The singer Miley Cyrus revealed in a recent Rolling Stone interview that her video for the song ‘Wrecking Ball’ was inspired by Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. The twenty-year-old told the magazine that her new video was ‘like Sinead O’Connor’s video but, like, the most modern version…. I wanted it to be tough but really pretty. That’s what Sinead did with her hair and everything.’

O’Connor, prompted by requests from newspapers to comment on Cyrus’s remark, responded by posting an open letter to Cyrus on her website, written, says O’Connor, ‘in the spirit of motherliness and love’.

‘I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos,’ begins O’Connor. ‘It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether its the music business or yourself doing the pimping.’

‘The music business doesn’t give a shit about you, or any of us,’ writes O’Connor later in the 1,000-word letter. ‘They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its what you wanted… and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, “they” will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body and you will find yourself very alone.’

‘You also said in Rolling Stone that your look is based on mine,’ says O’Connor. ‘The look I chose [for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’], I chose on purpose at a time when my record company were encouraging me to do what you have done. I felt I would rather be judged on my talent and not my looks. I am happy that I made that choice, not least because I do not find myself on the proverbial rag heap now that I am almost forty-seven years of age… which unfortunately many female artists who have based their image around their sexuality, end up on when they reach middle age.’