To say that Sinead O’Connor never quite regained the musical heights of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” is not to slight the rest of her output, which contained jewels. There is no getting back to a record like that first one. It was in some sense literally scary: The label had to change the original cover art, which showed a bald O’Connor hissing like a banshee cat, for the American release. In the version we saw, she looks down, arms crossed, mouth closed, vulnerable. The music had both sides of her in it.
A fuzziness has tended to hang over the question of who produced “The Lion and the Cobra.” The process involved some drama. O’Connor clashed with the label and dropped her first producer, Mick Glossop, highly respected and the person the label wanted. In the end, she produced the album largely by herself. But not entirely. There was a co-producer, an Irish engineer named Kevin Moloney, who worked on the first five U2 albums and Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love.” He and O’Connor went to school at the same time in the Glenageary neighborhood of Dublin, where he attended an all-boys Catholic academy next to her all-girls Catholic school. But Moloney didn’t know O’Connor then, though they took the same bus.
In Asheville, N.C., this fall, Moloney sat in the control room of Citizen Studios, where he is the house producer, and hit play on “The Lion and the Cobra.” The first song is a ghost story called “Jackie.” A woman sings of her lover, who has failed to return from a fishing expedition. You’re on deep Irish literary sod, the western coast and the islands. It’s the lament of Maurya in J.M. Synge’s play “Riders to the Sea,” grieving for all the men the ocean has taken from her, except that the creature singing through O’Connor will not accept death. “He’ll be back sometime,” she assures the men who deliver the news, “laughing at you.” At the end, her falsetto howls above the feedback. She starts the song as a plaintive young widow and ends it as a demon. “Gets the old hairs going up,” Moloney said.
“Where did she get that?” I asked. “Those different registers?”
“It was all in her head,” he said. “She had these personas.”
And the words? Were they from an obscure Irish shanty she found in an old newspaper? “Oh, no, she wrote it herself,” Moloney said. “Her lyrics were older than she was.”
Moloney’s connection with O’Connor came through U2’s guitarist, the Edge (David Evans). In late 1985, the band was between albums, so Evans did a solo project, scoring a film. He recruited O’Connor — who had just been signed to the English label Ensign Records — to sing on one tune, and Moloney engineered the session. O’Connor was 18, with short dark hair.
Ensign put her together with Glossop, who had just co-produced the Waterboys’ classic album “This Is the Sea.” But she spurned the results: “Too pretty.” Glossop remembered O’Connor as reluctant to speak her mind in the studio, leading to a situation where small differences of opinion weren’t being addressed, leaving her alienated from the material. With characteristic careerist diplomacy, she called Glossop a “[expletive] ol’ hippie” (and derided U2, who possessed some claim to having discovered her, as fake rebels making “bombastic” music). Glossop recalled that when he ran into her at a club a couple of years later, she hugged him and apologized — “which was a nice gesture,” he told me.
Nobody has ever heard those first, abandoned tracks from “The Lion and the Cobra.” “They put a big sound, a band sound around her,” Moloney said, “and she was disappearing in it.” Glossop remembered it slightly differently. “She had a rapport with her band,” he said, “and I recorded them as a band. But she was turning into a solo artist.”
She was also pregnant, unbeknownst to Glossop (“It would have been nice to know,” he said). The father was the drummer in the band, John Reynolds, whom she had known for a month when they conceived. According to O’Connor’s autobiography, “Rememberings,” the label pressured her to have an abortion, sending her to a doctor who lectured her on how much money the company had invested in her.
O’Connor not only insisted on keeping the baby; she also told the label that if it forced her to put out its version of the record, she would walk. “They eventually caved,” Moloney said. “They told her, ‘Make it your way.’” But with a “limited budget.”
That’s when she reached out to Moloney, in the spring of 1986, saying she needed someone she trusted. He started taking day trips to Oxford, where she was holed up in a rental house. “We were in the living room,” Moloney said. “A bunch of couches and a bunch of underpaid, underloved musicians who were struggling big time.”
“There was a bit of a little communal hub,” he said, “always a few joints going around the room. Sinead loved her ganja. A lot of talking, and then somebody would start to play, and people would pick up instruments. And Sinead was, like, captain of the ship.”
When they got into the studio in London, Moloney turned the earlier, band-focused approach inside out like a sock. O’Connor’s voice was allowed to dictate. The musicians worked around it.
For the song “Jackie,” he said, “Sinead wanted to do all of those guitar parts herself. And she wanted to do it really late at night, when everybody else was gone home. She didn’t feel good about her guitar playing. I got her to do this really distorted big sound, and then we layered it and layered it. It became this sort of seething. She was like, ‘Look at me — I’m Jimi Hendrix.’”
The most difficult challenge in recording O’Connor, he said, was finding a microphone that could handle her dynamic range, with those whisper-to-scream effects she was famous for. “Once we figured out the right way of capturing her vocals” — an AKG C12 vintage tube mic — “she did it really fast.”
I must have looked amazed — the vocals are so theatrical and swooping, O’Connor’s pitch so precise, that I had envisioned endless takes — because Moloney said, as if to settle doubts, “Within a couple of takes, it was done.”
The jangly guitar opening of the third track, “Jerusalem,” played. “I remember hearing her play this for the first time,” Moloney said. “I got it, knowing her background.” O’Connor was abused — psychologically, physically, sexually — by her mother, who died in a car accident, and by the Catholic Church. “All the systems had failed her,” Moloney said, “that were supposed to protect her.”
If he was right that he heard trauma in “Jerusalem,” the song lyrics also drip with erotic angst (“I hope you do/what you said/when you swore”). It introduces the record’s main preoccupation: love and sex as they intersect with power and pain.
The streams cross with greatest emotional force in the song “Troy,” one of the most beautiful and ambitious pieces of mid-1980s popular music. The track sticks out production-wise, with a powerful, surging orchestral arrangement (the product of O’Connor’s collaboration with the musician Michael Clowes, who also played keyboards on the album).
There’s a moment in the song when O’Connor repeats the line, “You should’ve left the light on.” I had never given undue thought to what it meant. Something about tortured desire: If you had left the light on, I wouldn’t have kissed you. But Moloney said it had a double meaning. When O’Connor was punished as a child and made to sleep outside in the garden shed, her mother would turn off all of the lights in the house. “There wouldn’t be a light on for her,” Moloney said.
O’Connor gave birth to her son, Jake, just weeks after Moloney finished the mixes. She told Glasgow’s Daily Record that although the baby had kicked when she sang in the studio, he slept now when the record came on. “She was so happy,” Moloney said with tears in his eyes. “She said: ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I went through all of that and I’ve arrived here with a record I love. Also, here’s my baby!’ She had two babies in one year.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine who lives in North Carolina, where he co-founded the nonprofit research collective Third Person Project.
