How Dolores O’Riordan responded to Sinéad O’Connor comparisons: “What I do is so different”
On October 3rd, 1992, Sinéad O’Connor protested the Catholic Church’s autocratic and abusive ways during her appearance on Saturday Night Live, ending her performance by shredding a photo of Pope John Paul II and essentially vacating her brief time as a mainstream pop star with a signature voice.
Two days later, on October 5th, The Cranberries debuted the ethereal vocals of their Irish frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan, with their single ‘Dreams’. The timing was, of course, a complete coincidence, but it might have subtly set the stage for several years of comparisons between indie rock’s bright new star O’Riordan and O’Connor, the outcast whose vaguely similar vocal style was rooted as much in Irish church singing and the ancient “keening” tradition than anything from modern pop.
O’Connor was five years older and similarly ahead on the career track, having already hit the pop charts with songs from her 1987 debut The Lion and the Cobra, not to mention the enormous success of its follow-up, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. The younger powerhouse was fan enough that she chose to sing the former’s track ‘Troy’ during her try-out for The Cranberries in 1990.
However, as the band began touring in support of their first album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, volleys about vocal similarities, combined with what she perceived as a lack of support from the Dublin music scene for the Limerick-based Cranberries, led O’Riordan to slowly lose patience and start pushing back on the subject.
“What I do is so different,” a miffed O’Riordan told Rolling Stone in 1995, “I might have been singing before [O’Connor] ever sang, who knows? It’s not like I’m going to sing because somebody from up the road [Dublin] got there first because she’s a few years older than me.”
Only 24 years at the time, O’Riordan came across a bit defensive, and understandably so, considering her authenticity was in question at the height of her band’s success. She went on to describe her early school days as evidence of her pre-Sinéad vocal exploits.
“If the principal of the school cancelled her class and stood me on her desk for the 12-year-olds to listen to, it must have been good,” she offered.
Fortunately, by the following year, as The Cranberries were promoting their third album To the Faithful Departed, the lilting singer seemed to have had an epiphany; that rather than defending herself like some sort of adversary of O’Connor, she ought to take aim at the misogynistic reporters who were actually pitting the two Irish women against each other for no reason other than to stir the pot.
“The Irish media had this headline, ‘The Battle of the Bitches’, and they had me on one side and Sinéad on the other,” O’Riordan told the Boston Globe in 1996, adding, “It’s just nuts the things they do… It’s like they try to create hatred between artists. But I think Sinéad is a great singer. And it’s not a competition between us.”
For her own part, Sinéad O’Connor admitted in a 2019 interview with the Belfast Telegraph that she had her own misgivings about comparisons to O’Riordan in the ‘90s, but that she similarly came to see her as an ally before O’Riordan’s untimely death in 2018 at just 46.
“Honestly, I think she was brilliant,” O’Connor, by then known as Shuhada’ Sadaqat, said of O’Riordan, “And look, I was imitating the people who influenced me, too. Eventually, I came to the realisation that she could stand up and sing any way she wanted. Which is how it should be.”
