Night Beat (51 page)

feargal sharkey: songs of hearts and thieves

“
A
Good Heart,” written by Los Angeles’ Maria McKee, of Lone Justice almost-fame, and sung by the U.K.’s Feargal Sharkey, was played repeatedly on U.S. radio in the spring of 1986 (in England, in fact, it became a number 1 hit), and for fair reason. “A Good Heart” is an irresistibly crafted dance track about romantic search that communicates a great surface of good-natured hope, and a great depth of petrified fear. The song is also the opening track for the eponymous solo debut album by Sharkey (once the lead vocalist for Northern Ireland’s most promising late-1970s pop-punk band, the Undertones), and with the singer’s wavery voice intoning the heartening chorus, “A Good Heart” opens the album in the manner of a tremulous invocation: “I know that a real love is quite a price/And a good heart these days is hard to find. . . . /So please be gentle with this heart of mine.”

But if “A Good Heart” is a lover’s prayer, the song that immediately follows it, “You Little Thief” (written by Tom Petty’s keyboardist, Benmont Tench), is as bitter a curse as I’ve ever heard in pop—a magnificent statement of pain so wrathful, so intense, so true, chances are you will never hear it on radio. “You little THIEF,” rails Sharkey, “you let me
love
you/You saw me STUMbling, you saw me FALL/You left me broken/Shattered and blEEEding/But there’s no hard feelings/There’s no feelings/At ALL.”

Of course, that last claim isn’t exactly true: There’s so much lyrical and musical temper in this song, and in Sharkey’s vocal delivery of it, that it is almost too overpowering to hear. Instantly, you are reminded of the most deep-felt moments in the music of Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry—two singers who, like Sharkey, once sang so forcefully, so nakedly, that they could redeem
any
conceit or frivolity—and instantly you realize just how inadequately their best music compares to what this Irish aspirant manages to achieve here, by only half-trying. In part, that’s because Sharkey isn’t weighed down by any of the self-defeating irony or preening hubris that have always been part and parcel of Stewart’s and Ferry’s acts. Instead, Sharkey just sings as if the art of these songs resides in the meaning of their words, and not in the histrionics of the performer. The result is one of the most genuinely emotive, intoxicating vocal triumphs of 1986.

marianne faithfull: trouble in mind

I
have never heard blues sung in the manner of “Trouble in Mind,” the performance that opens the soundtrack to the 1986 movie of the same name. It is more like a painting of the blues—or some kind of stripped-down study of the music’s elements—than a true enactment of the form. And yet it’s as definitive an example of what blues might do in these modern times as you’d hope to find.

The song opens with an ethereal, harplike synthesizer sweep—not much more than an exercise in texture—played by arranger Mark Isham. Then Isham dresses up the moment a little: some muted trumpet (suggestive of Miles Davis’ on
In a Silent Way
), a few moody piano arpeggios—all the elements weaving together at a snail’s pace, congealing into a cool-to-the-touch, high-tech consonance. Then a voice enters, stating its lament as directly, as simply, as brokenly as possible: “Trouble in MIND, that’s true/I have AL-MOST lost my mind/Life ain’t worth livin’
/Some
times I feel like dyin’.” The voice belongs to Marianne Faithfull, and she imparts immediately, in her frayed matter-of-fact manner, that she understands firsthand the experience behind the words: She lifts the song from blues cliché to blues apotheosis. What is remarkable, though, is how she does this without indulging for a moment in the sort of growly vocalese that many singers pass off for feeling. In fact, Faithfull does it simply by adhering to a literal, unembellished reading of blues melody. But behind that artlessness, the song’s meanings inform her tone—they even inform the silences between notes—and that tone alone nails the listener, holding one’s ear to an extraordinary performance. Not much more happens in the song, but not much more needs to. The directness of the vocal and the stillness of the arrangement virtually sound like a portrait of emotional inertia—and of course, that’s the way they’re supposed to sound.

Before
Trouble in Mind
’s soundtrack ends, there is one more unforgettable moment: Faithfull and Isham’s rendition of Kris Kristofferson’s “The Hawk (El Gavilan).” At the outset, a lone synthesizer delineates a melodic motif, a trumpet dips between the spaces of the strain, and Faithfull takes on the lyric in the same unvarnished manner as the earlier song. “Got to make your own rules, child,” she sings, “Got to break your own chains/The dreams that possess you/Can blossom and bless you/Or run you insane.” The textures move a bit more here, and there’s a more gradual undertow to the arrangement—an undertow as gentle and sure as the momentum that carries life to death. Couple the music’s steady, calm flow with the lyric’s images of loss and flight and yearning, and you have a performance that manages to sound both resigned and unyielding at once. Which is to say, Kristofferson-Isham-Faithfull’s “The Hawk” may be pretty-faced, high-tech pop, but at the recording’s heart, it is a spawn of the blues. Its resonance is beyond trend: It is ageless.

stan ridgway’s wrong people

A
s leader of the Wall of Voodoo, Stan Ridgway was nearly despicable: He didn’t so much reduce hard-boiled cynicism to a cliché as he reduced it to a sneering inflection—which might have been a kick if the attacks hadn’t all been delivered in a slurring monotone. In other words, Wall of Voodoo’s gambit was a mean-minded, dead-ended one, and apparently even Ridgway realized this, for just as the band reached an audience large enough worth insulting, the singer “fired himself” from the enterprise. The joke, it seems, was up.

Maybe so, but the hard work had just begun. In 1986, two years after checking out, Stan Ridgway checked back in with
The Big Heat
(I.R.S.), and damn if it wasn’t among the best L.A.-founded albums of that year. Perhaps what made
The Big Heat
work so well is that, instead of viewing his characters from the outside and laughing at their uneasiness and their seeming dispensability, Ridgway now crawled inside their skin—and discovered that it’s actually kind of an intriguing place to be, a place that lends itself to hauntingly, rollickingly effective storytelling. In any event, instead of sneering, Ridgway now shudders a bit as he relates the accounts of people in flight—people running from or chasing after murder and deception, people who seem horrified and enthralled by their own admissions, people who have been forgotten but sure won’t leave life that way. They are, in fact, California characters like those in the works of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson (mean and damned), or of Kim Nunn, Robert Siodmak, or Fritz Lang (rugged and redeemed). Either way, they are people you give a full hearing to—and as a result,
The Big Heat
also demands no less than a full hearing.

In
The Big Heat,
the wrong people—hateful, bored, lost, hurting, dangerous people—not only are given a voice, but, here and there, are given a shot at victory. Somehow, it’s an exhilarating victory. “You gotta watch the ones who keep their hands clean,” sings Stan Ridgway in the title song. On
The Big Heat,
the artist gets his hands dirtier than ever. Hence, he’s maybe, just maybe, worth our trust. One thing’s for certain: There are few artists who can be so scary and unaffected at the same time as Stan Ridgway.

sinéad o’connor’s songs of experience

“
C
an we shut out the lights?” asks Sinéad O’Connor, in a soft voice.

It is a cold and blustery late February 1990 night in the center of London, and O’Connor—a twenty-three-year-old, bantam-sized Irish-born woman, with round, doleful eyes and a quarter-inch crewcut—is perched on a stool in a BBC Radio sound studio, holding an acoustic guitar, and looking a little uneasy. She has come here to perform some songs from her newly released second album,
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
And for reasons of her own, she feels like singing these songs in the dark tonight. After the lights dim, the room falls quiet, and O’Connor begins strumming the hushed opening chords to “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”—the account of a young woman who has been brought to the edge of her deepest-held hopes and dreams, and then deserted by the one person she needed and trusted most. It is one of O’Connor’s most powerful and affecting songs, and for good reason: Not so long ago, she more or less endured the experience that she is singing about, and it transformed her life.

Tonight, she seems to be singing the song as if she were composing its painful recollections and caustic indictments on the spot. In a voice that veers between hesitation and accusation, O’Connor sings with a biting precision about the moment she realized that the man she loved and trusted no longer cared for her need or faith in him—it was in the instant that she recognized he would no longer hold on to her hand as a plane would lift off—and she rues all the abandonment and betrayal that her expectation has left her with. And then, just when the music should surge into the crashing chords and snarling yowls that frame the song’s bitter kiss-off, O’Connor halts the performance abruptly, and for several long seconds, there is only silence from the dark booth. “I need to practice that one a bit,” she says finally, in a shaky tone. “I need to calm down.”

A minute later O’Connor resumes the song, and this time she leans harder into the performance. It is an exceptional thing to witness. Somewhere in that darkened booth, a young woman with an almost supernatural voice—a voice that can convey rage, longing, shock, and sorrow, all in the same breath—is both chasing down, and being chased by, some difficult private memories, and it seems less like a pop performance than an act of necessary release. It is also a timeless ritual: Pop and jazz and blues singers have been sitting in darkened recording booths turning private pains into public divulgence for generations now. But many of the best of those singers—from Billie Holiday to John Lennon—were, in one way or another, ravaged by that darkness. If Sinéad O’Connor has her way, she is going to howl at that darkness until there are no more bitter truths that it can hold.

MAYBE IT’S HER startling looks that first catch you—that soft black bristle that barely covers her naked head or those soulful hazel eyes that can fix you with a stare that is hungry, vulnerable, and piercing in the same instant. Sooner or later, though, it is Sinéad O’Connor’s voice—and its harsh beauty—that you will have to reckon with. According to her father, it is a voice that she inherited from her mother, a passionate and often troubled woman. According to Nigel Grainge, the president of her record company, it is a voice that bears the lineage of her strife-torn and heartbroken homeland, Ireland. “We’re talking soul singing, like Van Morrison,” he says. “That is,
real
soul singing.” O’Connor herself says she never really thought much about where her voice emerged from. Like her heart and memory, it was just another sign of deep familial pain.

Whatever its origins, O’Connor’s voice is a remarkable and forceful instrument, and it has quickly established her as one of the most estimable new pop artists to emerge in years. This is a heartening development, though also—given the sort of music that O’Connor makes—a completely unlikely one. On the basis of her 1987 debut work,
The Lion and the Cobra—
a brilliant album about sexual fury and spiritual passion—O’Connor seemed fated for a career like that of Van Morrison, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, or many of rock’s other great truth-tellers: namely, a career of essential artistry, on the border of mainstream affection. But with her current work,
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,
Sinéad O’Connor has achieved both widespread success and flat-out greatness. Furious and lovely,
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
is the work of a young woman who has had to weather some hard and haunting losses, and who sets out to rebuild her faith. By the album’s end, she has won a certain measure of hard-earned peace, but only by venting some racking pain, and by leveling an excoriating rage at those who have betrayed her. In an era when even many of the best pop albums are increasingly subservient to the dominance of style and beat, Sinéad O’Connor has fashioned a full-length work that takes uncommon thematic risks, and that makes style entirely subservient to emotional expression. Like Bob Dylan’s
Blood on the Tracks
and John Lennon’s
Plastic Ono Band,
O’Connor’s
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
is an intensely introspective work that is so affecting and farsighted, it seems capable of defining the mood or experience of an entire audience.

Which is exactly what it appears to be doing. In the United Kingdon, where it was released in late February 1990, the album bulleted to the top of the charts in its first week of release. In America,
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
vaulted to number 1 on Billboard’s Top 100 album chart within a month of its release—an almost unprecedented feat for a relatively unknown female artist. Apparently, there is something in O’Connor’s fierce and rapturous music that is touching a public nerve, though the singer herself believes that it is the video version of the album’s first single—a deep-blue cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”—that has paved the way for the album’s success. Indeed, “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a gripping performance: For five minutes, O’Connor holds the camera—and therefore the viewer—with a heartsick gaze, and tries to make sense of how she lost the one love that she could never afford to lose. One instant she tosses out sass, the next, utter desolation, until by the song’s end, the singer’s grief has become too much for her, and she cries a solitary tear of inconsolable loss.

“I didn’t intend for that moment to happen,” says O’Connor, “but when it did, I thought, “I should let this happen.’ I think it shocks people. Some people, I know, really hate it—maybe because it’s so honest, or maybe because they’re embarrassed by displays of emotions.

“But I think I’m probably living proof of the danger of
not
expressing your feelings. For years I
couldn’t
express how I felt. I think that’s how music helped me. I also think that’s why it’s the most powerful medium: because it expresses for other people feelings that they can’t express, but that need to be expressed. If you
don’t
express those feelings—whether they’re aggressive or loving or whatever—they will fucking blow you up one day.”

SPEND MUCH TIME around O’Connor, and you’ll find that she’s a lot like her music—that is, she is smart and complex, and she can effortlessly tap into deep wells of sadness and anger. But as often as not, she can also prove sweet and goofy, and can seem truly bewildered by the rituals and expectations that accompany fame. For example, the day after her performance at BBC Radio, during the photo session for this story, O’Connor takes the occasion as an opportunity for listening to some homemade tapes of reggae oldies and recent hip-hop faves like Queen Latifah and N.W.A. (Hip-hop, says O’Connor, is the one pop form that she feels has the closest spiritual kinship to her own music.) In between shots, O’Connor dances around and shares giggle fits and hilarious private asides with her longtime friend, personal assistant, and constant companion Ciara O’Flanaghan. Sometimes, right before striking a serious pose, Sinéad will roll her eyes and crack up, as if she’s both tickled and embarrassed by the notion of her own celebrity.

At other times, the realities of O’Connor’s fame can prove less amusing. The afternoon following the photo shoot, O’Connor is walking down a hallway at the offices of her London record company, wearing dark sunglasses and a black leather jacket. She has the hood of a white jersey pulled over her head, and seems deep in thought as she walks along, staring down at her feet. At first, she doesn’t respond to hearing her name called. It turns out that she has just finished reading a blistering article about her in the latest issue of the pop music newsweekly
New Musical Express,
and it has left her near tears.

In England, O’Connor has become something of a controversial figure with both the music and mainstream press. When she arrived on the scene, she was given to uttering often acerbic views about politics, the music business, and sex—and came across, in
NME’
s estimation, as “the female Johnny Rotten of the ’80s, an angst-ridden young woman who shocked established society with her looks and views.”

Recently, O’Connor has done her best to undo this image, though the British press has been reluctant to let her outdistance or make amends for her past, and
NME
in particular still regards her as an
enfant terrible.
In this morning’s article, the newspaper takes several of the more controversial statements that O’Connor made a couple of years ago on a range of topics—including her views about U2, the Irish political situation, and her former manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh—and contrasts them with her recent statements on the same subjects. It’s a scathing and intentionally mean-witted piece of journalism, and at the article’s end, writer Eugene Masterson asks: “Does a leopard change its spots so quickly or is Sinéad a chameleon who changes her views to suit her moods?”
NME’
s implication couldn’t be clearer: O’Connor is a fickle opportunist and manipulator, who has abandoned her forthrightness at the first blush of success.

“When the press looked at me,” she says, “they saw a woman with a shaved head and a pair of Doc Marten boots, and they assumed that I was aggressive and strong and tough. The truth is, I’m not really
any
of those things.” As she talks, O’Connor is tucked into the backseat of a taxi, en route to her home in the Golder’s Green area of North London. She stares out the window as the car makes its way through the rain-drenched maze of British urban sprawl, and she talks in a low but intense voice. “Just because I’m a woman that speaks my mind about things and doesn’t behave like some stupid blond bimbo, doesn’t mean that I’m aggressive. It really hurts me when people think that—when they make me out to be some sort of nasty person, when all I want to do is be a
good
person. It can hurt so much that I feel like crying.”

O’Connor pauses and pulls absently at the hint of forelock at the front of her hair. “They don’t care that if they say, ’Sinéad O’Connor’s a complete bastard,’ I’m going to sit up all night and think, ’I
am
a complete bastard.’ And when I’m walking down the street, I’ll be thinking, ’Everyone’s looking at me, thinking what a
complete bastard
I am.’ Obviously, if they listened to any of my music—to a song like ’The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’—they would realize that I couldn’t possibly be as secure and strong as they would expect me to be. Obviously there’s a lot of insecurity in there.

“But they don’t care about what a person has been through.”