Nothing compares to her

The incomparable Sinead O’Connor has had a 30-year battle with the music industry, writes Will Hodgkinson.

Of the many astonishing moments in Sinead O’Connor’s Rememberings, from being beaten up by her mother when she was a child to becoming America’s public enemy No 1 in 1992 after ripping up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, one sticks out in particular. In 1990, nine months after the release of her peerless cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, she was staying in Los Angeles when the telephone rang. A voice asked if that was ‘‘Shinehead O Khan-er’’. It was Prince. He was sending a car to take her to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

After O’Connor is dropped off by a silent limousine driver, the door is opened by an Igor-like figure who leads her through a darkened house, its windows covered with aluminium foil. She’s led to the kitchen, where Prince appears, ‘‘wearing all the makeup that was ever in history applied to the face of Boy George’’. After offering to get her a drink, he inexplicably loses his temper and slams a glass down on the table.

Things get increasingly sinister from there. Prince says he doesn’t like the language that O’Connor uses in interviews. She tells him to f... off. After losing his temper again Prince suggests they patch things up by having a pillow fight, only to attack her with something hard stuffed inside the pillow.

He blocks her from leaving the house. He drags her towards his car. She escapes and runs down the road, and Prince catches up with her in his car. She dashes up to a random house and rings the doorbell, at which point this towering figure (metaphorically speaking) of American music, perhaps realising how this would look to a stranger, disappears into the night, never to be seen by O’Connor again.

‘‘Firstly, Prince didn’t like people covering his songs,’’ says O’Connor, who speaks in a low, rapid monotone with a heavy County Dublin brogue.

O’Connor is speaking from her cottage outside Dublin where she lives alone, having had four children and been married four times. She is in the hijab she has worn since embracing Islam in 2018. But with her shaven head, ever-present cigarette and heavily tattooed arms, at 54 she doesn’t seem much changed from the Irishwoman whose angelic voice, uncompromising attitude and willingness to go up against some very big forces turned her into a household name in the 1980s and 1990s.

The overriding theme of O’Connor’s memoir is of people recognising this incredible talent in her, then wanting to control it against her wishes. ‘‘And I was too young to realise what was going on,’’ she says. ‘‘When you’re successful in the music industry, you pay with your life. If you’re a pop star, you spend 1 per cent of your time making music. The rest of it is spent having your picture taken.’’

Most of all, O’Connor says, she found being famous embarrassing. ‘‘I didn’t like sitting in a hotel in

Amsterdam like a hooker, spilling my soul to 10 journalists in a row. Then somebody, somewhere, is annoyed at something you said – friends, family, strangers. That was a bit weird.

‘‘And the whole being crazy thing was a bit weird too. In America it felt like they were trying to silence me by making out that I was crazy before I ever really was crazy. They did the same with rappers like NWA and Public Enemy, who they tried to silence by saying they were angry black people. Actually [we] had the same message: people should be themselves.’’

The accusations of craziness ramped up after the Saturday Night Live incident. That was because, O’Connor suggests, nobody could accept that the sexual abuse within the Irish Catholic Church she was protesting against was really happening.

‘‘It gave people in my private life, or in the music industry, licence to treat me like I was crazy,’’ she says. ‘‘But actually it impacted my life for the better because people felt tearing up a picture of the Pope derailed my career when actually having a No 1 record derailed my career. That wasn’t meant to happen, so I was tearing up my life as a pop star. That allowed me to do the thing I was born for, which was live performance.’’

O’Connor was vindicated when the widescale cover-up of abuse, such as the case of Belfast priest Brendan Smyth, was found to be so staggering it contributed to the downfall of the Irish government in 1994.

‘‘Ultimately, the only figure vindicated here is God,’’ O’Connor says when I suggest this. ‘‘People who claimed to serve God were perpetuating the abuse, not just by keeping it secret but by passing priests on to other countries when they knew what they were up to. All I did was throw a little conversation bomb – and then run.’’

The truly shocking incidents in Rememberings come in the early chapters. The third of five children, O’Connor grew up in material comfort, the daughter of a structural engineer father, but under terrible physical and emotional abuse from her mother after her parents divorced in 1975. O’Connor’s mother would encourage her daughter to steal, resulting in her being sent to a former Magdalene asylum when she was 15. You have to wonder what drove that kind of behaviour in the first place. ‘‘In a million years I’ll never know,’’ O’Connor says after a long pause. ‘‘Until recently I would tell you she was possessed but someone asked me if my mother was a psychopath and I think he hit the nail on the head. That’s the thing about my mother: she would smile as she would be cruel.’’

O’Connor survived all of this – alongside being bashed in the head by the door of a train that was travelling at full speed when she was 11, leaving her with a slipped disc and a permanent hunch – to find salvation in music. Bob Dylan was the first artist whose music really touched her. What she heard in him, she says, was a father figure.

‘‘If a marriage broke up in Ireland in the 1970s, men had no rights to their children at all,’’ she says. ‘‘I didn’t see my father from the ages of 11 to 13, and people underestimate how much young girls need a male role model.’’

These days O’Connor’s output has slowed down, although she says she does want to get out there again. ‘‘I still love performing, but at my age I find living out of a suitcase destabilising. And singers are like football players: they have a certain lifespan and I’m getting too old to be dragging my sorry arse around the world.’’

Before it is time to leave, I ask O’Connor which is the personal favourite of her albums. It’s 2007’s Theology, a relatively obscure collection of religiously inspired songs that touched on her love of Rastafarianism and her brief, surprising stint as a priest in the Apostolic Church.

‘‘I’ve studied theology since I was seven, but I left Islam until last because I was prejudiced. I believed the b ....... we’ve been fed,’’ she says. ‘‘Then I read the Quran and it felt like I had been a Muslim my whole life and I didn’t even know it... Our culture would teach you that Islam is all about treating women like s... Nothing is further from the truth.’’

Yet O’Connor is doing Islam – like she does everything else – in her own way. ‘‘Now me and a bunch of my friends are going to get s...-faced to celebrate the book coming out,’’ she tells me. Then, with a quick thanks, she’s gone.