ABSTRACT
On Friday 6 September 2019, the singer-musician Sinead O’Connor appeared on the Irish state broadcaster’s long-running light entertainment programme The Late Late Show and delivered a powerful, nuanced performance of two songs, each of which enjoys classic status within modern Irish popular music history. The idea that popular music is indelibly stamped by the geo-spatial context within which it’s produced is less engaging in 2020 than it was in the 1980s. O’Connor embodied a disturbing mixture of innocence and vulnerability on the one hand, and aggression and anger on the other. Many of the individual songs on I Do Not Want, for example, follow a similar pattern with O’Connor singing sweetly and breathily to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar. The music of O’Connor and McGowan emerged from a particular stage in the technological organization of popular music; at the same time, it emerged from, and was indelibly informed by, a particular stage in Irish history.
