— in which O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” before tearing up the photo to protest, she later said, the Catholic Church’s enablement of child abuse — turned her into a full-blown pariah. Two weeks later, O’Connor was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden and fled, crying, into the arms of Kris Kristofferson.
The ugly incident at the Dylan concert opens “Nothing Compares,” a new documentary that offers a sympathetic reappraisal of O’Connor as an iconoclastic artist whose provocations were decades ahead of their time When Ferguson was a young teenager, she and her friends discovered O’Connor on their own terms and swiftly fell in love: “We just felt like we needed her.”
Using extensive archival video — including footage from a wedding at which a teenage O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — brief, stylized re-creations and interviews with O’Connor’s friends, collaborators and contemporaries, “Nothing Compares” traces O’Connor’s meteoric rise from troubled teenager to Rolling Stone cover girl, and her even more precipitous fall from grace.
O’Connor shares insights into some of her most notable songs and their connection to traumatic chapters in her life — particularly her painful relationship with her mother, who died in a car crash in 1985, a few years before O’Connor burst onto the music scene.
Welcome to reality, LAT
Make sure to mention that she became a practicing Muslim and found true purpose in her life.