NOTHING COMPARES 2 SINEAD O’CONNOR LETTING RIP!
Her year-long feud with Miley Cyrus. Her 6am fist-fight with Prince. Her beef with U2. And what really gets the singer and self-styled priest hot under the dog collar. Read on to find out why...
Sinéad O’Connor has spent a lifetime battling ‘a nest of devils’ in the Vatican. In 1992, she provocatively ripped up a photograph of the Pontiff on live primetime US television in protest at the Catholic Church’s alleged involvement in child abuse. But now the shaven-headed singer has decided it’s high time they shared a pipe of peace.
But being Sinéad O’Connor, who has taken to wearing a clerical collar with leather trousers on stage, it’s not tobacco she’d like to smoke with the Holy Father. ‘I’d like to have a joint and a chat with him,’ she says, conjuring an unholy image of a Rastafarian Pope Francis.
‘I don’t really know anything about the dude and he may be a very nice man. My problem isn’t with him personally. We’d probably have some common ground – we’ve both got weird jobs for one thing. Maybe we should swap roles. He could dress up as me and I could be him.
‘Tearing that photo of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live was actually inspired by [Bob] Geldof ripping up a picture of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on Top Of The Pops in the punk days,’ she says. ‘So thanks for that, Bob.’
Fellow photo-defilers, O’Connor and Geldof have, of course, just reunited for the recording of BandAid30. ‘I’m involved for one reason alone,’ she says, ‘and that’s because I love Bob. If he ever asked me to mop his kitchen floor I would, willingly.’
She shyly admits to recognising her own influence in some of the younger artists involved in BandAid30 like Adele, Emeli Sandé and Ed Sheeran.
‘Fair play to Ed,’ she says. ‘It takes some balls just to get up with an acoustic guitar. The people I’ve admired have always done that – Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. I still do a section in my own shows on my own and people go mental.’
Sinéad’s career has been characterised by controversy, the most recent of which has been a year-long war of words with Miley Cyrus over what O’Connor sees as Cyrus’s irresponsible sexualisation of her fans, many of them children.
She has written a series of open letters expressing ‘motherly’ concern for young artists including Justin Bieber and Britney Spears, singling out Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball video, in which the former child star appeared naked and licking a sledgehammer, advising Cyrus that she was being ‘pimped’ by the music industry. ‘This isn’t about Miley or any other personalities,’ Sinéad states clearly this afternoon. ‘It’s an issue of child protection. Her audience needs to be protected. She is selling sex and sexual imagery to very young kids and it’s wrong, it’s reckless and it’s dangerous.
‘I was right when I said the Catholic Church sexualised minors and I’m right about the music business doing the same. I know what I’m talking about.
‘Miley even looks like a kid herself. She’s a very young-looking young woman. She’s come up through Disney, she was Hannah Montana, the whole thing. The music industry is sexualising the artists that look most like kids.
‘As an artist you have to be conscious of minors,’ Sinéad contends. ‘There’s no excuse for endorsing this type of reckless behaviour because that leads to child sex trafficking and ultimately the deaths of children. It’s that dangerous. It’s well known that paedophilic people hang around industries where children are. Look at the Church, look at schools, look at the music business.’
How should paedophiles be punished? ‘They should be killed, as mercifully as possible.’
Not chemical castration in the case of male offenders? ‘No, first strike, you’re dead. I’m not equipped to
diagnose but if you so much as look at a child in a sexual context... it’s the one crime a person should be killed for. It’s the only thing that will stop people from doing it.’
Sinéad has elected to meet in ‘the cabin’, a shed at the bottom of her garden in Bray, Co. Wicklow. To reach this bohemian workspace, you must enter her impressively proportioned Victorian house – where she has lived for the past eight years – past rooms filled with family photos, Indian paintings, funky rugs and musical instruments, on through a large kitchen, across a small five-a-side football pitch, and you’re there.
Shunting her Starbucks coffee aside, Sinéad lights a cigarette and turns down the Aaliyah CD. She has just come off a tour of America promoting her latest album, an intelligent, infectious, guitar-driven work, and feels as if her ‘blood is made of lead’. Her speaking voice has deepened. ‘That’s age,’ she shrugs (she’s 48 next month), and I’m sure the 20, 30 fags a day have done their bit.’
Next week an addiction support worker will move into Sinéad’s house for a month to help her quit smoking. ‘I really want to stop,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be very… interesting.’
She recalls her turn last month on Later With Jools
Holland, claiming, ‘I was so sick I almost died in front of a live audience, like Tommy Cooper.’
This is typically melodramatic. But while Sinéad is given to comedic overstatement, she is scrupulously honest. ‘I am unable to lie,’ she sighs, offering up specifics unselfconsciously. She is allergic to alcohol (‘I puke’), hates pasta, loves Lebanese food, doesn’t watch TV, paints illuminated manuscripts as a hobby, bakes an excellent Christmas cake, and occasionally buys clothes on Amazon.
She is fine financially (‘I’m grand, I’m a grafter, I can pay the bills), and as intense as she can be, Sinéad will happily admit to frivolous activities such as avidly following George Clooney’s recent wedding.
‘My breath was taken away by how beautiful that woman
‘I was running around Prince’s car, spitting at him, as he tried to box meat six in the morning’
looked,’ she says of Amal Alamuddin. ‘Part of me was no doubt thinking, “There goes George, he’ll never be mine; oh well, I’ll have to live with that,” but then I got over it because she’s just so cool.’
When addressing difficult questions, Sinéad’s body language turns inward, the shoulders hunch, the eyes flicker and she rubs distractedly at the mole on her chin.
She was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2003 but suffers from post-traumatic stress and depression (‘a sore-hearted sadness’, as she describes it) brought on by physical and psychological abuse in her childhood, a subject she doesn’t discuss today apart from saying, ‘It wasn’t my Dad, he’s a lovely man, it was others that caused the… trouble.’
Sinéad O’Connor has always confused and confounded. Critics didn’t know what to make of her when she arrived in London in the late 1980s, shaven-headed, bovver-booted, doe-eyed and sulkily confrontational. Was she a punk? A protest singer? An angry New Age lesbian? All of the above? The singing on her 1987 debut
The Lion And The Cobra was extraordinary: red in tooth and claw, tender and powerful, her remarkable songs spoke of deep pain and spiritual questing. She caused quite a stir.
By 1990, abetted by the ubiquity of Nothing Compares 2 U,
‘What U 2 did with iTunes was… almost terrorist’
Sinéad had become traffic-stoppingly famous, as well known and notorious as Madonna. Even Frank Sinatra was talking about Sinéad, promising that he would ‘kick her ass, if she was a guy’ as O’Connor wouldn’t allow the American national anthem to be played prior to her concerts. She ignored Ol’ Blue Eyes, saying that she ‘wouldn’t hit an old man ... it might kill him’.
Despite conservative America’s reservations, Sinéad moved to LA, living in a ramshackle rented house in the hills above the city, tooling around Tinseltown in a jeep and experiencing the type of bug-eyed attention X Factor candidates can only dream about.
I visited her during the warm Californian winter of 1990 and found her level of fame frightening. Restaurants would freeze, waiting staff became struck dumb, drivers would be so distracted as to almost crash. You became immune to hearing her name being constantly hollered.
Now, she says: ‘I didn’t have a pop star personality. I was a square peg in a round hole. I’d been inspired by protest singers not by a desire to be famous. But there were no lessons in how to deal with fame, so for me it was a massive identity crisis.
This tumultuous time will be revisited in the memoirs she has started writing this year. Initially sold on the promise that it would ‘dish the sexual dirt on everyone I have ever slept with’ she now admits this was a lame publicity stunt acknowledging that she has ‘sensibly forgotten 99.99% of anyone I ever slept with anyway!’
‘I’m making the memoir funny,’ she says. ‘So there’s nothing, even stuff from my childhood, too miserable to write about. You have to explain the person you are, but it won’t be heavy.’
Evangelistic as Sinéad is about the world’s injustices, she remains infectiously enthusias- tic about music: John Lennon (‘he was shot on my birthday’), Bob Dylan (‘I see him as my rabbi’), roots reggae, R&B, Memphis soul, Chicago blues. Although her last meeting with Prince (the man who arguably made her career) in the early 1990s, didn’t go too well.
‘We had a fist fight,’ she says, throwing a convincing combination of air-punches. ‘There was quite a scene. I ended up having to escape from his house. I was running around his car, spitting at him and he’s trying to box me – all at six o’clock in the morning. I rang on someone’s doorbell to get in their house because Prince was about to kick the living s*** out of me.
‘The row happened because he summoned me to his house to tell me that he didn’t like me swearing in my interviews. I told him to go f*** himself… and it all went downhill from there.
‘His windows are all covered in tin foil because he doesn’t like light. He sat by the door of his house and, true to God, the irises of his eyes dissolved. They didn’t move up or down, left or right. They dissolved. The entire of his eyes became white,’ she says darkly.
She is similarly unforgiving of U2, for not ‘standing by their album [ Songs Of
Innocence] and just putting it out’, preferring instead to ‘force it on people who didn’t want it in the first place’.
‘What they did with iTunes [uploading unrequested material into subscribers’ libraries], was a badly judged move,’ she says. ‘There was something almost terrorist about it. I’m really not a U2 fan but it wasn’t at all kosher invading people’s lives like that. It was bad management.
‘Funny thing is the kid who devised the app that removed the U2 album from people’s computers,’ she cackles. ‘He made a fortune apparently.’
We end up talking about sex, drugs and Lily Allen, who worried Sinéad, when she saw her. ‘She looked underweight, as I am. A bit too thin, but that can happen.’
Sinéad’s own bodyweight has fluctuated over the years, mainly due to psychiatric medicine. A naturally slender woman, she gained significantly while taking ‘toxic doses of stupidly prescribed drugs’, then stopped the programme and lost the weight.
Now medication-free, she is so slight that her parting embrace feels a little like hugging a small step-ladder.
Albeit a clever, passionate and lovably wonky one.