The ‘90s single mother friendship of Björk and Sinéad O’Connor
“Probably my best friend ever is music, because that’s the one who always understands me,” a 29-year-old Björk declared in 1995, “But to find a person, a real person, who’s on that same ‘boing!’, you can add to theirs, and they can add to yours, that’s just ever so precious.”
Not many people, it must be said, have operated on the same creative “boing” level as Björk, but she’s managed to befriend a handful over the years, and to collaborate with an even luckier few: Mark Bell, Tricky, Thom Yorke, Kelis, Michel Gondry, and Alexander McQueen among them. One artist, with whom she’d hoped to work, but never did, was arguably the one woman in the ’90s who could match her “boing” for “boing” as both a singer and a personality: Sinéad O’Connor.
Just a year apart in age, Björk and O’Connor achieved international fame at roughly the same point in the late 1980s, the former with her band the Sugarcubes and the latter with her debut solo album, The Lion and the Cobra, and, as one can easily imagine, there was an immediate mutual admiration.
According to a story in the Irish Independent, O’Connor attended a Sugarcubes concert in 1988, sitting in the balcony with David Bowie, and all three singers met up backstage afterwards, which feels like some sort of charisma hazard. In any case, a friendship was established, which carried on into Björk’s solo career in the early ‘90s, when she moved to London as a single mother with her son Sindri.
Both Björk and O’Connor had sons at the age of 20, and according to the former’s chat with the Alternative Press in 1995, the two single mom icons used to meet up with their kids in a west London park; a sight that must have caused a parade of double-takes among the passers-by.
While Björk would eventually have her own run-ins with the press, her iconoclastic behaviour was celebrated by journalists in a way that O’Connor’s was not, as the Irish and British press were particular brutal in their ridicule of the singer both before and after the massive success of ‘Nothing Compares to 2 U’, and Björk had a theory as to why.
“Maybe the reason that she doesn’t get away with it,” Björk surmised, “maybe it’s because she’s serious and people that are serious, they’re sometimes not considered as flexible, whereas I’m probably a bit more of a clown, so I can get away with things like that.”
She said she’d love to make a record with Sinéad someday, but that, so far in her career, she’d rarely found herself collaborating with other vocalists, explaining, “Two singers can only go that far, you see. I think most of the people that I have my little musical love affairs with have been people that make beats, because that’s what I need, just like a rhythm to feed off. So that’s tricky.”
Björk might have meant that it was tricky to find non-beatmaking collaborators, or that one of those collaborators was literally Tricky; regardless, the world missed out on what might have been a fascinating team-up, and we’re merely left to ponder what they might have discussed on those walks in the park.
