Harry Belafonte Used Fame to Fight for Freedom – The New York Times

To say that Sinead OConnor never quite regained the musical heights of her 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, is not to slight the rest of her output, which contained jewels. There is no getting back to a record like that first one. It was in some sense literally scary: The label had to change the original cover art, which showed a bald OConnor hissing like a banshee cat, for the American release. In the version we saw, she looks down, arms crossed, mouth closed, vulnerable. The music had both sides of her in it.

A fuzziness has tended to hang over the question of who produced The Lion and the Cobra. The process involved some drama. OConnor clashed with the label and dropped her first producer, Mick Glossop, highly respected and the person the label wanted. In the end, she produced the album largely by herself. But not entirely. There was a co-producer, an Irish engineer named Kevin Moloney, who worked on the first five U2 albums and Kate Bushs Hounds of Love. He and OConnor went to school at the same time in the Glenageary neighborhood of Dublin, where he attended an all-boys Catholic academy next to her all-girls Catholic school. But Moloney didnt know OConnor then, though they took the same bus.

In Asheville, N.C., this fall, Moloney sat in the control room of Citizen Studios, where he is the house producer, and hit play on The Lion and the Cobra. The first song is a ghost story called Jackie. A woman sings of her lover, who has failed to return from a fishing expedition. Youre on deep Irish literary sod, the western coast and the islands. Its the lament of Maurya in J.M. Synges play Riders to the Sea, grieving for all the men the ocean has taken from her, except that the creature singing through OConnor will not accept death. Hell be back sometime, she assures the men who deliver the news, laughing at you. At the end, her falsetto howls above the feedback. She starts the song as a plaintive young widow and ends it as a demon. Gets the old hairs going up, Moloney said.

Where did she get that? I asked. Those different registers?

It was all in her head, he said. She had these personas.

And the words? Were they from an obscure Irish shanty she found in an old newspaper? Oh, no, she wrote it herself, Moloney said. Her lyrics were older than she was.

Moloneys connection with OConnor came through U2s guitarist, the Edge (David Evans). In late 1985, the band was between albums, so Evans did a solo project, scoring a film. He recruited OConnor who had just been signed to the English label Ensign Records to sing on one tune, and Moloney engineered the session. OConnor was 18, with short dark hair.

Ensign put her together with Glossop, who had just co-produced the Waterboys classic album This Is the Sea. But she spurned the results: Too pretty. Glossop remembered OConnor as reluctant to speak her mind in the studio, leading to a situation where small differences of opinion werent being addressed, leaving her alienated from the material. With characteristic careerist diplomacy, she called Glossop a [expletive] ol hippie (and derided U2, who possessed some claim to having discovered her, as fake rebels making bombastic music). Glossop recalled that when he ran into her at a club a couple of years later, she hugged him and apologized which was a nice gesture, he told me.

Nobody has ever heard those first, abandoned tracks from The Lion and the Cobra. They put a big sound, a band sound around her, Moloney said, and she was disappearing in it. Glossop remembered it slightly differently. She had a rapport with her band, he said, and I recorded them as a band. But she was turning into a solo artist.

She was also pregnant, unbeknownst to Glossop (It would have been nice to know, he said). The father was the drummer in the band, John Reynolds, whom she had known for a month when they conceived. According to OConnors autobiography, Rememberings, the label pressured her to have an abortion, sending her to a doctor who lectured her on how much money the company had invested in her.

OConnor not only insisted on keeping the baby; she also told the label that if it forced her to put out its version of the record, she would walk. They eventually caved, Moloney said. They told her, Make it your way. But with a limited budget.

Thats when she reached out to Moloney, in the spring of 1986, saying she needed someone she trusted. He started taking day trips to Oxford, where she was holed up in a rental house. We were in the living room, Moloney said. A bunch of couches and a bunch of underpaid, underloved musicians who were struggling big time.

There was a bit of a little communal hub, he said, always a few joints going around the room. Sinead loved her ganja. A lot of talking, and then somebody would start to play, and people would pick up instruments. And Sinead was, like, captain of the ship.

When they got into the studio in London, Moloney turned the earlier, band-focused approach inside out like a sock. OConnors voice was allowed to dictate. The musicians worked around it.

For the song Jackie, he said, Sinead wanted to do all of those guitar parts herself. And she wanted to do it really late at night, when everybody else was gone home. She didnt feel good about her guitar playing. I got her to do this really distorted big sound, and then we layered it and layered it. It became this sort of seething. She was like, Look at me Im Jimi Hendrix.

The most difficult challenge in recording OConnor, he said, was finding a microphone that could handle her dynamic range, with those whisper-to-scream effects she was famous for. Once we figured out the right way of capturing her vocals an AKG C12 vintage tube mic she did it really fast.

I must have looked amazed the vocals are so theatrical and swooping, OConnors pitch so precise, that I had envisioned endless takes because Moloney said, as if to settle doubts, Within a couple of takes, it was done.

The jangly guitar opening of the third track, Jerusalem, played. I remember hearing her play this for the first time, Moloney said. I got it, knowing her background. OConnor was abused psychologically, physically, sexually by her mother, who died in a car accident, and by the Catholic Church. All the systems had failed her, Moloney said, that were supposed to protect her.

If he was right that he heard trauma in Jerusalem, the song lyrics also drip with erotic angst (I hope you do/what you said/when you swore). It introduces the records main preoccupation: love and sex as they intersect with power and pain.

The streams cross with greatest emotional force in the song Troy, one of the most beautiful and ambitious pieces of mid-1980s popular music. The track sticks out production-wise, with a powerful, surging orchestral arrangement (the product of OConnors collaboration with the musician Michael Clowes, who also played keyboards on the album).

Theres a moment in the song when OConnor repeats the line, You shouldve left the light on. I had never given undue thought to what it meant. Something about tortured desire: If you had left the light on, I wouldnt have kissed you. But Moloney said it had a double meaning. When OConnor was punished as a child and made to sleep outside in the garden shed, her mother would turn off all of the lights in the house. There wouldnt be a light on for her, Moloney said.

OConnor gave birth to her son, Jake, just weeks after Moloney finished the mixes. She told Glasgows Daily Record that although the baby had kicked when she sang in the studio, he slept now when the record came on. She was so happy, Moloney said with tears in his eyes. She said: Oh, my God, I cant believe I went through all of that and Ive arrived here with a record I love. Also, heres my baby! She had two babies in one year.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine who lives in North Carolina, where he co-founded the nonprofit research collective Third Person Project.

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Harry Belafonte Used Fame to Fight for Freedom - The New York Times