Sinéad O’Connor Nothing Compares 2 U: The Story Behind The Video

Nothing Compares 2 U: quick facts

Singer: Sinéad O’Connor, from Glenageary, Co. Dublin.
Written by: Prince, in the mid-1980s, for his side project The Family.
Released: January 1990.
The video: directed by John Maybury, filmed in Paris. Most of it is one close-up of Sinéad’s face, and the tears near the end were real.
Success: number one in countries around the world, named Billboard’s number one world single of 1990, and MTV’s Video of the Year, making Sinéad the first woman to win it.

There are music videos, and then there’s this. A young Irish woman with a shaved head, dressed in black, singing straight into the camera, with almost nothing else on screen. Then, near the end, two tears roll down her face. She wasn’t acting.

More than 35 years later, it’s still one of the most powerful music videos ever made.

A Prince song nobody had heard

“Nothing Compares 2 U” was written by Prince in the mid-1980s for The Family, a band on his Paisley Park label. Their album went nowhere, and the song was barely noticed.

Sinéad O’Connor, then 23 and already known for her fierce debut album The Lion and the Cobra, recorded her own version for her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, released in 1990. Her version, slow and aching, with that extraordinary voice, turned a forgotten album track into one of the biggest songs of the decade.

The tears were real

The video was directed by the British filmmaker John Maybury and shot in Paris in early 1990. Most of it is a single, unbroken close-up of Sinéad’s face against a black background, with a few shots of her walking through Paris’s parks.

The tears near the end weren’t planned. Sinéad later explained that she was thinking about her mother, who had died in a car accident a few years earlier, and the emotion simply broke through. Maybury kept the camera rolling.

A worldwide number one

The song went to number one in countries all over the world, including Ireland, the UK, the US, Australia, Canada and Germany. Billboard named it the number one world single of 1990. At the MTV Video Music Awards that year, it won Video of the Year, and Sinéad became the first woman ever to win the award.

Remembering Sinéad

Sinéad O’Connor was never comfortable being a pop star, and she never stayed quiet. She spoke out about the Catholic Church, about abuse, about mental health and about injustice, often at great cost to her career, and many of the things she said were later shown to be true. She was also one of the most remarkable voices Ireland has ever produced.

Sinéad died in London in July 2023, aged 56. Thousands of people lined the seafront in Bray, Co. Wicklow, where she had lived, to say goodbye as her funeral procession passed.