Thanks first and foremost to the great men who wrote and performed these songs and whose inspiration has kept me nourished with strength at times when I might otherwise have lost faith in myself.

This is the intro to the liner notes in Sinead’s new cd. Sinead O’Connor gets slagged off a lot – like most well known artists, she’s under public scrutiny a good deal of the time and what she gets up to in her private life tends to be commented on. For example, a few years ago, she issued a letter to the public stating that she was retiring for good from the music business and wanted to be left alone. Then a couple of years later, she recorded and released more music. None of this matters or should - the only thing the public needs to be concerned with is the quality and integrity of her music. Up til now, this has never been in question, from her first cd, ‘The Lion and the Cobra’ through her chanteuse efforts on, ‘Am I Not Your Girl?’ to, ‘Sean-Nos Nua’, a cd of traditional Irish airs such as ‘Molly Malone’ and ‘The Parting Glass’. Her latest effort, ‘Throw Down Your Arms’, is a cd of all reggae covers. The title is also the name of a tune by Burning Spear, and the men she refers to in her opening sentence are several great Jamaican songwriters and singers.

Although I have been a fan of Sinead’s since she came on the music scene and have felt that she’s always had complete integrity in her art, I admit to wondering how it would come off upon first hearing that she’d done a whole cd of classic reggae covers. I looked at the track listing and saw tunes by Burning Spear, Scratch Perry, Buju Banton and Marley, among others and wondered if this was where it was going to go wrong for her. These are hardcore roots reggae tunes, not like some of Marley’s later, more mainstream commercial stuff, like ‘Get Up Stand Up’ or ‘One Love’, and I just wasn’t sure how Sinead was going to be able to do these. After hearing a couple of tracks initially, it seemed the most natural thing for her to do.

She begins with a Winston Rodney (Burning Spear) tune, ‘Jah No Dead’ which features on the soundtrack of a reggae film called ‘Rockers’ and is an acapella song attesting to the fact that Jah (God, to Rastafarians) still exists and is there to be called up. It’s almost like a prayer and Sinead delivers it just the way Rodney does and with as much emotion. When this ends, trailing off, the next song kicks in with horns and a reggae drum roll as Sinead continues with Burning Spear’s signature piece, ‘Marcus Garvey’, a tribute to the 1920s Jamaican activist who preached a Back to Africa philosophy, later adopted by Rastafarians. Again, Sinead captures every nuance of the original – the patois and the phrasing of the song. She continues with Burning Spear in the next two, ‘Door Peep’ and ‘He Prayed’ – both done perfectly.

It seems a good time here to mention that two of her backing musicians are Sly and Robbie (Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare), the greatest drum and bass rhythm section in reggae. Sly and Robbie are unique in that they straddle the golden period of reggae in the 70s, playing with damn near everyone who was doing anything on record, and the present, in which they continue to play and produce.

It’s not that Sinead couldn’t have made a good reggae record with her feeling and with other good musicians, but doing it with Sly and Robbie takes it from being merely a good record to a great one. There are other musicians of note on here – Mikey Chung, on guitar, who has played with Peter Tosh, Inner Circle and Lee Perry’s Upsetters, Uziah ‘Sticky’ Thompson, who’s played with everyone in Reggae - Wailers, Mighty Diamonds, Gladiators and many others. The rest of the musicians on this record are of the highest ability, a given on a Sly and Robbie production, which also happened to be recorded at Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica, Marley’s former studio.

The other tracks are equally as good, ‘Y Mas Gan’, by Linford Manning (Abyssinians), ‘Prophet has Arise’ (Cecil Spence), ‘Downpressor Man’ (Peter Tosh), ‘Vampire’ (Lee Perry), and again to ‘Burning Spear’, the title track, ‘Throw Down Your Arms’. Two absolute standouts on here are her version of Buju Banton’s, ‘Untold Stories’ and Perry’s, ‘Curly Locks’, which is so soulful that it, to my mind, surpasses Scratch’s original and two other versions of it - Jacob Miller’s and Freddie McGregor’s respectively, which is really saying something. She ends with Marley’s, ‘War’, replicating the original production so well that in her backup vocalists, you can hear the I Threes (Marley’s backup singers) right in the pocket.

The only thing one could question here is Sinead’s authenticity and her ‘right’, culturally and ethnically, to do these tunes. Sinead is neither black nor Jamaican but she came up hard and paid dues as a woman and a Catholic in Ireland and she is not a come-lately to reggae. She has been listening to and singing these songs in her life for over twenty years and she approaches them respectfully. In her words, regarding doing the songs as they were done originally:

Maria Callas, when asked how one should find the right emotion for a song said, ‘The composer has taken care of everything. Just do exactly as the composer has written’, and for that reason I have kept exactly true to the originals, with the exception of making key changes to suit a woman’s voice.

With her exceptional woman’s voice and her personal emotion, she not only pays full respect to these songs, but makes them her own for the moment. Sinead O’Connor has always had integrity in her music and that continues to be true on this record. Anyone familiar with these songs will appreciate her efforts on this cd, and for those not familiar, it is a perfect place to discover them.

Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille. To read Marc's short story, 'Plastic Paddy' on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.