Sinead O Connor, Oct. 30, Keswick Theatre

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Sinead O Connor, Oct. 30, Keswick Theatre

POSTED: Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 6:32 PM

Filed Under: Music | Show Last Night

You asked for the truth and I told you.

Jerusalem means a lot of things to a lot of people. One thing we can all agree on is that the city can be oppressively hot in July. The summer I visited, I couldn't get any relief. Because while all everyone else in my youth group got to swim after long, hot, tense days, I wasn't allowed in the water lest I ruin the cast on my broken arm. See, a few weeks before I left, I awoke from a dream in which Sinead O'Connor told me to climb on top of a bookcase to tape her poster to my ceiling, and the late-night redecorating didn't go as smoothly as I'd dreamt.

Maybe I should hold a grudge against her because of that, or because as much as I'd listened to The Lion and the Cobra that year, her fierce love song "Jerusalem" didn't at all prepare me for how fiercely I'd fall in love with the place. But the truth is, I've always felt nearly as fierce — protective, possessive — about the singer as the holy city. I know she's got her faults, but God help you if you slag her in my presence. She doesn't make loving her easy, though. I always said I'd listen to her sing the alphabet, a math textbook, the back of a cereal box, whatever — her voice never ceases to move me. The way she can fill a huge auditorium with an unaccompanied whisper, well, it's something special. But when she started singing openly, frequently, unabashedly about Christ, I resisted. Christian rock is a line I do not cross. Or didn't. Damn, she's good.

At the Keswick on Mischief Night, she gave the people what they wanted. More than a third of her set came from I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, including "Nothing Compares 2 U" and "The Emperor's New Clothes," which still resonates all these years later. She did only three songs from her latest album, Theology, a couple apiece from Faith and Courage and Universal Mother, a pair of tracks she contributed to movie soundtracks and one from The Lion and the Cobra. "Never Get Old," which she introduced as something she wrote "a long time ago" when she was 15, may be the low point of her stunning debut, but here it induced lasting chills. Thrilling moments were plentiful. Like the a cappella "In This Heart," which gradually added vocal harmonies from funky bassist Caroline Dale, fiddle player Clare Kenny and guitarist Kevin Armstrong. And the part in the heartbreaking divorce song "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance" when drummer John Reynolds, O'Connor's ex-husband, broke through the rest of the band's reserve with a fit of fury. (It's impossible to overplay that card.) And "If You Had a Vineyard," O'Connor's adaptation of Isaiah's warning to Jerusalem and Judah, one of several numbers to elicit a scattered but spontaneous standing ovation.

I'd rather not break another arm to prove my devotion, but if the devil himself planted Sinead O'Connor in my dreams again, I'd probably do her bidding. For my sake, then, it's a good thing she's on the side of the angels.

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