One year on from her death, how does Sinead O’Connor deserve to be remembered? It’s a question I found myself asking whilst listening to Archive on 4 on Radio 4 on Saturday night. Sinead O’Connor: A Life in 10 Songs, presented by Jo Whiley, was very much a celebration and a commemoration of the singer who died last July, aged 56. Cue an hour of music, memory and a treatise on fame, trauma, resilience and resistance. 

But it was also, maybe, something of a mea culpa. An acknowledgement that many of the things O’Connor was ridiculed for during her life - most notably that moment when she tore up the picture of the Pope on the set of Saturday Night Live in 1992 whilst protesting against clerical child abuse - turned out, in the end, to be righteous.

If anything, I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung too far the other way. “It infuriates me now that she has been turned into this kind of saint,” Scottish singer Shirley Manson admitted at one point in this hour-long documentary. “And there is a presumption that we all admired her while she was alive and praised her and listened to her advice. And none of that was true.”

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Indeed. She was hounded for much of her public life by the media and suffered much at the hands of others. But the danger is we now put her on a pedestal. Because the sanctification of Sinead is not, I think, what she deserves. O’Connor was wonderfully, gloriously unsaintly. She was a sweary, funny, filthy-minded, messed up, sometimes mistaken, brilliantly talented, inevitably flawed human being.

And so the moments I liked most in this hour where the moments where we peaked past the mourning veil; guitarist Marco Pirroni’s memories of taking a hand out of her (much to her annoyance) and the Sugababes’ founder and former manager Ron Tom recalling Sinead saying she wanted to join his band.

Or even the moment in 2012 that O’Connor exclaimed that hers had been “a journey of a person who has made it to happiness.”

That’s not a word we associate with O’Connor too often, but it doesn’t mean she didn’t find it now and then.

She once told one of her interviewers: “Don’t make it all misery. Just remember, my story’s not Angela’s f****** Ashes.” O’Connor never saw herself as a victim. I think it’s important not to give her that status now that she is no longer with us.

Alison MoyetAlison Moyet (Image: Toby Emes)

Coincidentally I’ve been recently listening to Alison Moyet’s new podcast series 40 Moyet Moments, a 40-part series (natch) that reached episode 13 on Monday. It’s a pretty bare bones thing; short, snappy chats (episodes are usually less than 15 minutes long, sometimes less than 10) between Moyet and her Scottish media manager Steve Coats-Dennis exploring her solo career. This week we reached the release of her 1987 single Weak in the Presence of Beauty.

“It’s one of the two times in my career when I made a cynical move,” Moyet told Coats-Dennis. “When I heard it I knew it was a hit and that’s why I recorded it.”

This is a really entertaining podcast series, simply because Moyet is herself entertaining. She’s also as ever, outspoken and honest. Talking of her time with Vince Clarke in Yazoo in the first episode she said: “The relationship was quite fractious, but all my relationships were quite fractious.” 

Her account of her day at Live Aid (episode 10) was particularly amusing. It was prefaced by Coats-Dennis warning listeners: “This episode may contain swearing. Quite a lot of it, in fact.”

Moyet described a helicopter to Wembley stadium with Bono and David Bowie, Paul McCartney and Linda inviting her to dinner and hogging the microphone at the mass singalong of Let It Be at the end of the performance when she should have been sharing it with the aforementioned Mr Bowie.

Bowie, Moyet said, was “one of the most human, modest, pleasant, polite and warm people. And completely unpretentious, which is something I used to find really funny about Top of the Pops. 

“You’d do Top of the Pops and come across these really big acts like Paul McCartney, who was really, really regular. And then you’d get these small baby acts who were so f****** jumped up, really sniffy, and would talk to people depending on your status at the time. It was really upside down.”

Another 27 episodes to go. Lucky us.

Listen Out For: Tony Blackburn’s Golden Hour, Radio 2, Sunday, 7pm

Mere moments after the announcement that Joe Biden was withdrawing from the Presidential race last Sunday Tony Blackburn had made a joke about it on his Golden Hour. Not bad for a man who has now been broadcasting for 60 years.