Sinead O’Connor and that mysterious version of “Silent night”
A ghost or an angel? It is difficult to define what the Irish singer-songwriter represents in the video clip of her unsettling version of “Silent Night”, when she appears in front of the protagonist in a house with Victorian architecture and furnishings, among chandeliers and wooden beams. Is she alive? Is she dead? Did she ever live? Or is it a dream of the protagonist? The video remains deliberately enigmatic, cryptic. After all, it is part of a larger story than the one it tells.
When in 1991 Malcolm McLaren, the former manager of the Sex Pistols, asked Sinead O’Connor to star in the Christmas film he was making for British TV, the singer-songwriter was already a star: the previous year with “Nothing compares 2 U” originally written by Prince for his The Family and then finished by her, who later repudiated it, had climbed the world charts and sold millions of copies, reaching with her album “I do not want what I haven’t got” the consecration immediately. His rebellious and non-conformist attitude will be discussed a lot. In 1992, a year after having reinterpreted the Christmas classic written in the nineteenth century by a young priest from Salzburg, Joseph Mohn, tearing up the Pope’s photograph live on television to protest against the sexual abuse perpetrated on children within the Catholic Church (“Fight the real enemy”), will even anger Frank Sinatra, who will say: “She deserves to get her butt kicked.” In the meantime, however, here she appears in “The ghosts of Oxford Street”, this is the title of the film signed by McLaren.
The former manager of the iconic punk band asks her to reinterpret for the project the Christmas classic sung, among others, by Sinatra himself, and she doesn’t say no. She made her own version, together with Peter Gabriel, with whom she had a brief and tumultuous relationship, who produced it and played the keyboards: “Sinead was an extraordinary talent. He knew how to move us with a candor and a passion with which many people identified – the former Genesis will remember about the singer-songwriter – the path he chose was always difficult and uncompromising, but at every turn he showed his spirit and his courage. I feel lucky to have had the chance to work with her.”
To understand the meaning of the video clip you need to watch the full version of “The ghosts of Oxford Street”, which has become so cult across the Channel that it has also been uploaded to YouTube (as well as being broadcast on TV every Christmas): it turns out that Sinead O’Connor plays a young nineteenth-century prostitute who is persecuted by the opium addict Thomas de Quincey, a British writer and journalist who lived between 1785 and 1859, played in the film by John Altman. The singer-songwriter is a mirage: de Quincey chases her, searches for her, tries to grab her, touch her, but never succeeds. And finally it collapses.
