Goodnight, Thank You, You've Been a Lovely Audience DVD

Liner notes

'You must be joking', I say, but my friend is serious. He wants to show me Sinéad O'Connor singing Molly Malone, the cheesiest trad song of all, the lachrymose ballad you hear at closing time all over the world, wherever Irish eyes are weeping. I know Sinéad is wilful, contrary, she likes to take risks with her art, but not even she can get away with this one, can she? Alive, alive? No. Seafood can be sexy, sure - I'll glug an oyster in the right company with a candle burning - but not Molly and her bloody cockles. 'Sure,' says my friend, 'but you've got to watch this'.

We are in the far west of Ireland, where The Song of Heart's Desire is being edited, and frankly I would rather be outside in the glory of a late summer evening watching boats chase a dolphin across the bay than sitting in semi-darkness looking at a screen. Then Sinéad appears, the camera looking right into her face, close up, like it did all those years ago when so many people noticed her for the first time. Back then it was the video for Nothing Compares 2 U, a reasonable song she owned and made into something remarkable, confessional, and confrontational: but it was the image that made the initial impact. The eyes and the lashes and the tears and not forgetting the shaved head, they loved the shaved head in the newspapers, and the attitude: Bambi in power boots they called her, but the more subtle of us saw an extraordinary performer, a powerful woman who had the strength to be vulnerable. She wept for her mother when she sang that song, and sometimes still does. It went to number one in seventeen countries and made her world famous. You know the rest, the rows and the controversies, there is no need to go over all that again, but neither should it be dismissed. She talked and sang about all the pain and confusion in her, and all the things that had been done to her and to others, and she was like a prophet speaking out when nobody else dared. She was mad, they said: but when the scandals broke and the debates raged and the country of her birth began to change, it became obvious her words and songs had resonated with the lives of so many other people. She compared herself to a keener, one of the professional mourners hired to wail out the pain of the community at a funeral. 'Those of us who have a voice are crying the grief on behalf of those who are afraid to cry it,' she said. Those were not the words of a pop star but of an artist who took her endeavours seriously. Too seriously, some said, because they didn't see her as we do here, in the documentary, faffing and joking about with that mischievous look on her face. She was never really comfortable with her staggering global fame and Universal Mother marks the beginning of a retreat from pop. The records she has made in the ten years since have been true to her stubborn, mystic, salty self, which is how we arrive at Sean-Nós Nua, the old way made new. 'I won't be able to move forward until I sing these songs', she says in this film of their being recorded, and they are soul songs, the songs of the Irish soul, liberated from preconceptions. 'Young Irish people, sadly, are full of prejudice about this music', she told me just a few hours before performing it on stage for the first time. 'They reject it because it reminds them of the uncool, the tradheads, the theocracy, the bullshit. Someone said My Lagan Love was about death for example. It's about fucking. You've got to rescue the songs.' Her way of doing that is to sing them in away that expresses the common longing of the green, red and black, of the Irish tradition and the African and Caribbean music that stirs her up. The song of heart's desire is a yearning after the divine and a knowledge of what it is to live, a hope for release from earthly burdens and a celebration of the joy of skin on skin. Which is all well and good when she is allowing Paddy's Lament, a song of exile from the American Civil War, to be reborn as a powerful cry against the wars we are waging now, but Molly Malone? Dear Jah, there's a challenge. So there I am, indoors in the far west, fearing the worst but looking at that face, as bare and mesmerising as it was a decade ago but with eyes that know so much more, and I remember it is a ghost song. Her father used to sing it to himself as he drove along. 'She died of a fever', she sings. 'And no one could save her...' and she turns away from the camera, just for a second. A shiver thrills my neck. I have been moved, against my will, by this most familiar of songs. My friend smiles in recognition and together we say the same thing: 'How the hell does she do that?'

You can see her sing Molly twice here, live and in the studio, but there's also many moments of transcendence in the other performances: times when there is more to what we are seeing and hearing and feeling than the voice of a woman and a collection of instruments, signs of something greater than ourselves. 'Sinéad is an exquisite singer', Donal Lunny says, and the Quincy Jones of Irish music should know. 'She is one of the big singers, a performer who can bring a tear to your eye and put a chill down the back of your neck.' How does she do it? Sinéad herself says she tries to move her personality out of the way and act as a channel for whatever ghosts inhabit each song - the ghost of the person who wrote it, or who first sang it, or the person it was about - 'to let that person use my body and my voice, my emotion, my eyes and my mouth'. That does not allow for the way the singer remakes a song as it comes from within her body, nor for the cost of exposing emotions most of us spend our lives hiding, but while her explanation may seem unlikely in a material world it would not surprise singers from parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and in secret places all over the globe. Some of the greatest singers alive are not famous, they sing on within the sanctuary of their traditions, and those who hear them are privileged. Sinéad has trained in bel canto, the seemingly effortless operatic style of singing whose practitioners are encouraged to imagine themselves into the original world of the song. The sean-nós singers of Ireland go further, approaching songs as a powerful form of collective memory which carry waves of meaning through the generations. All the talk of ghosts makes sense if you find yourself in an Irish pub watching a frail old fella haul himself up on creaky limbs and sing sean-nós as the rest of the drinkers fall silent, until the room seems haunted.

Lillis Ó Laoire, perhaps the finest sean-nós singer alive, recognises Sinéad as 'a fellow traveller' who has the ability to 'say the song', to allow it to find its own expression through her. You will see that happen here, again and again, as has anyone who ever witnessed Sinéad amble on stage, smile coyly at the front row - "Thanks for the clap" - and then become transformed. She has not lost the warrior wail, the full-throated cry of defiance that was there when she made her first record as a teenager, and she has developed what they call the long note, the ability to sustain a phrase just a little longer than you expect so that it slips across the rhythm and unsettles the listener. Her most astonishing skill is the whisper that is not a whisper: when she sings so quietly her voice seems about to crack but it never does, and the note stays pure and true. I have stood in the back row of a packed auditorium and heard her do that, far away on stage, so that it sounded and felt as though she were whispering into my ear.If only. How can anyone who is capable of doing such a thing give it up? Is this really the last night of our acquaintance? It seems so. But if the role of 'Sinéad O'Connor' the public figure has become too exhausting to play, this is surely not the end of the singer. She may sing in the bath, or up a mountain or to her children, or unannounced at a session somewhere, but the voice will not be silenced. Will we miss her, when she is no longer singing for us? As the last line of the last song on this her last recording goes: 'I know your answer already.'

Cole Moreton