Belfast DJ and producer David Holmes has spoken about his experience collaborating with the late Sinead O'Connor, saying it was "brilliant" and "beautiful".
Holmes produced O'Connor's as-yet-unreleased final album before her death in July, aged 56.
The Northern Irish musician and composer is set to release his first solo album in 15 years, Blind on a Galloping Horse, this week, which contains the recent single Necessary Genius.
In the track, he praises all the "dreamers, radicals, outcasts and misfits" and gives a special nod to O'Connor in the last line: "I believe in Sinead O'Connor / I believe in refugees."
Speaking to the BBC, Holmes said of the late singer-songwriter: "I love Sinead. We had a brilliant, beautiful experience making a record that I hope the world will hear next year some time."
"I've heard people call Sinead mad, bonkers blah blah," he continued. "Sinead was one of the most fiercely intelligent people I've ever met, and she was far from mad. She had some mental health issues yes, but she wasn't mad.
"She was a very sensitive, beautiful person. She used to ring me up and say, 'how are you doing? I think you're working too hard'.
"So do I believe in Sinead O'Connor? Absolutely."
While the album they collaborated on together at Holmes' Belfast studio has not yet been released, one new track, The Magdalene Song, recently appeared in the finale of BBC drama The Woman In the Wall, which is about the trauma of a woman who spent time in a Magdalene laundry.
Holmes said it was fitting that the track was used for the series, with O'Connor's permission, as she was "very outspoken about the Catholic church" and had "spent time in a care home that was linked to a laundry".
He said: "It's a song of two parts. The first part is heart-breaking. But then in classic Sinead [style], it comes to a certain point where the emotion of the song completely flips and it becomes this song of defiance.
"She's talking about having her children taken off her because of the woman that she was, and then she goes, 'but that's not gonna happen, I'm gonna live'.
"That was the genius of that song and so it was perfect for the end of the series."
