The Washington Post

(Laura Hynd for The Washington Post)

Sinéad O’Connor
is still in one piece
She tore up a picture of the pope.
Then her life came apart. These
days, she just wants to make music.

By Geoff Edgers March 18, 2020

   

BRAY, IRELAND — Sinéad O’Connor’s office is a glass, pentagon-shaped porch

that’s also the entryway to her house. Most days, before the sun rises over the
Irish Sea, she’ll be sitting there, smoking a cigarette, nursing a sugary cup of
coffee or shuffling through her iPad. She may even pick up a guitar.

When the water ripples in the wind, the spot can be hauntingly beautiful,
“Ulysses” sprung to life. Not that O’Connor, born just four stops up the train line
in the Dublin suburb of Glenageary, feels particularly romantic about the
setting.

“I f---ing hate living in Ireland,” she says. “My spiritual home is America. I know
that my stork should have dropped me in America. But he got drunk in Dublin.
It’s freezing, it’s miserable. Everything’s really expensive. I love America, but I
can never leave Ireland. I wouldn’t leave my grandchildren or my children.”

There are four children, a pair of grandchildren, four ex-husbands and an ex-
boyfriend, Frank, who lives a short walk down Strand Road with their son,
Yeshua, 13. There is her father, a sister and three brothers, all within a drive.
They know her not as the pop star who rose to fame singing “Nothing Compares
2 U,” but as a witty, compassionate, difficult, fearless, playful and unpredictable
woman who has struggled, personally and professionally, ever since she ripped
up that photograph of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. And they
remember the last time O’Connor left home.
In 2015, doctors in Ireland performed a radical hysterectomy to relieve
O’Connor’s chronic endometriosis. But the procedure pushed her into
premature menopause, which went undiagnosed and unmedicated, she says,
and made her go “completely mental.” She moved to Chicago, where she had
friends, then moved to nearby Waukegan, lived in a motel and volunteered at a
veteran’s hospital. As her depression deepened, she headed to San Francisco
and checked into a well-respected treatment center. She eventually landed in a
New Jersey Travelodge, where, in August 2017, O’Connor posted a 12-minute
plea on Facebook referencing suicide attempts and intense loneliness. That led
to an ill-advised appearance on “Dr. Phil.”

John Reynolds, her first husband and longtime producer, flew to the States and
brought O’Connor home to Ireland. And with that, one of contemporary music’s
greatest and most original artists seemed to vanish.

But last month, O’Connor, 53, quietly traveled to the West Coast for the opening
leg of a mini tour, eight club shows spread over 12 days. They were a first step
to reclaiming a career virtually abandoned during the years of turmoil, familial
conflict and canceled gigs. All seemed forgiven. Crowds were spellbound as
O’Connor, in bare feet and a hijab — she converted to Islam in 2018 —
mesmerized them with a 17-song set that stretched across her career.

It’s been five years since audiences last saw Sinead O’Connor on a stage and three years since a heart-
breaking cry for help. (Erin Patrick O’Connor/The Washington Post)
“To say it was religious would be an understatement,” said Bikini Kill’s Kathleen
Hanna, who saw the Feb. 9 performance at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles.

Backstage after the show, booking agents huddled with O’Connor, plotting a
potential fall tour to mark the 30th anniversary of her influential album, “I Do
Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” which included her No. 1 cover of the Prince-
penned “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

She sat there quietly. Even as O’Connor finishes a memoir aimed for the spring
of 2021, starts work on her first album in years and awaits the second leg of a
tour — a string of sold-out East Coast shows, including at the Birchmere, which
have been postponed due to coronavirus concerns — there is a bigger project
underway. How to live.

There are still moments when O’Connor will break down, either in fury, tears or
a kind of self-loathing. But during her most recent hospital stay, which ended
last May, she learned an important concept, which has become her mantra:
radical acceptance. As a girl, she suffered abuse from her deeply religious
mother that remains with her decades after her mother’s death. In the past,
she’s tried to fight and deflect it, sometimes by lashing out at others. She’s
learned that this doesn’t help.

“Because that kind of pain doesn’t go away,” O’Connor says. “You only learn to
live with it. Music is where I can manage it.”
O'Connor, right, sits with Jackie Rainey, a member of her band, at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where
she performed on Feb. 9. (Lindsey Best for The Washington Post)

Translating the pain

She can be incredibly calm and patient. She can also explode. She can speak
eloquently about Jesus or the Koran or go blue enough to make Amy Schumer
blush, sometimes in the same conversation. She can be shy and insecure. And
yet she didn’t hesitate to stare down the cameras on American television to call
out one of the most powerful men in the world.

“It’s all soul,” says Bob Geldof, the Live Aid co-organizer and Boomtown Rats
frontman who grew up in the same neighborhood as O’Connor. “It’s a troubled
soul and it ekes pain and an attempt to find an understanding through her voice
and through her music. The pain gives rise to a great anger, which may not be
understood at all. [People] don’t quite understand the intensity or how a
personal pain translates into a sort of empathetic rage. The point is, you don’t
have to. You can just listen to one of her songs.”

The songs. Highly literate, with references to Yeats, Alex Haley and the Old
Testament. A blend of fact and fiction. Fearless, whether documenting racism,
political hypocrisy or a bad boyfriend.

Michael Stipe remembers being deeply influenced by O’Connor in the late ’80s.
He ended up adopting her mannerisms for his own performance in R.E.M.’s
video for “Losing My Religion.” He also covered one of her songs, “The Last Day
of Our Acquaintance,” in concert.

“In my timeline, there is a direct line from Patti Smith to Sinead O’Connor,” says
Stipe, invoking the 1970s punk poet laureate. “So many people have lifted from
her, from me to Miley Cyrus. She’s one of our great, living icons.”

Left: O'Connor performs in the Netherlands in 1988. (Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images) Right: The
Irish singer’s appeal was about more than music. (Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images)

It may be hard, today, to understand just how shocking it would have been to
encounter O’Connor when she first landed in the late 1980s. This was before
Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette, riot grrrls, Liz Phair or Lilith Fair. With rare
exceptions — Madonna, Annie Lennox — the women on MTV either played
candy pop or served as eye candy for creepy, hair metal bands. O’Connor, still
20 when her debut, “The Lion and the Cobra,” arrived in 1987, could sing with
anyone, sliding from the most delicate phrasing to full-throated, octave-leaping
howls. She wrote one of the most heartbreaking political songs of the moment,
“Black Boys on Mopeds” and set a 17th-century poem to the beat of James
Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” The stunning video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,”
largely a close-up of O’Connor’s expressive face, made her the first female artist
to win MTV’s video of the year.

And her appeal was about more than music. There was also the look. Buzzed
head, Doc Martens, eyes steely and intense except when she broke into a
mischievous, dimpled smile. As if there was a joke that only she understood.

“Her voice made me feel like I existed in the larger world,” says Hanna, a
college student when she got her first O’Connor tape. “She could sing something
with lots of pretty parts but also you could hear rage and sexuality and humor.”

Fiona Apple was 11 when she watched the Grammys on TV in 1989. O’Connor
performed “Mandinka” alone onstage, wearing a bra top and her son Jake’s
sleep suit tucked into her jeans.

“She inspired me,” Apple says. “She showed me how to be unadulteratedly

yourself and just be free.”

In late February, O’Connor was inspired to write a song called “Horse on the Highway.” This raw, unreleased demo
was recorded in her house in Ireland.
 Last night, I dreamed I was on fire

O’Connor says her proudest moment remains her most famous, that 1992
appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” That’s when she decided, without telling
the show’s producers or her publicist, she was going to use her promotional
appearance to deliver a political message to one of her frequent targets, the
Catholic Church. This was more than a decade before widespread reports in the
American press about the sexual abuse and coverups by clergy. By then, in
Ireland, O’Connor had already seen smaller reports of the behavior.

After performing Bob Marley’s protest song, “War,” O’Connor lifted a

photograph of Pope John Paul II to the camera, tore the picture into pieces and
declared “fight the real enemy.”

The camera cut away in silence. That week, O’Connor was attacked in headlines
(New York Newsday: “No hair, no taste”), her records were piled up and
steamrolled in Manhattan and, at a sold-out Madison Square Garden tribute to
Bob Dylan, angry shouts drove her off the stage.

O’Connor was thrilled this month when Time Magazine named her one of its
100 Women of the Year, alongside Hillary Clinton, Aretha Franklin and Angela
Davis, and singled out the risk she took in making such a public stand. But the
28 years since the pope-picture ripping have been, she says, “in­cred­ibly
isolating. To have been treated like a mental case because of it. Offstage and on.
In private and in public. Even in my bed.”

“If they could have burned her at the stake,” Hanna says, “they would have.”
Kris Kristofferson stands with O’Connor during the 1992 Bob Dylan tribute at New York’s
Madison Square Garden, shortly after the “Saturday Night Live” photo controversy. (Ron
Frehm/AP)
Finding peace
There have been times when O’Connor has been eager to call out those she felt
wronged by. The list of targets is long, including family members, managers,
friends, Bono, Madonna, Prince, even Bob Geldof. She got into a public spat with
Miley Cyrus after writing an open letter, in 2013, warning the singer “in the
spirit of motherliness and with love” that her “Wrecking Ball” video showed she
was being “pimped.” Three years ago, she accused Arsenio Hall of supplying
Prince with drugs, sparking a $5 million lawsuit from the former talk-show
host, which he later dropped.

Though O’Connor acknowledges both being in and causing a considerable

amount of pain, she also says some of the hurt was unintentional.

“My true nature,” she says, “is as a very loving person who doesn’t want to hurt
people or cause hurt or to be hurt. That doesn’t mean that, as an artist, I would
cease to challenge other artists. It doesn’t mean that I’m not f---ing Sinead
O’Connor anymore. It just means I’m not a loose cannon.”
O’Connor converted to Islam in 2018. (Lindsey Best for The Washington Post)

She’s found a kind of peace in Islam, adopting a Muslim name, Shuhada, though
she continues to use Sinead professionally. The beauty of being a Muslim is that
she doesn’t have to discard what she appreciates about other religions.

“Christianity lied to me as an Irish person,” she says. “Christianity did nothing

but rape the people of Ireland, metaphorically and literally. That’s why I like
Islam. Because I can take the things I embraced with me. Jesus is still there but
it’s the Jesus that makes sense to me.”

These text messages were part of an exchange with writer Geoff Edgers. He
asked O’Connor why she’s carried so much guilt for anger that was rooted in
the abuse inflicted by her mother.

Wednesday, March 4, 5:00 AM GMT

Sinead O’Connor

I do feel like I was a monster. I feel awful. I do beat the

living s- - - out of myself. Am full of grief about it would
 be a better way of describing it

Was Not my purpose on the planet to have hurt

anyone …

But no one ever minded if they hurt me

Is the thing

That’s part of the code also

All artists have one dream that will never come true

If you can figure that out you know them

They teach that in acting school. Key to finding a

character is what dream does he or she have that will
never come true

Mine is a mom

😭
Talking about the past, the conflict, can still be a trigger. It sometimes feels to
her like it’s all anybody wants to talk about. And the past is a more complicated
conversation for her at 53 than it was when she was in her 20s.

“I don’t want to get the s--- kicked out of me anymore,” she says. “When I was
young I could take a kicking. I’m too old to take a kicking now.”

O’Connor talks half-jokingly about the “right to be forgotten,” a still formative

attempt in Europe to allow people to strip personal information off the Internet.

“Most people only have one or two awful things when you Google them,” she
says. “But if you tried to do it with me, it’d take 100 years, wouldn’t it? I’d leave
everything having to do with music. Take away all the other s---.”
It’s easy to understand why she wants to move on. The past — and explaining it
— can be exhausting. Take her appearance in February on an Irish TV show
hosted by Tommy Tiernan. She knew him as a comedian and walked onto the
set with a smile, looking upbeat and ready to chat. But Tiernan, bearded, in a
knit cap and with sad eyes, seemed stricken. He decided to focus on suicide
attempts and depression.

One morning, after several days of interviewing with The Post — both in
California and in Bray — she shows up for breakfast feeling irritated and raw.
And then the “SNL” incident is brought up. Again? Why, she asks, does
everything have to be about the past? Her voice cracks and she wipes away a
tear. Hasn’t she served her time?

O’Connor performs at the Lilith Fair in 1998. Female artists such as Fiona Apple were
inspired by O’Connor when they were growing up. (Steve Granitz/WireImage/Getty Images)

An artist’s job
Here in Bray, a resort town about 45 minutes from Dublin, O’Connor lives in an
old house that was once a bed-and-breakfast. She’s got Hindu gods painted on
her bedroom walls, a statue of the Mother Mary under the staircase and a
wood-burning stove she’s just had installed to help cut down the gas bill. There
is no trophy case or wall of gold records. O’Connor says she doesn’t think she
ever claimed her Grammy and has no idea what happened to her MTV awards.
If you didn’t know any better, it would be easy to miss the fact that a
professional musician lived here. The only evidence is a few guitars in a back
bedroom.

O’Connor doesn’t have a home studio or notebooks lying around filled with
song drafts. She writes, she says, largely in her head. A melody will strike, the
words will come and she’ll repeat the whole thing until it’s ready to be laid
down as a demo.

Reynolds, her longtime producer, remembers O’Connor composing virtually all

of 1994’s “Universal Mother ” in a single night, simply singing into a tape
recorder. She isn’t afraid to share her inspirations, whether the therapy time in
“Milestones” or “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” about her relationship
with former manager and onetime partner Fachtna O’Ceallaigh.

You can’t truly understand O’Connor without considering her homeland and
what she lived through here. In the Ireland of O’Connor’s youth, the church and
state ruled together. Divorce was illegal, sex was not to be discussed and “The
Troubles” was the euphemism employed to describe the warring, largely
between Catholics and the Protestants, that led to thousands of deaths. In this
midst of this, during the 1970s, Sean and Marie O’Connor decided to separate.
Sinead, not yet 10, ended up living with her mother, a regular churchgoer who
also regularly and brutally beat her daughter. (These beatings were, she says,
often when she was naked. In the past, she’s termed them sexual assaults.)

Beyond her personal torment, O’Connor paid attention as reports of abuse in

the church in Ireland began to circulate.
“When the pope came to Ireland when I was a kid, the first thing he did is get
down on the ground and kisses the ground and says ‘Young people of Ireland, I
love you,’ ” O’Connor says. “Yet the church was creating people like my mother.”

Left: “An artist’s job is sometimes not to be popular,” O’Connor says. (Laura Hynd for The Washington Post)
Right: “An artist’s job sometimes is just to create conversation where conversation is needed.” (Laura Hynd
for The Washington Post)

This was also around the time she found her key musical talisman. Her older
brother, Joseph, brought home Bob Dylan’s 1979 album “Slow Train Coming.” It
is the first of Dylan’s Christian albums and, at the time, was dismissed by music
critics turned off by the religious themes. O’Connor found herself drawn to the
songs.

“It was the first time you heard a priest being any way sexy,” she says of Dylan’s
“Gotta Serve Somebody.”

“Slow Train” also resonated, with Dylan writing about the difference between
believing in God and believing in men.

“But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency,” he sang on “Slow Train.” “All
nonbelievers and men-stealers talkin’ in the name of religion.”
The same tone of defiance carried over to the “SNL” incident.

After Marie O’Connor died in a car accident in 1985, Sinead took a photo of Pope
John Paul II off her mother’s wall. In the fall of 1992, the singer began carrying
it around, looking for an opportunity to use it. She was inspired by Geldof’s
Boomtown Rats, who, in a 1978 TV performance, celebrated bumping “Summer
Nights” from its chart-topping slot by ripping up a photo of John Travolta.

Pop singers are “supposed to shut up and be pretty and sing nice songs,” Geldof
says. “Well, f--- off. And we learned that because that was the only option we
had in Ireland. We were not going to be quiet anymore.”

Despite the backlash and the years of mistreatment, O’Connor has no regrets
about the moment.

“An artist’s job is sometimes not to be popular,” she says. “An artist’s job
sometimes is just to create conversation where conversation is needed. You
drop the issue and then you run and you let everybody argue it out. I’m not at
all sorry about it.”
O'Connor, seen at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, is starting work on her first album in
years and awaiting the second leg of her tour. (Lindsey Best for The Washington Post)
Back onstage
In early February, O’Connor played San Francisco and then climbed into an SUV
for the eight-hour drive south on Interstate 5, smoking butts and blasting
Freddie King, Van Morrison and the intentionally offensive, fake country singer
Wheeler Walker Jr., whom she finds hilarious. The trip included her first stop at
In-N-Out Burger, where she was impressed by the patty but not the fries. In San
Juan Capistrano, O’Connor and her band played the Coach House, a club with
the feel of a saloon, long tables and waiters serving steaks and chicken strips.

At her peak, O’Connor played to thousands. The Coach House accommodates

480 people.

Thursday, March 5, 12:09 PM GMT

Sinead O’Connor

As long as I keep my mouth shut about anything but

music I should be ok. But that’s hard if people ask you
all about other stuff … I hope the piece will put an end
to that. You asked me what I want from the piece and
I said to sing I believe in you but it’s not what I want. I
want and to talk of anything but music.

Backstage after her show, she met Rob Prinz, the co-head of worldwide concerts
for ICM Partners, whose stable also represents Jerry Seinfeld and Bob Seger.
Prinz told her he imagined bigger venues and a tour in the fall to perform “I Do
Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in sequence. And though O’Connor was hobbled
by a foot injury and too worn out from the long ride to bounce around excitedly
at the idea, the fact that she was even in this place, talking business, was a
measure of just how far she’d come.

Last May, when she got out of St. Patrick’s hospital in Dublin, she had less than
$10,000 in the bank. She wasn’t bitter. The money she earned from stardom had
lasted 30 years. To deal with bills, O’Connor sold the rights to her first four
albums back to Universal Music Group. She then made plans to get back to
work.

“Which is great,” she says. “Same as everybody else.”

The shows were stunning. In San Francisco, at August Hall, after shyly avoiding
the audience for the first two songs, O’Connor lifted her head and smiled. The
crowd erupted. At the Coach House, they screamed, “We love you, Sinead,” after
she sang “Thank You for Hearing Me,” a hypnotic, 25-year-old song recorded
after an emotional crash in the early ’90s.

Later that week, Kathleen Hanna heard that O’Connor was playing the El Rey in
Los Angeles. What? She called Alaska Airlines and canceled a planned trip to
New York. Just a few months earlier, Hanna’s lifelong friend Allie Randall, with
whom she listened endlessly to O’Connor‘s music back in the late ’80s, had died
of cancer. For days, Hanna had holed up, revisiting O’Connor’s first two albums.

At the El Rey, Hanna teared up as she watched from the balcony.

O’Connor had spoken up, spoken the truth so many times in the past, and they
had tried to erase her. It was time to celebrate her return.

“Oh my God,” Hanna said out loud. “She’s back.”

Geoff Edgers
Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post's national arts reporter, covers everything
from fine arts to popular culture. He's the author of "Walk This Way: Run-DMC,
Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever." He is also
the host of "Edge of Fame," a podcast co-produced by WBUR Boston.

About this story

Editing by Janice Page. Photo editing by Moira Haney. Copy editing by
Annabeth Carlson. Project editing by Hau Chu. Design and development by
Junne Alcantara.