Sinéad O’Connor deserved better than the music industry

It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity.

OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it wasn’t anywhere near as dragged out as the Sinéad O’Connor cover. So when I heard that the singer had died at the age of 56, my first thought was, selfishly ‘Oh no – they’ll be playing That Song all day!’ The second was ‘The tearleaders will have a field day with this one…’

Sure enough, over on social media what my husband calls the ‘tearleaders’, metaphorical ambulance chasers competitively mourning dead celebrities, were already up and at ‘em before sunrise.