Sinéad O’Connor dismissed ageing rockers including Roger Waters as ‘old farts’

1 August 2023

Sinéad O’Connor thought ageing rockers including Roger Waters were “old farts”.

Sinéad O’Connor thought ageing rockers including Roger Waters were ‘old farts‘

The ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ singer, found dead in London on 26 July aged 56, was one of a string of A-list guests who played with the Pink Floyd frontman, 79, at an iconic gig in Berlin in 1990 when he mounted a rendition of the band’s landmark album ‘The Wall’.

Roger told ‘Uncut’ magazine in a 2008 interview that has resurfaced since Sinéad’s death about how she wound him up with her attitude to the old rockers she joined at the concert, including The Band, when she was aged 24: “She was so worried that there weren’t any other ‘young people on the show’.

“I and everybody else were old farts in her opinion so she was worried that she was doing something that wasn’t ‘street’ enough.

“And because it wasn’t ‘street’ enough, she came up with this brilliant idea: she said that I should employ Ice-T or one of those people to re-work one of my songs as a rap number!

“I am not joking! And neither was she f****** joking!”

Roger left Pink Floyd in 1985 and his 1990 ‘The Wall’ show took place on Potsdamer Platz, a former public square that had been bisected by The Berlin Wall.

Local heroes The Scorpions opened the show with ‘In the Flesh?’, while Joni Mitchell, 79, sang ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, and a version of ‘The Trial’ featured Marianne Faithfull, 76, and the actor Albert Finney, who died in 2019 aged 82.

Sinéad provided probably the most moving moment of the gig when she sang a version of ‘Mother’, flanked by Roger and The Band’s Levon Helm, who died in 2012 aged 71, Rick Danko, who passed away at 55 in 1999, and Garth Hudson, 85.

The gig came in July 1990, six months after Sinéad shot to global fame with her career-defining cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.

While filming the music video for the track couldn’t stop thinking about her mum Johanna, who died in 1985 in a car crash five years before it was made, and who Sinéad says spent years abusing her.

The tear she cried during the video’s making is one of the most iconic moments in music history and the tortured singer, who spent years battling mental health problems, said: “I didn’t know I was going to cry singing it. “Every time I sing the song, I think of my mother.

“I never stopped crying for her.”