My mother made me live in the garden for a week. She was a violent beast, but I was able to soothe her with my voice

She wore her heart on her sleeve from the moment the world first saw her to the moment it tragically lost her

- MATT ROPER

And in Sinead O’Connor’s last interview, she was just as honest, vulnerable and unflinching as ever.

The Sky documentary Nothing Compares, airing from tomorrow, was to be an intimate portrait of a living legend, but will now be a homage to a remarkable life gone too soon.

As well as the documentary, she had been finishing an album and was planning a world tour.

It was because of her music that we knew her, but Sinead always insisted it was her music that saved her, both from the traumas of her past and the knocks that she took in her career.

She said: “There was no therapy when I was growing up, so the reason I got into music was therapy. Which is why it was such a shock for me to become a pop star. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.”

She would later reveal how she and her four siblings were abused by their violent mother, Marie, until their father John won custody of them when Sinead was 10 years old.

After she began to play truant to go shoplifting, Sinead was sent to a correctional school where she began expressing her pain in music. She said: “Everybody in music has a story. You know there is something they need to get off their chest. Perhaps we all need a bit of love and affection that we didn’t get anywhere else, but we get by making music.”

Music had been a part of her life right from the beginning though, and in her last interview Sinead recalled: “My first musical memory is my father singing to me Scarlet Ribbons. I just remember being blown away. I was like, ‘Oh my God’, the angels came in the window.