The Independent (London) November 29, 1992, Sunday The life of Saint Sinead By WILLIAM LEITH IN THE LAST week of October, Sinead O'Connor, the 25-year-old Irish pop star, announced her retirement. She told the New Musical Express: ''I'm not writing any more fucking songs and I'm not singing any more fucking songs.'' This wasn't the first time O'Connor had said that she was going to quit the music scene. In February 1990, she said: ''I don't want to be in this business any longer - everything about it makes me sick.'' So the pronouncement didn't sound remotely realistic. But nevertheless, she'd had a hell of a month, even for her. It started on 3 October when O'Connor tore up a photograph of the Pope on live television. She was performing Bob Marley's protest song ''War'' on the American show Saturday Night Live. As she sung the last line, ''we have confidence in the victory of good over evil'', O'Connor produced an 8 in by 12 in photograph of the Pope from the pocket of her white gown and ripped it up. Then she said: ''Fight the real enemy,'' and tossed the shreds of the Pope's picture at the camera, saying: ''There's only ever been one liar and it's the Holy Roman Empire.'' O'Connor walked over to some candles and blew them out. Then she walked offstage. Nobody applauded. But everybody wanted to interview her. A few days later, on a New York radio phone-in, she told listeners that the Roman Catholic church was responsible for Hitler and that the New Testament was a ''forgery''. Then she told Vox magazine: ''The Jews in Germany would not have been exterminated if Hitler had not been abused as a child. Hitler wasn't a bad person, he was a very fucked-up person.'' O'Connor wasn't feeling particularly stable herself. ''People,'' she told the New Musical Express, ''are raping their babies. As we're having this conversation, hundreds of them are being raped outside in the street.'' The only solution, she said, ''to all of the problems in the world - starvation, homelessness, joblessness etc - is to get rid of money''. On 16 October, O'Connor appeared at New York's Madison Square Garden in front of more than 18,000 fans in a star-studded tribute to Bob Dylan. She was supposed to sing the Dylan song ''I Believe In You''. But as soon as she was visible, the audience started to boo. The booing went on unabated for more than two minutes. And then, unaccompanied, she started to sing Bob Marley's ''War'' again. She kept it up for a minute, and then she backed away, dropped her head and staggered into the wings, physically supported by Kris Kristofferson. It was shortly after this that she announced her retirement. ''Yes, it's been a frantic month,'' said O'Connor's publicist Suzanne Parkes. Sinead O'Connor is a controversial pop star, but there's nothing controversial about her music. Mostly, her music is abstruse and doomy, like a weirder, more pessimistic Kate Bush. O'Connor just says and does headline- grabbing things, and this may and may not be a ploy to sell her records. But if it is, it doesn't work very well - she's only ever had one big hit, a song written by Prince, ''Nothing Compares 2 U'', which was number one on both sides of the Atlantic, and which made her career. ''Nothing Compares 2 U'', a beautifully honed, soppy pop song about a lovelorn woman, is nothing like as obscure and difficult as O'Connor's usual run of material. But her jagged, vaguely threatening banshee-voice sets it off perfectly. The song is incredibly catchy and memorable; it's so neat that O'Connor's consummate oddness can only complement it. From the first line, through the increasingly dramatic swoops and gulps of the chorus, the song works brilliantly. The video, too, is simplicity itself, mostly just a head-shot of O'Connor as she sings. She purses her mouth, looking suitably angry and confused; at the end, a famous tear rolls down her cheek. The song made her career, and it also made her fortune (it was said to have earned her in the region of pounds 5m). None of her other records has been anything like as successful: not ''The Lion And The Cobra'', a harsh, untidy song which pulses with vague threat; not the terse, punky ''Jump In The River''; not ''My Special Child'', an uneasy lament to lost children. Recently, her performance in the singles chart slumped even more than usual. In July 1990, ''Emperor's New Clothes'' reached number 30; in October 1990, ''Three Babies'' reached number 42; in June 1991, ''My Special Child'' could only manage number 56. Her last album, Am I Not Your Girl, is all cover-versions of old songs - ''The Lady is a Tramp'', ''Black Coffee'', and the latest single, ''Don't Cry For Me, Argentina''. If the the songs she writes are spiky and harsh, she delivers these old standards with delicacy and with consideration. But Sinead O'Connor has consistently spoken out against commercial success, refusing to appear at both the Grammy and the Brits awards, even when she'd won. ''I despise the music industry,'' she told the Sunday Times in 1991. ''I despise its values and I'm sick of artists sitting on their arses . . . Music has been made into a money-generating machine. It doesn't encourage you to think, it doesn't heal you, it doesn't inspire you. We're just supposed to shut up and sing.'' Her outspokenness prompted Edwina Currie to reply: ''Sinead is entitled to her views, but she's a bit of a prat.'' SHUT UP and sing? For Sinead O'Connor, that hardly seemed likely. People didn't buy many of her records, but she certainly made them buy lots of newspapers. Sinead O'Connor has made herself a magnet for publicity and, without having written any big hits, without having much importance in the world of pop music, she's in a unique position: with nothing to lose, she can shoot her mouth off. Of course, in an industry famed for coke-heads and yes- men, it's easy to stick out a mile. But remember what it used to be like before it was a big corporation? It was full of troublemakers, of no-men. Sinead O'Connor harks back 20 years. O'Connor is always railing against the music business - its materialism, its safeness, its stars. She insults other pop stars all the time. Like: ''Peter Gabriel is a weirdo, absolutely bonkers, barking mad.'' And: ''Prince hasn't a clue what life is like for ordinary people. He's got a huge ego.'' Or Sting: ''What a prat!'' The question is: is this all part of a game plan? Is any of it? Is O'Connor a hard-nosed player in the media game? Or is she childish, naive - perhaps even honest? The overriding theme of O'Connor's pronouncements is pain. She's drawn to talking about the world's victims - victims of famine, rape, child abuse, Aids. Just look at that shaved head, the mixture of vulnerability and hardness. Her favourite subject is her own pain. When ''My Special Child'' was released in 1991, O'Connor gave an interview about the four miscarriages she has suffered. ''I was waking up in the middle of the night screaming,'' she told the New Musical Express. ''Miscarriages . . . never really get discussed - nobody knows that it is a death. It is a grieving thing and there's nowhere to go and talk about it and there doesn't seem to be any of it understood. I don't think there is for any woman.'' And boy, does she get the headlines. ''Mad mum tortured me, sobs sad Sinead''; Sinead Rocks Reynolds Over Abortion Row''; ''Sinead Praises Rapist Tyson''; ''Made Preggers For Being Famous''; ''Why Don't you belt up, Sinead?''; ''Shut up? Me? No Way!'' This year, when she released her single ''Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home'', the sleeve bore a photograph of a murdered Guatemalan child, which enabled her to talk about child abuse in interviews. Piers Morgan of the Sun, an important figure in the world of pop celebrities, wrote: ''Do yourself a favour - keep pictures of murdered boys off your singles and try one of you smiling instead. People would be so shocked they'd buy it out of fascination - and you could do with a hit.'' SHE WAS, she says, abused as a child. And the theme of child abuse has been behind her recent media frenzy; she issued a statement at the end of October, her frantic month, which read: ''The cause of my abuse is the history of my people, whose identity and culture were taken away from them by the British with full permission from the 'Holy' Roman Empire. Child abuse is the highest manifestation of evil. It is the root and effect of every addiction. Its presence in a society shows there is no contact with God. And God is Truth.'' O'Connor was born into middle-class Dublin in 1966; her father was an engineer who later became a barrister. Both he and her alcoholic, tranquilliser-addict mother were lapsed Roman Catholics. When they split up, in 1975, Sinead was deeply hurt. ''There was a lot of fighting between my parents,'' she later said. ''It rubbed off on me.'' Worse still, Sinead was forced, along with her sister Eimear, to live with their mother. ''Mum was very unhappy,'' she has said. ''She was very violent. She was a sick woman and there was nobody to help her. She was very emotionally unstable and all the family were the victims of her illness.'' Sinead's mother beat her. The two girls, she has said, were beaten with hockey sticks, carpet sweepers, tennis rackets, dishes - anything. Sinead claims her mother used to take the girls out on shoplifting sprees. ''I very quickly became addicted to it,'' she told her biographer Dermott Hayes. ''I stole a lot of things like clothes, sweets and perfume.'' Once she was locked in the cellar and starved; sometimes she was locked out of the house at night. She roamed around Dublin, pretending to be collecting money for charity. Sometimes she entered talent contests in Dublin hotels; she won one with ''Don't Cry For Me, Argentina''. Her first sexual experience, widely discussed in the tabloids nine years later, was when she was 14; she hated it, and blames the nuns who were her schoolteachers until she was expelled for truancy and shoplifting at the age of 15. ''They tell you sex is dirty,'' she says. ''My first sexual experience occurred when I was 14 but I didn't enjoy it because - thanks to them - I was lying there thinking: 'I shouldn't be doing this, it's evil.' '' Expelled from school, this veteran of petty crime, Catholic guilt and rudimentary showmanship was sent to Grianan, a training school for girls with behavioural problems in the Dublin suburb of Drumcondra. She hated it, but after a year, her father, now a barrister, sent her to the pounds 3,000-a-year Newtown boarding school in Waterford. She started a serious relationship with Kevin O'Byrne, an old friend from primary school, seeing him in Dublin at the weekends. A year earlier, she had had a break of sorts; she'd been singing Barbra Streisand's song ''Evergreen'' at a wedding, and the brother of the bride, a member of the band In Tua Nua, had liked her. They kept in contact, and later wrote a song - ''Take My Hand'' - which the band recorded. Sinead, desperate to be a pop singer, left school and moved back to Dublin. Meanwhile, she needed a job. ''She came to me desperate for cash,'' Ken O'Farrell, who ran a kissogram agency, told the Sun. ''And . . . was happy to put on the sexy outfit and do the job. She wasn't a feminist then. She really wanted to be a rock star, and I think she thought by being a singing kissogram she was moving up.'' Sinead had two outfits: the French maid, and the mini-skirted nun. ''She used to sit on blokes' knees and read them lustful poems,'' recalls O'Farrell. She made pounds 6 a night. In 1985, Sinead became the singer of a band called Ton Ton Macoute; they were spotted by Ensign Records executives Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill. Grainge and Hill's position was clear: they disliked the band, but thought they saw potential in its crop-haired singer, who threw herself around the stage with passionate, jerky movements. Sinead's mother died in a car crash. Sinead had a feeling, she said, that she knew this would happen the night before. Then she moved to London, signed up with Ensign, and began recording a collection of her strange, interesting songs. She met and fell in love with the drummer John Reynolds. She became pregnant, decided on an abortion, but pulled out at the last moment. Her first album, The Lion And The Cobra, was released in 1988. A POP SINGER! And what did she do? She talked to the press. She declared her support for the IRA and her dislike of Ireland's premier rock band U2. She railed on about how pompous the band was, a stupid and tactless thing for a Dublin musician to do. But honest, unusual, anti-careerist. ''There was a series of things that I said that caused a lot of trouble and which weren't, in retrospect, things that I genuinely felt inside me,'' she told Q magazine in a calm moment. ''I never thought of the moral consequnces of what I was saying.'' In 1989, Sinead told the Face: ''I was this desperately unhappy person . . . That was the main reason why I was going around being bolshy and aggressive to everyone. I was totally obsessed with my own unhappiness to the extent that I was making everyone around me unhappy as well. It's only since I've gotten happy, that I realise how utterly awful I was. Now, I look back and think, what an absolute tosser. Cos now I'm happy. Simple.'' Is that why she was being bolshy and unpleasant, then? Because she was unhappy with herself? And not because she was unhappy with other people, with the world at large, with the Establishment? These days, the pop rebel is necessarily a twisted creature. What has she got to rebel against? Now that pop music is no longer rebellious in itself, it's hard for a pop star to define herself as a rebel without blundering into contradictions all the time. What is there to rebel against? The world? The world of pop music? It's hard to see where one ends and the other begins. ''Sinead is perhaps too disarmingly honest for her own good,'' says her friend Sean O'Hagan. ''She seems to think that she must speak out, that it's incumbent on her as an artist to do this. She's one of the few people I've met with little or no interest in a career, or long-term prospects.'' Another friend, and the director of several of O'Connor's moody videos, John Maybury, says: ''People often say: 'Why can't she enjoy her fame?' But to her, those things are superfluous. She's just a simple and honest person. It's almost an accident that she's had the success she has; her music's not really very commercial.'' Mary Selway, a casting director who cast Sinead in her recent acting venture, a part in Wuthering Heights, says: ''She's not at all outspoken - she's a very shy, private and very serious-minded person. The problem is that she has deeply held convictions, but she confuses them with publicity hype.'' So is she a serious artist who has, with the help of a Prince song, blundered by accident into the bland, feel-good, coke-snorting world of corporate pop? ''She refuses to make the private/public distinction,'' John Maybury says. ''She doesn't have what a friend of mine calls 'falserity'; she can't put on the superficial veneer of 'I'm happy and everything's wonderful,' because it just doesn't work that way for her.'' IN 1990, the success of ''Nothing Compares 2 U'' pushed O'Connor into a completely new realm. In terms of publicity, she didn't know her own strength. There she was, her image oddly poised, not quite fixed yet. Before, she'd spoken her mind, and the dutiful boys from the music press had jotted it down. But after the Prince song, she had the tabloids to deal with. The wild tabloid life started in the summer of 1990. In New York, John F Kennedy Jnr asked her out to dinner, handed her a pencil and a notebook for her telephone number. She snapped the pencil and put the two pieces into his breast pocket. In September 1990, Sinead, playing a concert at the Garden Arts Centre in Holmdale, New Jersey, would not allow the national anthem to be played. Afterwards she disguised herself in a coat and hat and took part in an anti-Sinead demonstration, denouncing herself to a television news crew. In December, she claimed that Prince had ''held her all night at his home, screaming abuse at her''. She tried to contact her mother from beyond the grave using a Ouija board. She posed topless for the cover of the Irish magazine Hot Press. (In Ireland, page three pin-ups are prohibited.) In January 1991, she wore a nipple-revealing string vest on stage in Gothenberg and fondled herself on stage, saying afterwards: ''I believe I can do whatever I like with my own body.'' And then, after she moved part-time to Los Angeles, she stepped things up a bit. February 1991: she decided to boycott the Grammy awards ceremony. On Entertainment Tonight, she said: ''I find it insulting to be told that the artist's best works are those that sell the most. I don't like MC Hammer.'' Mike Hammer, the rap singer, replied: ''If it really is that bad in America, then the next meal ticket back to her homeland is on me.'' Sinead flew to Ireland immediately, sending Hammer the bill for pounds 2,600. That week in Dublin, she picked up two pop awards from RTE. Later, she would tell the press: ''I did actually crack. I broke down completely. I couldn't handle the strain any more. I contemplated killing myself. I started to think that I was really as insane as people were constantly telling me.'' Days later, as the Gulf war was hotting up, Sinead declared on MTV: ''Why are we making Saddam Hussein out to be the devil? America and England - we are the devils. America and England have a history of barbaric terrorism no better than Saddam's. This will get me into a lot of trouble but I don't care. It is the truth.'' Hosting the Brit awards, the British version of the Grammy awards, Radio 1 DJ Simon Bates announced a ''special tribute'' to Sinead, and then played a video of Whitney Houston singing ''The Star Spangled Banner''. Annie Lennox, Rick Astley and Roger Daltrey were reported to have ''whooped with laughter.' Phil Collins later made a subtle joke, mentioning her name and the apologising for ''using the S-word''. In America, Jay Leno, host of the Tonight show, said: ''Sinead O'Connor says she's tired of being famous. That's a coincidence. I'm tired of her being famous too.'' In June, hoping to get a part playing Joan of Arc, she told Simon Bates: ''I feel quite akin to some of the things she went through. I think she was a sane person among mad people.'' At a party in Paris in September, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, trying to launch her own pop career, sent a flunkey across the room to say hello. O'Connor said loudly: ''I haven't got time to spend on 30-year-old brats!'' In October, she denounced MTV in the magazine Spin. ''The images,'' she said, ''move so quickly that the brain doesn't learn to focus.'' In November, she declared that she was divorcing her husband. Madonna said: ''Sinead has the sex appeal of a Venetian blind.'' THE BOOING of Bob Dylan's crowd at Madison Square garden was, I was told, ''Extraordinary. Unanimous. Their faces were twisted up with hate.'' ''What I learned that night ,'' O'Connor told the New Musical Express, ''was that there is no longer any point in trying to use music as a means of communicating with people.'' O'Connor's publicist says: ''She said there was a wave of hatred; she could feel it in her body. People reported that afterwards she was sobbing, but actually she was retching.'' Later today, she will perform at the Royal Festival Hall.