The Observer-Sunday, September 13,1998

Sinead O'Connor interview

Sinéad O'Connor is supposed to be the Angry Young Woman of Pop, but when she came in like a low-watt bulb behind her PR officer I thought there was
something martyr-like about this upright little figure, the cotton dress
falling to narrow ankles, the thin face, the shorn hair. On her feet were huge
platform mules with plasters taped clumsily round her toes. There was pen
scribbled on her hand. She walked as if through water. She trailed a faint
cloud of impending doom. 'Hello,' she said shyly. She stood by the coffee
table. Businesslike, the PR opened photocopies and folders, showed O'Connor
interviews and photographs. She nodded faintly. She looked at the pictures -
in them, her hair was long and floppy. 'Yes,' she said. 'I like those.' And
did she want a car the following morning? No, said O'Connor. OK, said the PR.
Would she call if she needed anything? Yes, said O'Connor. Well, said the PR,
with an encouraging smile, she would leave us to it. We perched side by side
on the sofa - it was a hot Saturday afternoon in the basement of a Tottenham
Court Road recording studio. O'Connor seemed stymied. She lit a cigarette and
kept giving it little taps to shake off the ash. She touched herself lightly,
on the breastbone, or a spot on her face, or the plasters on her toes. She ran
her transparent hands up and down her arms. She has long curved eyelashes and
deep blue eyes, which she swivelled to look at me, sidelong. She wore a
wedding ring and a nose stud. She makes you want to be careful with her.
'Sinéad,' says her elder brother Joseph, 'has always had a great capacity to
inspire love.' O'Connor's conversation is not confrontational, but humble.
'Speaking for myself,' she says often, or 'I can't speak for anybody else,
but...' She talks of being a 'very homesick person', of needing to feel loved,
of being too shy to sing in the hearing of her children's nanny. 'She's a
child as well really,' Joseph says. When I ask questions, she certainly seems
to answer with a child's honesty. It is as if she has no choice but to tell me
the truth. She speaks with little expression, and from her angelic face pours
a stream of filth. What dark things are in her! The beatings-up by her mother.
Her mother spitting on her womb. Locking her in her room. Starving her. The
men who have used her. Her miscarriages. Her three abortions. Her attempted
suicide. The rift with her family. The fame. The loneliness. I can hardly bear
it. 'Well,' she says with a small smile, 'it used to be sad. It's not so much
now. I also see it as a great gift. That may sound a bit fucked up, but our
souls, I believe, come into this world in order to evolve. I believe you
choose your parents and the experiences you're going to have.' But why on
earth would she choose those? She gives a faint laugh. 'I've often asked
myself that.' Sinead O'Connor made her name eight years ago with the release
of a little-known Prince song called 'Nothing Compares 2 U'. It went to number
one on both sides of the Atlantic. In the video she was, appropriately,
enough, crying - she says those tears launched her career, but I think this
can be read on more levels than one. She was 23 and suddenly very famous. Her
shaved head made her an icon; her anger made her a target. For the next seven
years, she stormed round the world - you could almost see the flames licking
her ankles - and then flinching from the murderous reaction. (She is not
unlike her role model, Joan of Arc, who also shaved her head and wept openly
and often before being burnt at the stake.) It was O'Connor who ripped up a
picture of the Pope on US television, who expressed support for the IRA (since
withdrawn), who called the woman who sued Mike Tyson for rape a bitch, who
claimed the pop star Prince held her 'all night at his home, screaming abuse',
who said Hitler 'wasn't a bad person, he was a fucked-up person', who
boycotted the Grammy awards, who refused to perform at a New Jersey gig if the
American national anthem was played - and then disguised herself and took part
in the anti-Sinéad demonstration outside, denouncing herself to a television
crew. When John F Kennedy Jnr asked her out to dinner she took the pencil he
handed her to write down her phone number, broke it in two, and stuck the
pieces in his breast pocket. Later she was booed so viciously at a Bob Dylan
tribute concert that she staggered off stage, retching. The Sun called her a
she-devil. On hearing of O'Connor's divorce, Madonna said she had the sex
appeal of a venetian blind. Mike Hammer, a rap singer, said: 'If it is really
that bad in America, then the next ticket back to her homeland is on me.' She
flew to Ireland and sent him the £2,600 bill. Jay Leno, the host of America's
Today Show, observed: 'Sinéad O'Connor says she's tired of being famous.
That's a coincidence. I'm tired of her being famous too.' O'Connor views those
years now with distaste. 'Between 1990 and 1997,' she says simply, 'I was
going through a major fucking dark night of the soul.' The reason for her
behaviour was always her mother: what O'Connor evocatively terms 'the original
grief'. 'That's why I did all those insane things,' she says, 'and that's why
I had the three abortions. And not to go on about my upbringing any more than
I already have for the last fucking 12 years, central to what happened to
myself and my brothers and sister was the violence. She was a very sick
woman.' Her mother, Marie, was mentally disturbed. She was the eldest of eight
children, and was brought up in Ireland on the same road as John, O'Connor's
father. The pair started going out when Marie was 14 and they married when she
was 20. Although Marie, a dressmaker, had four children, O'Connor thinks she
probably only wanted one, 'and I think she had a propensity not to want girls,
for some reason. I remember when she got back from hospital, I was 12 going on
13, and she rang me up at work - I had a number of jobs, and she would make
you rob from your jobs so you would get fired. But I had managed to sneak
another one while she was in hospital, and she rang me up at work and she was
like: "Come home at once, you bitch," which was her fucking way of speaking to
us. And when I got home she had a receipt on the dressing table which had been
lying there for years, and she held it up in front of me and accused me of
running up the bill. You could see that it wasn't, but she held this thing up
and started to beat the shite out of me and I had to say, "OK, I did it."
Which was really fucking - you know, the thing in front of me wasn't really
the thing in front of me.' Her parents divorced when O'Connor was about eight,
and her father, an engineer who left school at 13, seems to have been unaware
of exactly what was going on. However, he knew enough to know that all was not
right, so when O'Connor was eight he went to court and won custody of the four
children. But O'Connor and her younger brother asked to go back to their
mother. Why? 'Well, my younger brother and myself were small and we missed her
a lot, and we did have this sense of compassion for her, and she was a really
great actor. She pretended she really missed us and wanted us back, so we felt
terribly torn.' And did they go back? 'Yes.' And did she get more abusive?
'Yes.' This account appears to differ from that of her brother Joseph, a
writer, who says their mother went back to court once more and won custody
from their father. Similarly he draws a different picture of the marriage. 'My
parents had a real grand passion,' he said four years ago. 'They married and
did all the things that people are supposed to do; they worked extremely hard,
went to church, made sure myself and my sisters and brother had the best
education going, and tried their best to bring us up properly.' He has
recalled their brand-new house in Glengeary, with both a living room and
lounge, symbol of their upward mobility. In 1993, after O'Connor wrote a poem
about the abuse, he seems to have felt driven to speak out. 'For some time
now, I have been at a loss to square the public version of the life of our
family with the facts as I know them,' he wrote in the Irish Times. He later
said in an interview: 'I'm not saying things didn't happen, but she's
exaggerating.' But O'Connor says he was the least picked on. 'My mother didn't
beat up my elder brother. I think she had a few goes at him when he was very
young, but my father told her if she fucking touched him he'd kill her, you
know. And then my sister was removed from the house when she was quite young
because it was obvious what was going on with her...' Although I had wondered
myself if O'Connor's abusive childhood had made her liable to embellish the
truth, her father has gone on record commending his daughter's 'moral
integrity' and 'absolute and fierce honesty'. And in yet another interview
Joseph has himself conceded their mother 'had a very disturbed, turbulent
nature. There was violence...' Probably both children are telling the truth as
they saw it. Either way, the irony of this situation is that the abuse that
fucked O'Connor up also spawned her talent for songwriting; more directly her
angelic voice was inherited from Marie. O'Connor is well aware of this rather
savage irony. 'The abuse sounds dreadful on paper, and it was dreadful, and
healing from it was dreadful, but out of that came a great deal of
creativity.' Donal Lunny, a record producer, once made a telling remark.
'Sinéad is an exquisite singer [but] her talent has been overshadowed. She is
one of those big singers, a performer who can bring a tear to your eye and put
a chill down the back of your neck.' Of course, it is also thanks to her
mother that she is known to the public less for these things than her 'angry'
personality. The four children do not seem to have been brought closer by
their wretched childhood. O'Connor says it was hard for her brothers to
support her or her sister, 'because they were also very badly abused. She had
different strategies for each of us. She was an intelligently evil woman, as
child abusers usually are. When I was 13 my sister ran away. My older brother
stayed a few months longer, but he just locked himself in his room all night
because she'd threatened to kill him. But eventually he fucked off. In the end
we all scarpered. It was every man for himself.' One of O'Connor's big
problems, and it really is a problem for her, is that since her mother was
killed in a car crash when Sinéad was 18, she will never understand why she
behaved as she did. When I asked why Marie hated her daughters particularly,
she replied that she really didn't know, 'and since she's dead, there'll never
be an explanation. But a lot of her violence was centred on my and my sister's
wombs. Literally. She would stamp on our wombs. And so I think to a certain
extent that's why I did abortions, to re-enact abuse on my own womb. Which,'
she added surprisingly, 'is not necessarily a bad thing. It brought out all
the issues I had about that.' But it might have been a bad thing, if she had
not been able to have children as a result? 'Oh no. If you have safe and clean
abortions, it's basically no problem...' Probably the strangest thing about
O'Connor is the lover-like love she bears this brutal woman. Many of
O'Connor's songs are about Marie. Her album Am I Not Your Girl? has a page at
the front written about her in O'Connor's childlike, un-joined up writing.
'What happens to a child,' it begins, 'that has been invaded mentally
physically emotionally spiritually sexually sensually made to lie naked on the
floor beaten spat at kicked scalded starved degraded raped humiliated punished
for scraping the plate or stealing a few peanuts made to beg for mercy mocked?
Murder the death of self-esteem self-confidence self-love...' But another
song, 'I Am Stretched On Your Grave', is a paean to her. 'I'm stretched on
your grave/And will lie there forever/If your hands were in mine/I'd be sure
we'd not sever/My apple tree my brightness/It's time we were together...' A
third expresses the anger: 'You cause as much sorrow dead/As you did when you
were alive...' 'Oh yeah,' says O'Connor. 'That's about my mother. About how,
now that she's dead, she's still managing, as she always said she would, to
haunt us.' Did she say that? 'Oh yeah. I mean, I love my mother profoundly, my
mother is the love of my life.' What a strange phrase to use. But I think her
mother really is the love of her life: the great love-hate relationship which
continues to bind from the grave, like Cathy and Heathcliff. It is no
coincidence that O'Connor's first London house with her ex-husband - that she
would later walk out of, never to return - was beside a graveyard. 'I like
dead people,' she told one interviewer. 'I find it comforting to have them
close by.' O'Connor had what sounds like a horrible adolescence. She was sent
to a 'rehabilitation centre for girls with behavioural problems' - the problem
in her case being stealing. Then she went to a Quaker school. Then she left
before her exams to sing in a band and worked as a waitress and a kissogram
girl. At 17, she impressed the head of Ensign Records so much she was given a
major recording deal. Then the controversy began. She says she hated being
famous; she was desperately lonely. 'Christ, loneliness is a crowded room,'
she said when I expressed surprise at this. 'I would be bold enough to state
that most people who find themselves, or throw themselves, into the public eye
do it because they are fucked up. They want in some way to feel like a
worthwhile person. They imagine that all these things on the outside will make
them feel like that. But they don't. In fact they make you feel lonelier and
lonelier. People see you as this pop star with loads of money and whatever
projections they may have about that.' And through all fame and fucked-upness
she kept getting pregnant. She had her first child, Jake, at 19. Then she had
three abortions and either four or two miscarriages (she seems to have said
four at times in the past, but she told me two). In all she has been pregnant
either seven or nine times; two years ago she had a daughter, Roisin. 'It's a
weird thing,' O'Connor agrees. 'I think it can be something which happens when
women have really low self esteem. Getting pregnant and giving birth can make
them feel they're worth something. There were pregnancies where I felt that
I'd been very - where I'd got into relationships with people who were not
necessarily going out with me for the right reasons, being a pop star and all
that kind of shit. There were two definite cases of that. One of them I could
tell because I got in touch with his wife. This fucking guy had a wife who I
fucking never knew about. He had kind of broken up with her but he thought by
getting me pregnant and having a relationship with me he was going to end up
with money and he was going to use this money to get back with his wife.
Luckily she told me all about it.' That must have been absolutely devastating!
'It was. It really was, to tell you the truth. And that was the second one.
The first one, I had a relationship with a guy who was really nice, but it was
a completely crazy relationship and we were both very difficult and disturbed
people and it wasn't suitable that we should have a baby. That was the first
abortion I ever had which was really, really disturbing. You know. And being
an Irish Catholic girl, I'd be terrified that the baby would come back and
haunt me. You get that kind of thing, when you're lying in bed thinking:
"Fuck, the baby's going to come and scare the pants off me."' Did she not use
contraception because she was Catholic? 'No, I did. Well, to be entirely
honest about it, each of those times I got pregnant on purpose. That's what I
was getting at earlier, that I had so little self-esteem. Also I had this
desperate kind of thing where I really wanted some man to want to stay with me
and look after me and all that kind of thing. And I imagined if I got pregnant
that kind of family thing would suddenly grow like some garden.' Does she ever
wonder what those babies would be like now? 'No. I'm very glad I made those
decisions. I feel it was the right thing to do.' But one of her songs makes me
wonder. The most haunting, marvellous song, called 'Three Babies', which goes:
'In my soul/My blood and my bones/I have wrapped your cold bodies around
me/The face on you/ The smell of you/Will always be with me...' It is a song
that latches on to your brain. 'The face on you/The smell of you/Will always
be with me...' She says there wasn't anything worthwhile about the fame and
success except 'the money, I think' - she says she has most of it left. Until
a few months ago she lived in Queensway with her son and daughter, but she is
now in what seems like a very healthy relationship with a musician called John
(they are not married, but the wedding ring she wears is for him) and she has
just bought a house for all of them in Gospel Oak - the north London suburb
where for years she has seen a therapist. Once you know about her Dickensian
childhood it is easier to understand why she was so angry and caused so much
hurt - for herself more than anyone else. It is chilling to think of her
joining a demonstration against herself in disguise. Even if it was a joke,
the symbolism is really unspeakable. So, too, is the shaving of her hair, the
equivalent of wearing a hair shirt for a woman (although now, a good sign, it
is merely short). But she doesn't go along with this. 'I really don't suit
long hair, it gets in my face and it grows really thick.' But a comment she
once made was interesting: that she used to feel ugly and didn't enjoy sex
until she was 30. 'I kind of felt I was an imposter, because I had no sense
that I was good. I think that's partly why I went round doing all this shit,
because that made me feel like a worthwhile person. Because it never struck me
that I ever was.' Did she weep at night? 'Oh God, yeah. I think I probably
wept all day and every day for about five years.' The peak of her desperation
seems to have occurred in the early 1990s, when she moved to LA from Ireland.
My father saw her there. 'It was in a very cheap, very ordinary drug store and
I remember so vividly seeing this girl sitting on a shelf with an aura of
loneliness around her. It was about two in the morning. She was just sitting
there. She looked desperate.' I have in front of me a picture from the Sun
from that time. O'Connor has a white headcloth wrapped round her shaven head.
Her huge eyes are brimming with tears and her mouth is open in mid-sob. She
looks like a medieval painting; or a martyr facing the pyre. 'LA,' she would
later remark, 'is like a hotel people check into for success at any cost.' She
hit rock bottom two years later. 'I was very, very down,' O'Connor says,
lighting a cigarette, 'and couldn't stop getting myself into trouble, it
seemed to me that whatever I fucking did, it just got me into more trouble.
And the fact that I had talked about my mother's abuse really upset my father,
and I found that really hard to deal with - there was a point when my father
and my brother wouldn't talk to me because of it. I found that really hard,
and I was a very fucking difficult person to get on with - we all were as a
family. We were all a bit volatile. 'Anyway, I was on tour with Peter Gabriel
which I should never have gone through with, I wasn't in the right state
emotionally to be away from home. And I had had a relationship with him which
had broken up and I was terribly depressed by that I think, really. It was in
the middle of the tour and we had three days off, and I was fucking tragic - I
think all women go through this with one man who fucks you up and drives you
crazy and in my case it was Peter. I just couldn't fucking accept that he
didn't want to go out with me, as I was pretty mad about him. I think I was
making a really idiot of myself basically, trying to go out with him, it was
really humiliating. Anyway, I found myself with three days off and I couldn't
face being on my own for three days. I didn't know anyone. Peter had something
else to do, and the band didn't even know who Shabba Ranks was, do you know
what I mean? So I rang the hotel doctor with my credit card and he never meets
me but he gives me a bottle of sleeping tables through the doorman. I
swallowed 26 of them - but only because I couldn't face being on my own for
three days. And I sort of didn't care whether I lived or died. I remember
saying to God before I did it, "Do what you want." I didn't care whether I
lived or died, but it wasn't that I actually said, "I want to die", do you
know what I mean, there is actually a bit of a difference. So I took these
fucking tables, drank a load of vodka and passed out. I woke up the next day
-' She woke up? 'Yes, I woke up. And I ordered a whole other lot of tablets.
The fucking same doctor on the phone with the credit card. He never asks what
I've done with the others! Then I passed out for a few days. I can't remember,
it was about three days. I woke up to hear Peter banging the door down because
I'd arranged to meet them to go shopping and hadn't shown up and Peter was
very worried about me. So they all came breaking in and they thought I'd tried
to kill myself. They didn't really understand that it was just that I couldn't
face being awake for three days.' And was she embarrassed that he found her?
'No. I think he thought I did it on purpose to get him, but that wasn't why at
all. He wasn't meant to find out anything about it. His method of dealing with
me was to not pay me any attention, which was kind of right in a way, but I
also found it very painful at the time. Because it wasn't really about him, it
was about what was happening with my family.' O'Connor touches her breastbone.
'I get nervous talking about my upbringing,' she says. 'Because it's real.
That shit really did happen.' Did she feel happier now? 'Yeah, I do. I think
it's very important that I'm not only identified with that stuff. There was a
time when that was my identity, because that genuinely was who I was. But I do
feel that I've gotten away from that. I'm 31, I'll be 32 in December, I was 20
when I put my first record out, do you know what I mean, so my mother was only
a couple of years dead. So it was still very much something I was wearing. But
yes, I'm a lot happier now, having gone through all of this stuff. You shit
and puke it all out and then hopefully give birth to yourself. I read this
thing in the Guardian which said the thing Sinéad O'Connor's least likely to
say is the Hail Mary, which is not true at all. I say the Hail Mary
comfortably in Irish. But it said the thing I'm most likely to say is "I'm
still on my healing journey." So I'm kind of wary about saying that, but I am.
I wouldn't say I'm 100 per cent recovered, but I'm not the open wound I used
to be and I'm not as fucking torn to bits as I used to be.' It seems that way.
Since she has dropped out of the limelight, she has been getting her act
together. She has been quietly making her albums - some of which are really
exceptional (I hadn't heard anything of hers apart from ,Nothing Compares 2 U,
before I interviewed her; now her records are among my favourites). She has
bought her family house in the suburbs. John is 'loving and nurturing' and her
day is a simple routine revolving round the kids - 'I'm a mother first, pop
star second'. They eat dinner at home. She is in bed by 10 most nights. 'And
now,' she says, 'I'm writing lots of love songs, which is nice. I've never
done that before. I'm working on an album for release next July. It's going to
be joyous. I can write songs now as if I were someone else.' I turn off the
tape recorder and she springs to her feet. When we walk up the basement stairs
into the evening sunshine, John is waiting for her in the car. She positively
runs towards him. Her face lights up.
(c) Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998