Cork musician recalls producing Sinéad O’Connor’s first recording

A Cork musician has recalled the moment, four decades ago, when he produced a young Sinéad O’Connor’s very first recording.

It was only a couple of years later that Brian O’Reilly realised that the young schoolgirl he had recorded in his Fermoy studio was THE Sinéad O’Connor.

Brian, the founder of the legendary group Loudest Whisper, had established Studio Fiona in 1979, and one day in the mid-1980s his brother Paud asked him if he would do a favour for a friend.

Joe Falvey was a teacher in Newtown School in Waterford, and a student of his wanted to record a demo tape to enter a song contest, so he had got in touch with Paud.

Mr Falvey had heard the shy 16-year-old student singing and playing guitar around the school, and was struck, as so many millions more would later be, by her great talent and her otherworldly voice.

He arranged for her a slot at T&H Doolan’s pub in Waterford, her first gig, where her voice silenced the entire room, something he described on RTÉ Radio 1 this week as “a shattering moment”.

“It was the most memorable moment of my life,” Mr Falvey told Oliver Callan.

“Everybody turned around and said ‘What, in the name of God, is that?’ The power, from this young, slim girl … I had heard her singing around the school, but this was power.”

When his student said she wanted to enter a song in a competition, he arranged to bring her to his friend’s studio in Fermoy, where over a three-hour session she made her first recording.

Speaking to The Echo from his home in Spain in the wake of Sinéad O’Connor’s death at the tragically young age of 56, Brian O’Reilly remembered the day Mr Falvey arrived in the studio with his student.

He recalled that she had two fellow students with her, as backing vocalists, and Mr Falvey’s brother travelled from Cork to play keyboard, with Brian himself playing bass.

“She did three songs for the demo, and she played a bit of guitar, and I remember she was asking me ‘What can you do with a voice, how can we manipulate it, or what effects can you put on it?’

“I said ‘the voice is the best natural instrument, so you can put a bit of reverb on it, like you’re in a church, or a bit of delay, as if you’re inside in a big canyon’”, Brian remembered.

“She did ‘Black is the Colour’, she did an original, and I can’t remember the other one.”

Brian described her death 40 years after her recording session in Fermoy as “a great shock and a terribly sad loss to all who loved her”.

He remembered a young woman who, even then, had known the musical sound she wanted, and who had the raw talent and the stamina to go on to great success.

“When young people come into the studio, what you try and do is help them along, and I know I had often come across people who talked down to you, so I made it my policy to try and be helpful to people, to try and encourage them.”

Brian joked that his friend Joe Falvey must be a musical lucky charm, as he had not only discovered Sinéad O’Connor, he had also sat beside Rory Gallagher in school.

“It was only later, when Sinéad O’Connor became so big, that Joe said to me, ‘Do you realise who that was?’

Loudest Whisper will play the Corner House on Coburg Street on Thursday 31 August.