The Daily Telegraph
October 23, 1992, Friday

Bad girl, mad girl?  MODERN TIMES Mick Brown meets Sinead O'Connor, a
singer who seems set on a course of self destruction

By MICK BROWN

   SINEAD O'CONNOR says she could feel the hatred from the moment she stepped on
stage at Madison Square Garden in New York last Friday night. "It was such a
weird feeling, a weird energy. So much bile, and so much hatred coming up. It
was like a big violent clash. Some people were cheering and others were boo-ing
and it just made me want to throw up. And that's when I cried." That was the
moment of Sinead O'Connor's public humiliation, booed from the stage by 18,000
people at a concert to pay tribute to Bob Dylan. Her crime had been to scorn the
religious sensibilities of America. Three weeks ago, appearing on the television
programme Saturday Night Live, O'Connor departed from the script, and tore up a
picture of the Pope, shouting "Fight the real enemy". This week, walking in New
York, she had eggs thrown at her. On Wednesday, a group called the National
Ethnic Coalition Organisations staged a public demonstration in which her CDs
were crushed by a steam-roller and a plea was made for America to be made a
"Sinead O'Connor Free" zone. We have been here before, of course, in 1966, when
John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus". Rock music is
fond of its martyrs, but they more usually fall to a surfeit of drugs and excess
than a surfeit of righteous zeal.  IT IS not simply the cropped hair and wide,
startled eyes that lend O'Connor the zealot's air.  Small and slight, she speaks
with a haste and intensity that brooks no interruption. She has something to
say, and she is going to say it. "The reason people are angry with me," she
says, "is because what I said was the truth. The point I was making by ripping
up the picture of the Pope was that we are not in contact with God. The proof of
that is the existence in the world of child-abuse, starvation, alcoholism,
homelessness. People are asleep, and it's time to wake up. Because if not, we're
all going to be destroyed." Controversy is always good for business, of course,
as Madonna has proved. But conviction - particularly a conviction so artlessly
constructed to antagonise - is not. O'Connor, who is 25, released her first
album three years ago, but came to major prominence in 1990 with a
million-selling song, Nothing Compares To U. Her angst-ridden songs about her
Irish upbringing, emotional insecurity and social pre-occupations have made her
a popular figure among young record-buyers and a controversial one in the record
industry. In 1990 she refused to allow the Stars and Stripes to be unfurled at
an American concert in protest against censorship of the arts, provoking Frank
Sinatra to suggest she should have her ass kicked. In the same year she
boycotted the Grammy awards in America, on the grounds that it recognised
commercial sales above art. Earlier this year, in Dublin, she was arrested for
trying to enter the Irish parliament to protest over the Supreme Court's
decision to refuse a 14-year-old girl an abortion. She hunches on a sofa in the
London offices of her record company, drawing on a cigarette, her finger moving
across the table in front of her as her conversation veers along a line from the
iniquities of the Holy Roman Empire and its "distortion of history", to the
idolatory of money - "the root of all evil" - to what she considers its most
tangible manifestation: child abuse.  This has been a recurring theme, of her
songs, and of her past pronouncements. But it has now taken on the dimensions of
a crusade. Growing up in Ireland, she says that she herself was "abused from the
moment I was conceived". Her mother came from a working-class background,
aspiring to a middle-classes life - "which is what people are supposed to do.
But in doing that she lost contact with who she was. She lost herself. And
suddenly she had four young children and couldn't cope. The doctor gave her
valium, the same as they do to loads of people. And as a consequence of that she
had no control over her life, and ended up nearly destroying her four children.
"I was starved; I was beaten up. I was censorially and psychologically abused.
But this happens to millions and millions of people. All evil comes from it."
O'CONNOR'S parents separated when she was young, and she was raised by her
barrister father until leaving Ireland at 17 for London and a career as a
singer. She was briefly married, to a drummer named John Reynolds, but they are
now separated and she lives in west London with her five-year-old son Jake and
her best friend and personal assistant Ciara O'Flanagan.

   When O'Connor talks, you are reminded most of the medieval religious zealots,
who warned against the destruction of the world through sin and flailed their
bodies for penitence. Her conviction borders on an intensity which makes you
suspect something almost unhinged; a symptom, one suspects, not only of her own
obsessions, but of a millennial vision of the world running down. Many people
who listen to O'Connor's music feel this, perhaps. But few of them have the
platform of television shows or newspaper interviews to say so. O'Connor says
she doesn't care what anybody thinks, what anybody says. When you suggest that
she is being more destructive of herself than of anything she attacks there is
only the faintest glimmer of a smile. "My career you mean?  This is no time to
sit around writing songs." What O'Connor would now like to do is not to record
songs, or to perform them, but to launch a campaign for everyone to "go back to
God. What I want is for everybody who says they believe in God, who's prepared
to put it into practice, to get out in the streets and say: 'No more violence;
no more manifestation of evil in any way, and in the name of God get rid of the
thing which took God away from us, which is money'." There was no hint of a
smile when I asked whether she would be giving up her money, too. "I could get
rid of my money, but as long as there is money in the world if I get rid of mine
my own family will starve. If everyone gets rid of all their money, no one is
going to starve. That's all we need to do: press delete." This is an admirable
notion, perhaps. But I can think of no one who would believe it was a realistic
one, except for O'Connor herself, whose sense of conviction is boundless. She
had planned to hold a conference today at which she would have been making her
plea for everyone to renounce money and renewing her attack on the Holy Roman
Empire. This has now been cancelled. But Sinead O'Connor is a very headstrong
woman, if not without grace. She believes what she says. Even as one fears one
is witnessing the dying fall of a short, but spectacular career, as she says it.