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Sinead O'Connor Live, August 23rd 1997, Chicago, Vic Theatre

By "Thomas W. Mohr"
 
A couple notes on Saturday night's show at the Vic Theatre here in Chicago...
 
Screaming Orphans were pretty great. They sound like a teenage Irish Bangles (and I do mean that as a compliment). Crowd loved them, and their half hour set was too short.

 
Sinead's setlist:
 
Emperor's New Clothes
Thief of Your Heart (outstanding)
Stretched On Your Grave ("for the dead people here tonight")
Perfect Indian
John I Love You
This Is To Mother You
Petite Poulet (more lively than on cd)
Thank You For Hearing Me (beautiful)
In This Heart (even more beautiful)
Fire On Babylon (fierce)
Last Day of Our Acquaintance (outstanding)
 
encore:
Redemption Song (see note below)
He Moved Through the Fair (amazing)
 
second encore:
Famine

There is a very good review in today's Chicago Tribune which I will try to post later today.
 
This was a great show, and a great crowd. The crowd cheered at the right times, and shut the hell up at the right times (a rarity here in Chicago, where we can be a noisy bunch).
 
In the middle of "Redemption Song", Sinead starting giggling, and apologized to the crowd and her band, saying something about "having to fart". I am not making this up -- she cracked up half of her band and most of the crowd. After the song she made some joke (she was talking softly, it was hard to hear her) about "atomic energy".
 
After the first encore, I told covivant that the show was over (having read the setlists for previous shows right here). And what do you know, out came Sinead for a second encore. She said something about normally doing only one encore but she was doing an extra one for her "Irish posse", perhaps a reference to the number of Irish people at the show. "Famine"
was kind of tentative, like maybe they had not rehearsed it much.
 
Show lasted maybe eighty minutes.
 
My only (minor) criticism is that some of the arrangements were a bit cluttered, what with eleven people on stage.
 
But it was a great show. Hopefully the bootleggers caught this one...

Borrowed without permission from "Thomas W. Mohr" who borrowed it without permission from today's Trib:

TURMOIL, TRANSCENDENCE AND TRUTH

REPORTS OF O'CONNOR'S MELLOWING EXAGGERATED

By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic

Web-posted Monday, August 25, 1997; 8:18 a.m. CDT

Sinead O'Connor is tough as a hard-core rapper, as fragile as a thrush. Eyes shut, head bowed, bent at the knees, twisting toward the floor, she burrows into her music, a celestial voice and sinuous hips bringing the spiritual and the sexual into harmony.

After a dozen songs and a pair of encores Saturday at the Vic, O'Connor left little doubt that she is not just a wonderful singer, but a transcendent one. There is nothing quite like the sight or the sound of this Irish woman in full cry, the ferocity of her compassion in "Thank You for Hearing Me" and of her grief in "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance." It is a shattering sound; it raises a lump in the throat and burns the eyes. It is the sound of truth, and of revelation: This is how deeply all singers should reach, one is made to feel, but seldom do.

Her music has, at least on first impression, softened in recent years. And her appearance, once brazen, hard and shaven-headed, has mellowed considerably as well. She took the stage in a red evening dress, with reddish brown hair framing her pixiesh features.

But appearances deceive, and the whispered invocations of her latest EP, "Gospel Oak"--like listening to a woman having a 3 a.m. bedside chat with her conscience--hardly prepare a listener for the intensity of her concert. Beneath the lulling bubblebath surface of the disc is a whirlpool of turmoil, and O'Connor brought out this tension by modulating her voice between a hush and a keening plea.

On "This is a Rebel Song," a lover's lament that serves as a metaphor for the long-troubled relationship between her native Ireland and her current home country of England, she sang, "I love you my hard Englishman/Your rage is like a fist in my womb/Can't you forgive what you think I've done?"

The juxtaposition of contrasting textures is also crucial to O'Connor's music. Her Gaelic phrasing and melodicism, her love of the drone, are steeped in centuries old tradition. But this mystic bent was underpinned by a bevy of beats borrowed from African and Caribbean culture that make the backbone slip.

For all the ravishing beauty of her voice, O'Connor does not revel in its purity; she also wants to feel the earth between her toes, the grease between the high notes she hits so effortlessly. The jaunty, accordion-driven "Petit Poulet" suggested a Cajun groove, "I Am Stretched on Your Grave" incorporated a "Funky Drummer" hip-hop rhythm, and "Fire on Babylon" borrowed its deep bass line from reggae.

A 10-member band, anchored by longtime drummer John Reynolds and bolstered by the voices of O'Connor's excellent opening act, the Screaming Orphans, worked the blend with finesse. Songs simmered and slowly escalated into rapturous climaxes. On "John I Love You," the arrangement was particularly intoxicating, a weave of voices, syncopated drum beats, sparse, spiderwalking piano lines and a counterpoint cello melody played by Caroline Dale.

O'Connor did not perform any songs from her scorched-earth debut album of 1987, "The Lion and the Cobra," and offered only three from her classic 1990 release, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got." She recalled the biblical fury of those releases on only a couple of occasions, particularly on "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance," which dredged up a world of heartache as she snapped off the line, "I know your answer already."

In its place came visions of hope, however intangible: Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" and the traditional ballad "He Moved Through the Fair," on which she was accompanied only by cello and keyboards. In the last verse, her departed lover visits her in a dream, a ghost bearing a promise--"It will not be long love"--and O'Connor's voice faded into the darkness. It was a moment, and a night, to cherish.