Sinead O’Connor promotes new album at Manchester Irish Festival.

Sinead O’Connor promotes new album at Manchester Irish Festival.

Sinead O’Connor promotes new album at Manchester Irish Festival.

The Iconic Irish singer-songwriter and performer Sinead O’Connor will be playing a special gig on Thursday 15th March at Manchester Cathedral as part of Manchester’s annual Irish Festival.

The festival which is now in its 17th year runs from Friday 2nd March to Sunday 18th March. The 17 day festival has over 200 events at 80 different venues, making it one of Europe’s biggest celebrations of contemporary and traditional Irish culture.

The concert forms part of a UK tour is to promote her brand new studio album ‘How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?’ and to celebrate a career spanning 25 years and millions of record sales worldwide . The album will be released through One Little Indian on February 20th 2012.

Sinead has recently been described by the Guardian as ‘On form, focussed and fervent again’ and Kevin Fitzpatrick from the Manchester Irish Festival said “We are delighted to have Sinead play the festival which celebrates the very best of traditional and contemporary Irish Culture.”

This will be her ninth studio album, and the latest release in a career spanning 25 years and millions of record sales worldwide, ‘How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?’ is as show stopping a performance as her silver jubilee deserves, and ranks as one of her best and most confident pieces of work so far.

Produced by long-term collaborator John Reynolds, its ten tracks play like an encyclopaedic definition of O’Connor’s oeuvre: songs about love and loss, hope and regret, pain and redemption, anger and justice. This is an album of consistently moving, exciting, brilliant and beautiful songs built around Sinead’s voice at its very best – raw and passionate.

The album contains original tracks all self/co-written bar one cover of John Grant’s ‘Queen of Denmark’.

Sinead has been playing new songs from the album at a series of critically acclaimed live shows this year at the Manchester International Festival, Iceland Airwaves and, most recently, at Mencap’s Little Noise Sessions - a performance that the Evening Standard called ‘extraordinary’ and awarded a five stars review.