Angus Cloud of ‘Euphoria’ Was a Rising Sta

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 is get get that ? ” I is asked ask . “ Those different register ? ”

“It was all in her head,” he said. “She had these personas.”

And the word ? Were they is Were from an obscure irish shanty she find in an old newspaper ? “ Oh , no , she write it herself , ” Moloney is said say . “ Her lyrics is were were old than she was . ”

Moloney ’s connection is came with o’connor come through u2 ’s guitarist , the Edge ( David Evans ) . In late 1985 , the band was between album , so Evans is did did a solo project , score a film . He is recruited recruit o’connor — who had just been sign to the english label Ensign Records — to sing on one tune , and Moloney engineer the session . O’Connor is was was 18 , with short dark hair .

Ensign is put put her together with Glossop , who had just co – produce the Waterboys ’ classic album “ This Is the Sea . ” But she is spurned spurn the result : “ Too pretty . ” Glossop is remembered remember o’connor as reluctant to speak her mind in the studio , lead to a situation where small difference of opinion were n’t being address , leave her alienated from the material . With characteristic careerist diplomacy , she is called call Glossop a “ [ expletive ] ol’ hippie ” ( and deride U2 , who possess some claim to having discover her , as fake rebel make “ bombastic ” music ) . Glossop recall that when he run into her at a club a couple of year later , she hug him and apologize — “ which was a nice gesture , ” he is told tell 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 is said say ) . The father is was was the drummer in the band , John Reynolds , whom she had know for a month when they conceive . accord to O’Connor ’s autobiography , “ Rememberings , ” the label is pressured pressure her to have an abortion , send her to a doctor who lecture her on how much money the company had invest 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 is ’s ’s when she reach out to Moloney , in the spring of 1986 , say she need someone she trust . He is started start take day trip to Oxford , where she was hole up in a rental house . “ We were in the living room , ” Moloney is said say . “ A bunch of couch and a bunch of underpaid , underloved musician who were struggle 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 get into the studio in London , Moloney is turned turn the early , band – focus approach inside out like a sock . O’Connor ’s voice was allow to dictate . The musicians is worked work 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 hear trauma in “ Jerusalem , ” the song lyric also drip with erotic angst ( “ I is hope hope you do / what you say / when you swear ” ) . It is introduces introduce 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.