Sinead O’Connor turns her fury on Simon Cowell

After last week’s public war of words with Miley Cyrus, Sinead O’Connor has now turned her attention to music producer, Simon Cowell. The Irish singer launched a scathing attack on Cowell and his sidekick Louis Walsh on Friday evening on the Late Late Show in Ireland.

Photo copyright - Alison Martin
Simon Cowell

She spoke of her concern that real music and musicians are being wiped out by artificial bands created on reality TV shows such as The X Factor. The best songwriters and musicians have less and less chance of making it in the music industry, because reality show judges, such as Cowell and Walsh, are filling the charts with cheap, bubble-gum pop.

Speaking to Ryan Turbridy, O’Connor said: “I think the important thing to say is there’s a certain alarm that needs to get rung and I know there are a lot of musicians around the country and around the world that will agree, music is being murdered, rock and roll is being murdered.

“The power of rock and roll to change things, to move people, is being murdered by all of this worship of fame, Pop Idol, X Factor, all this stuff.

“People like Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh – who doesn’t even know how to burn a CD as of the last time I saw him – deciding what records should sound like, and deciding who gets to be famous and who doesn’t.”

Louis Walsh is the man responsible for putting together 90s boy bands Boyzone and Westlife. He also championed the Irish twin brothers John and Edward, who became known as Jedward, on the UK series of the X Factor in 2009.

Simon Cowell is of course the man behind the boom in reality TV talent shows over the last ten years.

O’Connor advised Miley Cyrus last week to let her talent, not taking her clothes off, sell her records. Cyrus’s ill-advised response on Twitter, in which she posted a string of O’Connor’s tweets from a period when she was suffering depression, provoked a vicious backlash. O’Connor went on the offensive, questioning Cyrus’s intelligence and threatening legal action.

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By Patrick Kehoe

Pat Kehoe is a writer for Irish Music Daily. His favourite Irish music bands are the Dubliners and Planxty.