Simon's Blog

A legend of popular music, Sinéad O’Connor has always been one of my favorite singers; hearing that she passed so soon was a profound shock. She was undeniably a complex individual, but she left us far too early. As a teenager, Sinéad was arrested for shoplifting and sent to a Magdalene Orphanage —a place she later described as a "prison where girls cried every day." There, she witnessed the horrors of institutional Catholicism firsthand. As she explained in the Showtime documentary Nothing Compares: “There was no therapy when I was growing up. I got into music for therapy. I just wanted to scream.” Legs McNeil, an American music journalist who knew her well, echoed this sentiment in the film, noting, “What bugged me was the atrocities Sinéad’s mother committed on her.” Sinéad herself never held back when discussing her upbringing. “She was a very violent woman, not a healthy woman," she said of her mother. "She was physically, verbally, psychologically, spirituall...

Helen Folasade Adu, known globally as Sade, was born in Nigeria to a Nigerian father and an English mother. After her parents separated when she was four, her mother moved the family back to England. Following high school, Sade moved to London to study fashion design, but her career took a pivotal turn when she joined the British band Pride as a backup singer. Her magnetic stage presence quickly stole the spotlight. By 1983, the group had evolved and rebranded simply as Sade. Their popularity exploded almost instantly; for their debut performance at London’s Heaven nightclub, the demand was so high that 1,000 fans had to be turned away at the door. Later that year, she signed with Epic Records. The band’s debut album, Diamond Life, became an international sensation, reaching number one in several countries and the top ten in the U.S., where it sold over four million copies. They followed this success in 1985 with Promise, which topped both the UK and U.S. charts—marking their first n...