Nothing compares to it: Revisiting the wild story of Sinéad O’Connor’s hit 35 years on
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Everyone remembers the Irish singer’s mesmerising video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Few know that Prince was the musician who wrote and released the original – or the level of chaos that ensued when he and O’Connor met. On the song’s 35th anniversary, Mark Beaumont delves into its emotive story.
![[O’Connor performing in 1992. She revealed in her memoir that she always thought of her mother when she sang ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/07/16/shutterstock_editorial_209350a.jpg)
When a long black limo pulled up outside Sinéad O’Connor’s LA home one night in 1990, she imagined it was her Cinderella moment. A grand carriage, dispatched to whisk her to her Prince. When she told friends that The Purple One had called earlier that night to suggest a meeting, and then sent a car to pick her up, they got romantic ideas. “We all thought maybe me and him would fall in love,” O’Connor wrote in her 2021 memoir Rememberings. Or that at least they’d get along. “We thought ‘He must be wanting to celebrate the song doing so well. There’ll be cake!’”.
![[As a limo delivered O’Connor to the front door of Prince’s mansion, she was met not with cake but with confrontation]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/11/19/12/MixCollage-19-Nov-2024-12-14-PM-6388.jpg)
“The song” had done very well indeed. O’Connor’s lustrous, synthetically orchestrated version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”, released on 8 January 1990 – 35 years ago this week – had broken the world’s heart with just two tears on a young woman’s cheeks.
![[O’Connor’s description of the secretive Prince as a threatening, demanding and controlling presence has seen bad blood linger]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/08/08/08/00209957a14193eb8aa5769e61bfc5e9Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaGFwaSwxNjkxNTY2MDEx-2.73136817.jpg)
Those tears were shed by O’Connor in John Maybury’s starkly emotional video for the song, as the singer thought about the mother she’d lost in a car crash four years earlier. “I didn’t know I was going to cry when I sang in the video because I didn’t cry in the studio recording it,” she said later; she revealed in Rememberings that she always thought of her mother when performing the song. “I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again. There’s a belief that she’s there, that she can hear me and I can connect to her.”.
