FEATURE:
Nothing Compares to You
PHOTO CREDIT: Ellius Grace for The New York Times
The Iconic Sinéad O'Connor
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NOT that I need an excuse…
IMAGE CREDIT: Penguin Books Ltd
to feature the magnificent Sinéad O'Connor, but as she has a memoir out, it seemed like the perfect chance! Rememberings is a book that everyone should own. It is a personal insight into a fascinating artist and hugely inspiring person. I am keen to bring in segments from a couple of recent interviews O’Connor conducted. Before that, make sure that you order a must-read memoir:
“Outspoken, provocative and enormously talented, singer Sinead O’ Connor has lived her life very much on her own terms and, in this forthright and considered memoir, she reveals all about stardom, motherhood and calling out hypocrisy.
The landmark memoir of a global music icon.
Sinead O'Connor's voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince's 'Nothing Compares 2 U' made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television.
O'Connor was unapologetic and impossible to ignore, calling out hypocrisy wherever she saw it. She has remained that way for three decades.
Now, in Rememberings, O'Connor tells her story - the heartache of growing up in a family falling apart; her early forays into the Dublin music scene; her adventures and misadventures in the world of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll; the fulfilment of being a mother; her ongoing spiritual quest - and through it all, her abiding passion for music.
Rememberings is intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and full of hard-won insights. It is a unique and remarkable chronicle by a unique and remarkable artist”.
I have been a fan of Sinéad O'Connor since I was a child. I think that her voice ranks alongside the greatest ever. It has been troubling reading about her struggles with mental-health issues through the years. She is such a strong and resilient person. There has been a mix of success, highs, controversies and lows through O’Connor’s illustrious career. Her most-recent album, I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss, was released in 2014. Her 1987 debut, The Lion and the Cobra, ranks alongside the very best debut albums of all-time. From incredible imagery through to O’Connor’s peerless voice, it is an album that everyone should own. Today, she lives in rural Ireland and leads a less starry and hectic life compared to what she experienced at the height of her career. O’Connor has conducted quite a few interviews around the release of Rememberings. They make for fascinating reading. I will not quote the entirety of the interview with The New York Times, although there are some sections that are worth highlighting:
“Her cottage was appointed in bright, saturated colors that leapt out from the monotonous backdrop of the Irish sky with the surreal quality of a pop-up book. Bubble-gum roses lined the windows, and the Hindu goddess Durga stretched her eight arms across a blanket on a cozy cherry couch. When O’Connor, 54, gave me a little iPad tour during our video interview, the place seemed to fold in on itself: The flowers were fake ones she bought on Amazon.com, and her pair of handsome velvet chairs weren’t made for sitting.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ellius Grace for The New York Times
“Deliberately, I bought uncomfortable chairs, because I don’t like people staying long,” she said. “I like being on my own.” But she disclosed this with such an impish giggle that it sounded almost like an invitation.
Now O’Connor’s memoir arrives at a time when the culture seems eager to reassess these old judgments. The top comment on a YouTube rip of O’Connor’s “Behind the Music” episode is: “Can we all just say she was right!” Few cultural castaways have been more vindicated by the passage of time: child sexual abuse, and its cover-up within the Catholic Church, is no longer an open secret. John Paul II finally acknowledged the church’s role in 2001, nearly a decade after O’Connor’s act of defiance.
But the book does not supply a tidy, cheerful sort of vindication. These moments of cultural reassessment can feel like the awarding of a consolation prize; the fallout of past judgments can never truly be reversed. Meanwhile, the same dynamics keep repeating, over and over again. In recent years, O’Connor’s mental health has become grist for the therapy-entertainment complex overseen by the likes of Dr. Drew and Dr. Phil, who thrive on casting illness as drama and converting pain into spectacle.
O’Connor has seen a little bit of herself in women who came after her — in Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears. “What they did to Britney Spears was disgusting,” she said. “If you met a stranger in the street crying, you’d put your arms around her. You wouldn’t start taking photos of her, you know?” It is not lost on O’Connor that the night Spears was roundly categorized as a crazy person, she shaved her hair off. “Why were they saying she’s crazy for shaving her head?” she said. “I’m not.”
O’Connor still shaves her head, herself, about every 10 days. “I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she said. She usually wears a hijab over it now; she converted to Islam several years ago and started going by the name Shuhada Sadaqat, though she still answers to O’Connor, too. She wrote the first part of her memoir in 2015, but after having a hysterectomy and “a total breakdown,” as she puts it in the book, it took time for her to revisit the project.
O’Connor is happy being on her own, with her garden and her Mayfair cigarettes and her iPads and her “imaginary boyfriend,” Taye Diggs, to keep her company via episodes of “Murder in the First.” “I haven’t been terribly successful at being a girlfriend or wife,” she said. “I’m a bit of a handful, let’s face it”
Just before rounding things off, there was another wonderful interview, this time from The Guardian that warrants a mention. Reading it – and how O’Connor is described -, I wonder whether there will ever be a biopic produced in the future. She is such an intriguing and fantastic figure whose life story is very varied and eventful:
“Perhaps O’Connor was always destined to be best known for simply being herself: the angelic skinhead who swore like a trooper and shocked the world with allegations of child sex abuse; a woman who played out her own mental health crises in public; who became a Catholic priest and then “reverted” to Islam; who had four children by four different men, when all these things were unheard of or taboo. Her albums have often been cussedly uncommercial – traditional Irish songs on Sean-Nós Nua, roots reggae covers on Throw Down Your Arms. There have been gorgeous, relatively poppy albums, such as Universal Mother, but even that featured a spoken-word polemic on why the Irish famine was not actually a famine, and compared the country to an abused child. O’Connor must be one of pop’s most reluctant stars. When she was told Nothing Compares 2 U was at No 1 she wept – and not out of happiness.
It’s not just her eagerness to stick two fingers up at convention that makes her endlessly fascinating. O’Connor is an enormously empathic figure; hers is a vulnerability we can all relate to. And she is often proved right, long after the event. Last time we met, 11 years ago, O’Connor was a Catholic priest (she had been ordained by a breakaway church in 1999) who had just been vindicated. In 1992, she had torn up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as a protest at child sex abuse in the Catholic church. At the time many people dismissed her as a loopy self-publicist. Two weeks later she was booed off stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, and her records were publicly smashed. But in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI issued an apology to the victims of decades of sex abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland, expressing his “shame and remorse” for their “sinful and criminal acts”. (She viewed the apology as wholly inadequate, calling the Vatican “a nest of devils and a haven for criminals”.)
Now, O’Connor is publishing her memoirs. The book, Rememberings, has been a long time in the making. For the first time, she has written about the childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. The book is a series of beautifully observed vignettes rather than a conventional autobiography: she takes us from the abuse to the kleptomania, reform school, pop stardom, pope-baiting, heresy, apostasy, breakups, breakdowns, kids, marriages and celebrity shags that have shaped her life. The writing, particularly when recounting her childhood, is lyrical, funny and anguished, and the revelations come thick and fast.
She was in America in 1991, soon after Nothing Compares 2 U had topped the charts. Although Prince had written the song for his side project, the Family, he’d had nothing to do with her recording. One day she got a call saying he’d like to meet her. A chauffeur-driven car arrived to take her to his house. From the off, she says, Prince acted strangely. He told her he didn’t like the language she used on TV and made it clear he was unhappy she was not his protege. Things soon got tense. She says the evening ended up with him locking her in his house, insisting they have a pillow fight, then hitting her with a hard object hidden inside the pillowcase. O’Connor says she managed to get away and he chased her in his car. Eventually she escaped. She has talked about this night before now, but previously she seemed to laugh it off. Not this time.
What does she think would have happened if Prince had caught her? “I think he would have beat the shit out of me.” Even talking about it after all these years, she looks shaken. What was the scariest moment? “When he was sitting on a chair by the front door and he wouldn’t let me out. His irises dissolved and his eyes just went white. It was the scariest thing I’ve seen in my life.” If he had still been alive, does she think there would have been a #MeToo moment about Prince? There still might be, she says. “I’m interested to see if that does happen because I know one woman he put in hospital for months. And she didn’t make a complaint. I think he was a walking devil. He wasn’t called Prince for nothing.” Did they ever meet after that? “No, I wouldn’t go fucking near him, no way. And he never attempted to meet me. I could have gone to the police and made a report, but I didn’t. I was just so glad to be out of it”.
Go and buy the new memoir from Sinéad O'Connor. Rememberings is a glimpse into the life and mind of one of the music world’s greatest treasures. Sadly, it appears that the next studio album from O’Connor will be her last. NME reported the news:
“Sinéad O’Connor has announced her retirement from music and touring in a series of new tweets.
Posted last night (June 4), O’Connor wrote: “This is to announce my retirement from touring and from working in the record business. I’ve gotten older and I’m tired.”
The musician went on to say that her upcoming album, ‘No Veteran Dies Alone’, will be her last album release”.
It is a shame that we will not get anymore music from O’Connor. That said, she has already provided us with so many wonderful songs. Lots of love to the amazing and truly inspiring…
MUSICAL icon.