Sinéad O’Connor performs her only UK gig

It’s an easy thing, ridiculing Sinéad O’Connor. We live in depoliticised, humanist times. The last thing we need is an angry, shaven-headed, sometimes lesbian priest, banging on about this, that and the other. Cynicism and apathy look down with a knowing eye on sincerity and action.

Strangely the only UK date of her summer excursions, O’Connor’s Gateshead show will be a stripped-down affair, and will mainly feature songs from last year’s Theology. A double album, it contains the same tracks on both; acoustic on the first album and orchestrated with a full band on the second.

This ought to be a great opportunity to demonstrate how the same song can be given a totally different feel and meaning, using arrangement and production aesthetics alone. But the versions just aren’t sufficiently different. The acoustic album isn’t bare and honest enough, and the full band album lacks the contemporary sensibilities of an album made in 2007. Fans tend to hark back to O’Connor’s first two albums; The Lion And The Cobra, containing the indescribable Troy; and I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, which featured her definitive, chart-topping rendition of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U.

Ironically, the trouble with O’Connor’s later work is that it sounds like her early work. Or rather, it sounds as if it was made at the same time. Bombastic reverb and synthy pad sounds were fashionable in the ambitious late 1980s. But in 2007, with a stripped-down aesthetic the order of the day, O’Connor can’t even leave the reverb and the pads alone on the acoustic side of Theology.

Her career has always been a battle between prodigious talent and unattractive self-aggrandisement. We live in sceptical times, so if she wants both her music and spirituality to be taken seriously, she’s going to have to lose the melodramatic spin.

Tues, Jul 22, Hall 1, The Sage Gateshead, St Mary’s Square, Gateshead Quays, Gateshead, 7.30pm, £7 and £29.50. Tel: 0191 443 3661. Metro: Gateshead. www.sinead-oconnor.com

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