Sinead O'Connor performs on stage at Glastonbury , United Kingdom, 1990. (Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)
There is an amusing section of Sinead O’Connor’s biography Rememberings where she describes an altercation with her managers at Ensign Records that explains her crew cut. She was having lunch at a place called Khan’s in London with top record company execs, Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill, just before the release of her first album The Lion and the Cobra.
Halfway through the lunch, Nigel announced he’d like her to stop cutting her hair short and start dressing like a girl, she writes. She replied to Hill: “So, lemme get this straight. He wants me to look like your mistress and the bird he left his wife for?” And with that flourish, she picked up her cigarettes and keys and flounced off.
The next day, she decided to cut all her hair off in defiance and in the book she describes going to a Greek barber who wept as he cut off her locks.
And, in that moment, we have Sinead O’Connor — a sharp-tongued, mischievous rebel, confrontational and intoxicating at the same time. But, if you look carefully, in that moment we have the other side of O’Connor too — the person who couldn’t help taking everything too far; the self-destructiveness that always seemed to lie just below the surface.
And there reside contradictions too, because although O’Connor lived during the punk era, and wanted to be a punk, and in some ways was a punk, the crew-cut did something odd — it made her look both vulnerable and beautiful, almost the exact opposite of her intention.
The contradictions of her life just keep coming. In contrast to the deliberate abrasiveness of punk music at the time, O’Connor’s personal style was to sing like a meadowlark. In contrast to the clashing tones and discordant chord structure of punk, O’Connor’s singing was so finely crafted, so perfectly pitched, it seems timeless and angelic.
Yet — more contradictions — often what she sang about was punkish: angry and full of dismissive bile. Even the title of her second, and most enduring, album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is curiously circular and edging toward didactic.
I sometimes think it’s no accident her enormous popularity rests on a song written by someone else — Prince — because her own songs just don’t have the same uncomplicated pop generality as Nothing Compares 2 U. And, yet (another contradiction), she delivers the Prince song with so much poise and skill it never leaves you. The power of the song and its emotional reach are enhanced by that single tear sliding down her face in the video.
There is so much about O’Connor that is overly hard and so much that is unbearably soft. Famously, she was beaten senseless by her clearly deranged mother who, of course, she loved. She spent her youth stealing from shops, encouraged by her mother, and was eventually caught and sent to a reform school run by nuns. Who she loved. And hated.
We don’t know whether O’Connor was so disfigured by her youth that she was emotionally crippled for life or whether her mental issues were inherent or genetic; it honestly doesn’t make much difference. But there is a terrible scene in her biography where she is lying on the floor of her mother’s kitchen trying to arrange her naked body in such a way that the blows mainly hit her bottom. And at that exact moment, she finds Jesus, she writes.
Spirituality, of one sort or another, never left her. But it was a spirituality of a special type. She was always trying to discover some new aspect of some new religion, finally becoming Muslim in later life.
And yet, dare I say it, another contradiction, her relationship with the church was tendentious, as were her relationships with record companies, fame, money and authority generally. Her most public exhibition of this was tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II’s photo on the popular American TV show Saturday Night Live in 1992.
That event marked a turning point in her career. She never again had a hit in the US, the live shows dried up, and the record sales dwindled. Consequently, she was often asked whether she regretted doing it. In her autobiography she retorts, absolutely not, as she did in interviews down the years.
“Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”
I often wonder about that. Like most people, I’ve had friends and acquaintances who are burdened by their own minds. What stands out is how important blame is in their lives, and how responsibility is often directed outwards, almost to avoid additional mental anguish should it be directed inwards, as often it should. There are lots of ex post facto justifications and confusion over timelines. And for people outside, it’s painful — rendered a useless accessory in the emotional car crash that is happening in front of you. You feel useless and complicit simultaneously.
But, the thing about that tearing-up-picture incident is this — ultimately, she was right. Would the investigation of the Catholic Church by The Boston Globe have happened if a slight, bald singer hadn’t boldly, bravely, unwisely, taken the first step? I don’t think so.
In a sense, it is this which O’Connor leaves us, not just herself, but her music. Music was a balm which held this most tortured soul together until she finally crumbled, understandably, in the face of her son’s suicide. If music could do that for so disfigured a singer and songwriter, it’s a clue about what it does for all of us. Personally, I hope that will be at least part of her gorgeous legacy.