band The Family, who were signed to his label. The song initially did not receive a very enthusiastic reception, but everything changed when O’Connor released her cover in 1990. Publicly, Prince praised the new version: “I love it, it’s great! I’m looking for cosmic meaning in everything. I think we did everything we could with this song, and then someone else was going to come along and take it over,” he said in an interview, which reports Joe Taysom in a text for .

However, a different version of events was presented by Sinead O’Connor. In an interview with The Times, she said: “First, Prince doesn’t like it when people cover his songs. Second, he had all these female protégés and he was annoyed that I wasn’t one of them. Third, my manager Steve Fargnoli he was his manager before and they were involved in a lawsuit. Plus, he was a bloody female boxer. I’m sure I wasn’t the only woman he hit,” she related the circumstances of their first and last meeting.

After the success of the cover performed by O’Connor, Prince asked her to meet face to face, and she agreed. She bitterly regretted it later and on the show “Good Morning Britain” in 2019, she told how everything turned out: “We tried to fight. It’s not a joke, it was a very scary situation. It was in Los Angeles. He called me to his house and I I stupidly agreed. He didn’t like me being his protégée and that’s what he wanted. He wanted me to be his protégé and he banned me from swearing in interviews. I told him where to go,” she described with Irish verve. The atmosphere was then to change drastically:

He went upstairs to get a pillow and there was something hard in it. I ran out of his house and hid behind a tree. At five in the morning we met on the Malibu freeway – I spit on him, he tried to hit me. I had to call someone’s house because that’s what my father taught me – to ring someone’s door if I found myself in a similar situation.

Sinead O’Connor was a victim of domestic violence as a child – her mother abused her mentally and physically. She could beat a child, starve it all day and call it names. She also forced her daughter to steal – the singer described some of these events in her autobiography – her memoirs were also published in Polish in 2021. Meeting Prince was supposed to bring back the worst memories of his youth. In the book, O’Connor wrote that after that incident, “I never wanted to see that devil again.” She kept her word.

Her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, sold so well that it went multi-platinum in both the US and UK. In 1991, she won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. The crisis in the career of the singer broke out in 1992, when during her performance on the live program “Saturday Night Live” she tore a picture of Pope John Paul II on the vision. It was an expression of her protest against the fact that the Vatican did not react to the fact that the Catholic Church in Ireland covered up numerous cases of pedophilia and child molestation. O’Connor herself studied at a school run by nuns. The event turned out to be fateful – O’Connor was booed at the next concert and later had to stop the promotional tour. Already then, the singer announced the end of her career and suffered one of many nervous breakdowns.