On a bright wintry afternoon towards the tail end of 1989, I met Sinéad O’Connor in a flat on All Saints Road in west London. I was there to interview the 23-year-old singer for the Face magazine about the making of her imminent second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Its title, Sinéad was keen to point out, reflected a newfound calmness and serenity following what had been a turbulent few years following the release of her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, in 1987.
She was, she said, no longer “this desperately unhappy and fucked-up person” who had been “bolshy and aggressive to everyone”. Instead, the new songs were “prayerful – not literally, but insofar as they give off a religious feeling – spiritual happiness”. By the time my feature was published as a cover story in February 1990, her second single from that album, Nothing Compares 2 U, had become a worldwide hit, transforming her life and utterly disrupting that short-lived serenity. The fame it brought in its wake was, for Sinéad, akin to an emotional tidal wave: unmooring and almost capsizing. She fought against it as if fighting for her life.
She was, she would later say, a protest singer, not a pop star. There was a sliver of truth in that, but her mercurial temperament defied labelling. As many have noted in the wake of her passing, she walked her own singular creative path, sometimes stumbling, sometimes falling, always defiantly and wilfully out of step, uncompromising and intent on telling it as she saw whatever the cost. She became a kind of outsider artist, answerable to no one but herself – fuelled by her beliefs, fascinations and commitments.
After that initial encounter, and before her long self-imposed exile from pop stardom, I became friends with Sinéad for a time in the 1990s, our paths crossing at house parties, in bars, at gigs. I remember her as a breath of fresh air: uplifting, unaffected, often hilariously unguarded in her opinions of her contemporaries and peers, and seemingly unaware of her beauty or her extraordinary presence, both of which held everyone around her in their sway.
In 1992, I had a blessedly brief second career as a co-director of pop promo videos, teaming up with my friend Seamus McGarvey, who has since gone on to become a renowned cinematographer (The Hours, Atonement, We Need to Talk About Kevin). Our first video was for the Bristol-Irish rap crew Marxman, who were as ideologically committed as their name suggests. It was banned by the BBC, earning us some credibility if little cash.
When I was given a rough cut of their proposed second single, Ship Ahoy, a broadside against colonialism set to a thunderous beat, I called Sinéad to tell her about it, sensing that she would have an affinity with both the music – she was a huge fan of hip-hop – and the sentiment.
That evening, Seamus and I sat with Sinéad in his beat-up Citroën on a rainy west London street and played it to her at full volume on the car stereo. She immediately asked us to play it again, bobbing her head and smiling. Seizing the moment, I asked her if she would sing the song’s short chorus when they recorded it properly in a few weeks. She agreed without hesitation.
It’s fair to say her presence transformed the song and, more dramatically, the video, which she also graced with her presence. Seamus shot her performance at Bray studios where, her wrists wreathed in chains for added symbolism, she seemed to inhabit the song’s plaintive refrain – “Lord, take me where I lie,/ Don’t let my children die.”
There was one dissonant moment during the shoot. Sinead had hung around, chatting and watching intently, while we dropped various emblems of colonialism – flags, miniature ships and statues – into a huge water tank, filming them as they sank slowly to the bottom. During a break for coffee, she beckoned me to one side, looking suddenly serious. “How come you don’t have a Vatican flag?” she asked.
It soon became clear this was an issue for her, so much so that we dispatched a runner to try and find one at short notice in a flag emporium in central London. Whether he succeeded or not I cannot remember, but the decision to seek one out seemed to assuage Sinéad, who departed soon after, hugging everyone involved in the shoot.
It was, in retrospect, a prescient interlude. A few weeks later, on 3 October 1992, Sinéad made headlines across the world when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a performance of Bob Marley’s War on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, intoning the words: “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil” and exhorting viewers to “fight the real enemy”.
As a provocation, it was both spectacular and self-sabotaging, brave and, to many, foolhardy. In a few seconds, she capsized her fame and unmoored herself from pop stardom, riding out a fierce backlash from American fans and the media. I wondered then, as I do now, what the psychic cost of her rebelliousness was, and where its roots really lay.
Sinéad was not so much a political artist as someone instinctively and righteously committed to speaking out against injustice. Her assault on a Catholic hierarchy at that time committed to denial over the extent of child abuse by its clergy is now seen as an extraordinarily brave and dramatic (early) breach of its collusive silence.
I met Sinéad many times afterwards, including one memorable night when she cajoled me and some friends to attend the opening of a shortlived Irish bookshop in Westbourne Park. A handful of people were treated to an impromptu acapella performance of several darkly mysterious traditional Irish folk songs, which she sang while sitting crosslegged on the floor. It was transfixing in its effortlessness and its emotion. Pure Sinéad.
In 2002, we met and talked in some depth about her recent ordination to the Catholic priesthood. Like Sinéad the anti-pop star, Mother Bernadette Marie O’Connor was serene and sincere, but also mischievous and provocative. Her relationship with the Holy Spirit, she explained, had been there since childhood “and it is everything to me in my life”.
A few minutes later, though, she confessed that she considered herself “more Rasta than Catholic.” She was drawn, she explained, to the positive elements of both to underpin her belief in the essential goodness of humanity. “You don’t have to obey all the rules,” she said, smiling. “I never did.” And she never would.
The last time I saw Sinéad was in January 2018, when our paths crossed again at Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday concert in Dublin, where she stole the show with an effortless rendition of his song You’re the One. She seemed in good spirits, if distracted, and I wish now I had talked to her for longer.
I’ve thought of every one of those almost ordinary times with Sinéad a lot in the last few days. One of the many problems with fame – and more so with media notoriety – is its distorting aspect. You can lose sight of the person you once knew, so much so that you start thinking: “Did I really know them at all?”
Death, amplifies that sense of distortion. So it is that her journey of creative brilliance and personal struggle, deep wonder and constant rebellion, and latterly aloneness and personal tragedy – has been condensed in obituaries into a narrative from which, it seems to me, she seems somehow missing or misrepresented. Her unruly contours of rebel life just did not fit that detached and formal format.
It is, above all, the testimonies of ordinary people – and most affectingly the women, young and old, who picked up on the felt intensity of her righteous anger and her empathy – that attest to how much she was loved and will be missed.
Since her death, a line from an old Simon and Garfunkel song, keeps playing in my head: “Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you … ” I tend to them now, and Sinéad is, for a few moments at least, alive and well, and as free-spirited, engaging and effortlessly unpredictable as anyone I’ve ever known.
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