The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Sorry Sinéad, you were right all along’
The crazy woman in pop’s attic? I used to think so, but her brave, wry memoir will change your mind
REMEMBERINGS by Sinéad O’Connor
304pp, Sandycove, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £28.00
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I knew Sinéad O’Connor when she had hair. I used to see her around Dublin in the early 1980s, a shy, awkward teenager with a strange and intense vocal presence. I watched her rise with fascination, when she shaved her perfectly shaped head and unleashed that beautiful banshee wail. Her shattering cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U took her to number one all over the world in 1990, aged 24. So I parlayed my connections to wangle an interview. It was a disaster.
Sinéad was sitting in a cramped office at Chrysalis Records, eating a curry. I asked a lot of questions, while she spooned food into her mouth and answered in monosyllables. After 20 minutes, I suggested that she finish her meal, and then we start again. “No,” she snapped. “This isn’t like an interview, it’s like a conversation on a bus.” I decided to leave but she demanded I hand over my recording, accusing me of wanting “to make a fool of her”. I retorted that she was doing a fine job of that by herself. It ended with us wrestling over a table for my cassette machine, before I fled, pursued through the lobby by a tiny pop star hurling abuse.
By 1992, the whole world had seen this other side of Sinéad. When she tore up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live, her career crashed and burned. A repuequivocal. tation as the crazy woman in pop’s attic has pursued her down decades of erratic and polarising behaviour, whether declaring (then retracting) lesbianism or being ordained as a renegade Catholic priest while campaigning against clerical sexual abuse, then converting to Islam.
She has changed her name twice (first to Magda Davitt, then to Shuhada’ Sadaqat, though she still performs as Sinéad O’Connor). There have been four short-lived marriages, custody battles, fall-outs with fellow pop stars, managers and friends, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, suicide attempts, and a full-blown mental health crisis after a hysterectomy in 2017, involving distressing messages on social media accounts and long periods of hospitalisation.
Yet no matter how chaotic her personal life, the music remained wondrous: 10 idiosyncratic albums of intensely felt, passionately delivered songcraft. Enough so that in 2014, I warily agreed to interview her again. Arriving at a sprawling Georgian house on the Dublin seafront, I was greeted with a warm hug and disarming smile. “I’m so sorry,” the middle-aged O’Connor blushed as we discussed our earlier encounter. “I was a very unhappy person. Young and angry. I couldn’t understand why people liked my music, because for me the only reason I was making it was because I was mad, and I had to.”
Rememberings offers O’Connor’s very personal version of events, a tale of maternal and institutional abuse that might be a misery memoir, if it weren’t related with such eccentric charm and cheery fortitude. The title is deliberately “I can’t remember any more,” she declares, “except for that which is private or that which I wish to forget.” She blames posttraumatic stress disorder for gaps in her narrative. “I ain’t been quite here, and it’s hard to recollect what you weren’t present at.” The structure is scattershot, and a lot of the stories familiar to anyone who has followed her career closely, but the accumulation of subtly awful details renders this first-person account quietly devastating.
O’Connor’s parents separated in 1975, when she was eight. Her elder brother Joseph, an acclaimed novelist, has described their mother as “a deeply unhappy and disturbed person” responsible for “extreme
After the pope photo furore, ‘I could just be me. Do what I love. Be imperfect. Mad, even’
and violent abuse, both emotional and physical”. Sinéad took the brunt, locked up for days, starved and beaten. She was encouraged to shoplift for her kleptomaniacal mother, then made to confess, stripped naked and struck with a sweeping brush while repeating “I am nothing” over and over. During such episodes, the brutalised young girl was sustained by profound religious visions, as a picture of Pope John Paul II looked down from her mother’s wall (the same photo she would rip up on TV).
In 1975, her father gained custody of his four children (unheard of in Ireland at the time) but Sinéad returned to her mother, locked into a “Stockholm syndrome” dependency. When she eventually broke away at 13, she proved unable to settle into her father’s new family. Her borderline criminal lifestyle led to a spell at a “rehabilitation centre for girls with behavioural problems”. She wryly remarks: “I think the whole world knows a refund is owed my father for that.” The nuns in charge belonged to an order later linked to the Magdelene Laundries scandal, where tens of thousands of young Irish women who had been sexually active outside “wedlock” were psychologically and physically mistreated. O’Connor gives a sad account of one of her fellow boarders, who was forced to give up her baby for adoption and became suicidally depressed.
Music was O’Connor’s salvation, but just as she was making a name for herself, her mother died in a car crash in 1985. At this point, the confused, bereft and angry girl was 18, about to sign a major record contract, and set on a collision course with the world. Unfolding in the present tense, with sometimes blurry detail and vague timeline, her narration poignantly evokes the artless voice of a lost innocent, singing to save her life. “I never made sense to anyone, even myself, unless I was singing,” she writes.
At a time when the music industry is being forced to address exploitative and bullying behaviour towards female artists, O’Connor’s confrontational stance starts to resemble heroism rather than petulance. She shaves off her hair when record company bosses request she look more feminine, accusing them of wanting to style her like their mistresses. When she becomes happily pregnant, she is dispatched to a doctor. “Your record company has spent a hundred thousand pounds recording your album. You owe it to them not to have this baby,” she is told.
This is not a score-settling kissand-tell, but it is certainly going to make some in the music business uncomfortable, as O’Connor calls out pervasive bullying, sexism and racism wherever she sees it. An account of dinner at Prince’s Los Angeles mansion portrays him as an egotistical tyrant. It ends with O’Connor fleeing on foot through Beverly Hills, pursued by the superstar in a sports car yelling that he’s going to kick the s--- out of her.
Even as she relates her terrible stories, O’Connor retains humour and perspective, acknowledging the part played in her own troubles by her volatile temper and deep insecurities. She is full of praise for many people in her life, even some whom she has badly fallen out with.
She is determined to tell her story the way she remembers it, which is certainly not the way it is usually told. Noting that she never set out to become a pop star, she objects to the notion that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed her career. “I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing up the photo put me back on the right track.
I had to make my living performing live again. And that’s what I was born for… After [the pope incident] I could just be me. Do what I love. Be imperfect. Be mad, even.”
I hope this brave book helps rehabilitate O’Connor. I look back and wonder, if I had understood more about mental health, childhood abuse and the marginalisation of women in the music industry, whether I might have been a more sensitive interviewer in 1990, and responded to her discomfort in a way that didn’t lead to confrontation. I am reminded of a mural that appeared in Dublin a few years ago, as Catholic clerical abuse was being exposed. It said: “Sorry Sinéad, you were right all along.”