Cat Power, David Gray, Dropkick Murphys and Glen Hansard are among the artists due to perform at a tribute concert for Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan, which will be held just after St Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
The concert on 20 March will feature collaborators and friends of the artists who will perform and remember their lives and work at what has been billed as the Sinéad & Shane celebration.
The Irish singers recorded the song Haunted together in 1995 and their deaths were among the biggest cultural moments of the past 12 months. O’Connor died in July at the age of 56 and MacGowan in November, aged 65.
After MacGowan’s death Michael D Higgins, the Irish president, described the Pogues’ frontman as one of “music’s greatest lyricists”, while the Australian singer Nick Cave paid tribute to his songwriting prowess and his “chaotic, poetic soul”.
O’Connor’s biggest hit was a cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, which reached No 1, bringing her worldwide fame – and after an appearance on Saturday Night Live when she ripped up a picture of the pope as a protest at child sexual abuse in the Catholic church – infamy.
In 2021, she released a memoir, Rememberings, in which she detailed her upbringing when she was physically and sexually abused and encouraged to shoplift by her mother before ending up spending 18 months at a centre that had previously been one of Dublin’s notorious church-affiliated Magdalene laundries.
O’Connor gave a track (the Magdalene Song) to the producers of the Woman in the Wall, a powerful BBC series about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, last year and changed her off-stage name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat when she became a Muslim in 2018.
The Irish singer-songwriter Hansard led a rousing rendition of the Pogues’ Christmas hit Fairytale of New York at MacGowan’s funeral in December, and he will perform again, although the set list has not yet been made public. Cave also performed a version of his collaboration with MacGowan – A Rainy Night in Soho – at the funeral but he has not been confirmed for the tribute concert.
Other acts that have signed up include Amanda Palmer, Bettye LaVette, Gordon Gano, Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz, Julia Cumming, Kat Edmonson, the Mountain Goats and the Resistance Revival Chorus. More acts will be announced shortly.
All proceeds from the concert will go to Pen America, a nonprofit organisation that promotes freedom of expression in the US.
