I’m not a pop star. I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then. I don’t need to be number one. I don’t need to be liked. I don’t need to be welcome at the AMAs. I just need to pay my yearly overheads, get shit off my chest, and not compromise or prostitute myself spiritually.

Sinéad O’Connor, Rememberings*

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born in Dublin on December 8, 1966. Just over 50 miles away, in Northern Ireland, the ethno-nationalist war known as “The Troubles” – which would last well into the 90s – was firing its opening shots.

Her father, John O’Connor, was an engineer, and her mother, Johanna Marie O’Grady, was a housewife. When Sinéad was a child, her mother abused her not only “physically, verbally, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally,” but also sexually.

In her memoir, Sinéad details how she had been forced to

take off all of my clothes and lie on the floor and open my legs and arms and let her hit me with the sweeping brush in my private parts. She makes me say, “I am nothing,” over and over and if I don’t, she won’t stop stomping on me. She says she wants to burst my womb. She makes me beg her for mercy.

At age 13, Sinéad went to live with her father, who had left her mother four years prior. By this point, she had become a rather maladjusted delinquent, frequently skipping school and compulsively stealing everything that wasn’t tied down (following the example set by her mother, who even stole from charity boxes and church collection plates).

Unable to cope with Sinéad’s shenanigans, her father sent her to the “An Grianán training centre” – otherwise known as a ‘Magdalene Laundry’ – to “correct” her behavior.

‘Magdalene Laundries’ were asylums that were opened in Ireland in the 1700s to house prostitutes, or so-called “fallen women.”

Ostensibly, their objective was to “reform” these women and help them back into society – but the reality is much darker.

“[T]he definition of prostitution,” writes Rebecca Lea McCarthy, in her book Origins of the Magdalene Laundries,

widened to include not only those who sold their body in exchange for profit, but the poor woman, the nonconformists, the single mothers, the young and poor truants, the abandoned wife, and any woman who was seen as a challenge to society’s moral code.

Rather than being “halfway institutions designed to help prostitutes transfer into new employment,” McCarthy continues, they “instead became virtual labor prisons for poor and marginalized women.”

Sinéad was forced to wash priests’ clothes and saw girls “cry every day” in the asylum. When she got in trouble, she was sent to sleep among the women dying in hospice, where she lay awake all night in terror listening to them moan and groan and cry out for a “nurse” (who was never coming).

She told SPIN magazine in 1990 that she had “never – and probably will never – experience such panic and terror and agony over anything like I did at that place.”

Once, she watched a friend get her infant son torn away from her by the staff, never to be seen again. “Now she’s gone too,” Sinéad wrote, “even though her body is still here.”

She doesn’t shape her nails. She doesn’t do her makeup. She doesn’t dress nice anymore. She never smiles or speaks. All she does is cry her poor heart out every day. She says they didn’t give him to his father, and she doesn’t know who they gave him to. They just took him and he’s gone.

In 1993, a mass grave of 155 women was unearthed at the High Park asylum in Dublin, finally blowing the lid off this dirty little secret. Later, it was discovered that another facility had buried 219 children in unmarked graves. At the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, the remains of 796 children were found stuffed inside a septic tank. Many of them had died from malnutrition. All of them had been stolen from their mothers, just like with Sinéad’s friend.

On a brighter note, Sinéad developed a relationship with one of the nuns, Sister Margaret, and she bought Sinéad her first guitar. Later, in a letter written to shed light on her friend whose baby had been taken away, Sinéad recollected warmly how this action had “saved her life” by setting her on the path to becoming a musician.

Sinéad was released from An Grianán after eighteen months and spent the remainder of her teenage years in the local music scene, playing with various bands.

In 1985, at the age of 18, she received news that her mother – who she hadn’t spoken to in nine months – had been killed in a car accident.

A few months later, after having been offered a shot at a record deal, she was on a plane to London.

The feisty little Irish rebel was going to make her presence felt, very soon.

Rise to Fame

The founder of Ensign Records, Nigel Grainge, visited the studio while Sinéad was recording a demo for the song “Troy.” He then did what any rational human being would do, and signed her on the spot.

Soon after, Sinéad went off to record her debut album. This did not go so well at first. The producer sent by the label was some “fucking ol’ hippie” who wanted her to sound like Grace Slick or Joan Baez and “spent hours getting just the bass drum sound right or just the high hat.”

When the album was completed, Sinéad hated it. The label did as well. It was decided that they scrap the entire thing and start over, setting themselves back a hundred thousand dollars.

Sinéad’s manager suggested that she produce the album herself, and she agreed.

The result was “The Lion and the Cobra,” which Slant Magazine rightfully calls “one of the most electrifying debuts in rock history.” An absolute masterpiece, from start to finish.

Six weeks after finishing “The Lion and the Cobra,” Sinéad had her first son, Jake, who the record company had tried to convince her to abort.

It was around this time that Sinéad sat down for lunch with Nigel and another record executive, and they suggested that she grow her hair longer and sex herself up a bit,

wear short skirts with boots and perhaps some feminine accessories such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other noisy items one couldn’t possibly wear close to a microphone.

The following day, she went to the barbershop and had her head shaved entirely, shocking the executives when she walked in for their next meeting. That was about the time the label began to learn what they were dealing with.

They did not offer advice on what kind of image she should project ever again.

“Troy,” which Sinéad wrote when she was 16, was the first single from “The Lion and the Cobra.” It showcases the extent of her raw talent and astonishing range, emotionally and vocally, possibly more than any other track she has ever recorded.

One moment, she could have the voice of an angel – soft as a kitten – the next, a spine-chilling scream that covers you in goosebumps.

How such power could be projected from such a tiny woman, is a wonder to contemplate.

For the music video they shaved her head bald, blew up the Hellfire Club, spun her in circles in front of the camera, and covered her “from head to chest in pure gold leaf, like that James Bond girl,” creating a surrealistic spectacle that somehow feels both ancient and futuristic.

“I look like a very pissed-off alien whose breath sets fire to stuff,” she later noted, approvingly.

The Lion and the Cobra” spawned two more singles: “Mandinka” and “I Want Your (Hands on Me).”

The record label predicted that the album would sell 25,000 copies. Instead, it sold over 500,000, receiving a Gold Certification.

Her first television appearances were performances of the song “Mandinka,” first on Late Night with David Letterman and then at the 1989 Grammys.

At the Grammys, where she had been nominated for “Female Rock Vocal Performance,” her rebellious nature began to surface. She shaved the logo for Public Enemy into the side of her head, to protest the industry’s treatment of Hip-Hop, and wore Jake’s baby outfit around her waist, basically as a “fuck you” to those who had tried to get her to abort him.

The release of Sinéad’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, is when she really shot to superstardom, however, due to its cover version of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which became the “#1 World Single” of 1990.

The world became collectively mesmerized by the emotional intensity of Sinéad’s vocal performance and the close-up of her large, beautiful eyes, which each shed a real tear in the music video.

Meeting His Majesty

Shortly after the success of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Sinéad received a phone call from an effeminate-sounding man who refused to pronounce her name correctly.

It is the artist known as Prince, offering to send a car for her so they could meet and hang out.

Sinéad agrees, and later a long black limo arrives to pick her up. On the way, the driver does not say one word, but rather just occasionally glances in the mirror with a look of fear, as if they are on the way to “Dracula’s Castle.”

When they get to Prince’s mansion, Sinéad rings the bell and waits, and the limo vanishes. Eventually, the door opens with a “creak.”

The man at the door – whom Sinéad nicknames “Igor” – also doesn’t speak, but rather nods his head in the direction they are to take.

The only four words he offers the entire way are in response to why they are having to travel through rooms and corridors that are pitch black: “He don’t like light.”

Igor leaves Sinéad in a kitchen, where she waits for the Prince. Eventually “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs” – as she calls him – appears in the doorway with a “swoosh,” like a villain from a Tim Burton film.

Fluffy Cuffs begins trying to intimidate her right away, and then scolds her for “swearing” in interviews. She responds by telling him to go fuck himself.

“This reeeeeeeeeaaaalllly pisses him off,” Sinéad later writes. “But he contains it in a silent seethe.”

Following this exchange, Fluffy Cuffs leaves her in the kitchen by herself and then a little while later summons her to a small dining area.

She notices Igor on the way, “keeping his eyes to the floor, very frightened, his body frozen in subservience.”

I sit at the table. I’m facing toward the courtyard. Himself is to my left. He shouts a violent order down the few steps to Igor. He wants soup. He asks if I want any. I really don’t wanna be part of treating Igor badly, so I say I’m not hungry.

It’s very, very low light where we are sitting. We aren’t saying anything. He’s brooding. He shouts again, and after a while poor Igor shuffles up the steps, carrying a silver tray that is draped with cream linen and upon which stutter two bowls of soup and two spoons. He is carrying himself as if he’s a battered child about to get beaten again. His hands are shaking and he is cowed as if before a demon. It’s the same abject fear my mother induced so often in my little brother. Igor looks like he’s ready to piss his pants. He also seems woozy, as if drugged.

Sinéad and Fluffy Cuffs then go back and forth for some time, with Him repeatedly demanding that she have some soup, and her repeatedly refusing, with poor Igor stuck in the middle “not knowing what to do, looking like he was gonna cry.”

The soup standoff ends, eventually, in a stalemate. Afterward, there is

Silence for some moments, Igor waiting for his lashing. It finally comes. Himself turns his vicious little face to mine and says, in a tone normal people would use when discussing feces, “This, by the way, is my brother Duane.”

After the soup episode Sinéad is repeatedly attacked and menaced by Señor Fluffy Cuffs. First, he talks her into having a pillow fight, but puts a solid object in the pillowcase so it actually hurts her.

Then, he chases her around the house, then outside – where she attempts to find an escape route or ride to safety – then back inside. Periodically, he stomps away in a huff, like a spoiled child, and then returns with renewed vigor for another futile attempt at domination.

At one point, while she is trying to reason with him and figure out how to get the hell out of there, she writes that he

lifts his face up to mine, as close as six inches, and stares into my eyes for like ten seconds. From the light through the open door, I see his eyes clearly. His irises dissolve in front of me, so that his eyes go pure white. They don’t go up. They don’t go down. They don’t go left. They don’t go right. They dissolve. I see it clear as day.

After being chased and stalked down the road, and then round and round a vehicle, with her continually eluding capture and “spitting at him like a cat that just had babies,” Sinéad finally gets Fluffy to leave her alone by darting up a random driveway and ringing the doorbell.

Needless to say, that was the last time Sinéad O’Connor and Prince hung out.

“I don’t appreciate the assumption I’m easy prey,” she later wrote, irritatedly recollecting the encounter.

I’m Irish. We’re different. We don’t give a shit who you are. We’ve been colonized by the very worst of the spiritual worst and we survived intact.

Escalating Controversy

It’s not like I got up in the morning and said, ‘Okay, now let’s start a new controversy.’ I don’t do anything in order to cause trouble. It just so happens that what I do naturally causes trouble. And that’s fine with me. I’m proud to be a troublemaker.

Sinéad O’Connor: The Rolling Stone Interview

When the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey wanted to play the national anthem before a Sinéad concert in 1990, she asked them not to, based on the reasoning that national anthems have “nothing to do with music in general” and playing them before a rock concert is extremely lame.

Between you and me? Anthems have petrifyingly contagious associations with squareness unless they’re being played by Jimi Hendrix. Also, for the most part, people come to shows so they can forget about the outside world, not be reminded of it.

This outrageous act of insolence triggered gasps and shrieks from coast to coast. The media, full of utter indignance and disbelief, ran segment after segment attacking her. D-list celebrities piled on, making statements to every outlet that would listen. Grassroots movements cropped up in hundreds of cities, protesting the leprechaun invader.

Sinéad, petrified by this negative attention, bought a wig to disguise her identity…….and went and joined one of the protests.

Next thing we know, a local female TV reporter (brunette, wearing six years’ worth of makeup) wanders over to us with her cameraman and her sound guy, who is carrying a ridiculously phallic fuzzy microphone above her head.

Using her best American accent, Sinéad gives an interview to the reporter, exclaiming that “Shine-Aid O’Caaanerrr” should “Git baayack t’ Eye-errr-layand.”

Later, footage of this “interview” is played over and over on the news, with the caption “Is that her?”

The following year, 1991, Sinéad was again nominated at the Grammys, but this time she decided to not go and to not accept any awards, and instead wrote a letter of protest and sent it to the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.

This act is the first concrete example of what she later explained was her master plan from the beginning: to use any fame she would acquire to bring attention to the systematic abuse of children, who until then were suffering in silence.

She also used the opportunity to call out the “false and destructive materialistic values” that are promoted by the music and entertainment industry.

As artists I believe our function is to express the feelings of the human race – to always speak the truth and never keep it hidden even though we are operating in a world which does not like the sound of the truth.

I believe that our purpose is to inspire and, in some way, guide and heal the human race, of which we are all equal members.

[The Grammy Awards] acknowledge mostly the commercial side of art. They respect mostly material gain, since that is the main reason for their existence. And they have created a great respect among artists for material gain – by honoring us and exalting us when we achieve it, ignoring for the most part those of us who have not.

In an interview with the press on the day she sent the letter, she went even further:

Thousands of children are starving to death every day . . . children are being beaten up because of problems in society . . . children are being sexually abused and emotionally abused, people are living in the streets. It’s not enough any more to just sit in you chair and say, ‘Yeah, it’s terrible.’

Musicians are in a position to help heal this sickness, but I’d say 90% of the artists in the music business fail in that responsibility.

Three days after the Grammys, after being relentlessly bullied and abused by the media, Sinéad donated her house to the Red Cross and moved back to England:

I don’t want anything to do with the trappings of so-called success anymore.

Fight the Real Enemy

My name is Sinéad O’Connor. I am an Irish woman. And I am an abused child. The only reason I ever opened my mouth to sing was so that I tell my story and have it heard. . . . If the truth remains hidden then the brutality under which I grew up will continue for thousands of Irish children.

1992 Open Letter to the Press

After her mother, who left her nothing in her will, died, Sinéad went into her house and “took down from her bedroom wall the only photo she ever had up there, which was of Pope John Paul II.”

It was always Sinéad’s intention to “destroy” this photo.

It represented lies and liars and abuse. The type of people who kept these things were devils like my mother. I never knew when or where or how I would destroy it, but destroy it I would when the right moment came. And with that in mind, I carefully brought it everywhere I lived from that day forward. Because nobody ever gave a shit about the children of Ireland.

In 1992, after being invited to perform on Saturday Night Live, she decided to destroy the photo on live television, in front of tens of millions of people.

For her second performance of the night, she sings an a capella version of the song “War” by Bob Marley, changing some of the lyrics so they are about child abuse.

When she sings the last word, “evil,” she shows the picture to the camera and then rips it apart, throws it on the ground, and says “Fight the real enemy.”

Afterward, the crowd sits in stunned silence.

While the sexual abuse of priests had been somewhat of an “open secret,” this was the first time anyone had brought attention to it on television.

It wasn’t until ten years later, in 2002, after a series of articles appeared in The Boston Globe, that it became a commonly accepted fact.

In 2016, a movie about The Boston Globe articles, Spotlight, won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

Now, everyone is aware of these horrific abuses. In 1992, however, Sinéad was turned into a pariah, virtually overnight, for daring to shed light on them.

Catholics gathered in Times Square, in front of her record label, and had piles of her albums crushed by a steamroller.

The entertainment industry never forgave her. She was canceled.

The matter is being discussed on the news and we learn I am banned from NBC for life. This hurts me a lot less than rapes hurt those Irish children.

Booed by Boomers

A few weeks after the pope incident, Sinéad was scheduled to sing at the Bob Dylan 30^th Anniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden.

This must have been a huge moment for her, as Bob Dylan is the artist that made her want to become a singer in the first place.

Following Elvis’s death, when Sinéad was a child, she was “crying so fucking much” she couldn’t even make her bed.

She wandered downstairs and heard “a kind man” – Dylan – singing to a girl that she “needn’t cry anymore.” Looking at the album cover, Sinéad found him “as beautiful as if God blew a breath from Lebanon and it became a man.”

He has an empty baby carrier hanging open across his chest. I slip myself in. His voice is like a blanket. He’s really tender and he loves girls. I have his chest to fall asleep on.

Shortly after giving Sinéad her first guitar, Sister Margaret bought her a “book of Bob Dylan lyrics and pictures of how to play the chords.”

His songs were among the first she learned, as she practiced to become a musician.

It was decided that she would sing a cover of the song “I Believe in You,” from Dylan’s album Slow Train Coming, at the concert.

“When I first try to sing ‘I Believe in You,’” Sinéad writes of the concert rehearsal,

I cry my eyes out, it means that much to me. I always know I’m gonna sing a song well if it first makes me blubber.

“And all I want,” she continues, “is for Bob to be proud of it.”

At the concert, which was broadcast live on television, Kris Kristofferson introduces her as an artist “whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity.”

As soon as Sinéad takes the stage, the crowd goes into an uproar and the stadium is filled to the rafters with booing and jeering.

Then the other half of the audience begins cheering to fight off the booers. And there ensues a noise the likes of which I have never heard and can’t describe other than to say it’s like a thunderclap that never ends. The loudest noise I’ve ever heard. Like a sonic riot, as if the sky is ripping apart. It makes me feel really nauseous and almost bursts my eardrums. And for a minute or two I’m not sure the audience members aren’t going to actually riot.

The version of “I Believe in You” that Sinéad had planned for the night was “very soft and whispered.” She silences the band as they attempt to begin the song, knowing she will be drowned out by the belligerent crowd.

After a few minutes of ruckus, Kristofferson is told to go and get her off of the stage. Instead, he comes out and says in her ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

“I’m not down,” she responds.

What happens next will surely go down as one of the most legendary and punk rock moments in all of music history:

Sinéad faces the vipers, silences the band one last time, and then steps to the mic and sings – shouts – “War” once again, making it clear that she stands behind her earlier performance, even in the face of overwhelming hostility.

As she leaves the stage, Kristofferson meets her and hugs her. She almost vomits and then goes limp in his arms.

Back on Track

A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career. That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.

Despite being essentially blackballed by the mainstream, for her protest of child rape, Sinéad went on to release ten studio albums, five compilations, and four video albums. She remained highly respected among musicians and artists and worked on countless collaborations, film scores, and soundtracks.

If she had wanted to persist as a pop superstar, she could have done it with ease. Nobody that ever heard her sing, saw her perform, or glanced at her iconic image would deny her talent and star power. She just had “it.”

Sinéad’s unshakable individualism and independent-mindedness made her highly incompatible with the music industry, which is known for being extremely cutthroat.

Industry mogul-types love to gain power and leverage over artists – who are their products – and they accomplish this by holding the keys to success.

For the most part, they are nothing but soulless, materialistic pimps who contribute little to nothing of value to the world.

They may own people – holding their careers and livelihoods in the palm of their hands – but they don’t own the music. That belongs to the rest of humanity – those of us who have actual feelings.

God Bless Sinéad for forging her own path, and never bowing down to such people.

Fortunately, we now have the internet, and artists and creators can easily circumvent the major corporations and their minions and rise on their own merit as truly free agents.

In Sinéad’s time, it was not so easy. Because of that, she will forever stand as a beacon of uncompromising independence, rebelliousness, and self-ownership.

There was no doubt about who this bitch is. There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star. But it was not derailing; people say, ‘Oh you fucked up your career,’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine. It meant that I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.

Interview with The Guardian, May, 2021

Legacy

O’Connor saw herself in the mold of the great Irish artists and agitators . . . For her, music was a form of DIY primal therapy. She didn’t just want to sing. She needed to scream. If other people could hear her, they would see her pain, but also feel her desire for the love and affection she never had as a child. They would relate and respond – and perhaps they could heal, too.

Allyson McCabe, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters

Sadly, Sinéad was never able to overcome the trauma of her childhood abuse, and was eventually clinically diagnosed with multiple severe mental illnesses. Beginning in 2015, she spent six years in and out of treatment centers. More than once, she attempted suicide, and her personal life was fraught with almost constant drama, much of which became fodder for the tabloids.

In January, 2022, her youngest son, Shane, killed himself, leaving Sinéad a “shell of a human being.” A little over a year later, on July 26, 2023, she was found unresponsive in her home and then later pronounced dead, at the age of 56.

I hope this article is able to help shed some light on why Sinéad may have behaved the way she did. Many have the impression that she was just a “crazy person.” I don’t believe she was a crazy person. I believe she was a victim of abuse, in a crazy world.

Throughout her life, due to her observations and own experiences, Sinéad grew to consider widespread child abuse as the source of all of the problems in the world.

That may have been an oversimplification on her part…..but probably not by much. The negative consequences, socially and psychologically, that result from rampant child abuse and trauma are extraordinary.

Addiction, criminality, mental illness, suicide – these are all common side effects of such behavior. In many cases, the abused go on to become abusers themselves, causing an intergenerational cycle of horror.

The fact that this was done in a systematic fashion by one of the most powerful institutions in the world – one that presents itself as the moral protector of society – is a shocking and shameful chapter of human history.

It is even more scary to realize that only just a few decades ago it was something that not one person would dare utter a word in protest against publicly.

Sinéad’s act of speaking out on this issue, without fear of consequence, cannot be overstated in its importance.

Her legacy will only continue to increase because of it – of that we can be certain. She will probably be studied as a significant historical figure of our time for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

More and more people will come to understand what she truly stood for. Her artistic, spiritual, and political contributions to the world will transcend time and space.

They tried to bury me. They didn’t realize I was a seed.

Nothing Compares (2022 documentary)

It seems that Sinéad always felt if it weren’t for her talent she would’ve ended up just like millions of others who come from broken homes, condemned to a long hard life of mental illness, dysfunction, and poverty, unloved and unwanted by society.

Or like the tens of thousands of other women who were imprisoned in Magdalene Laundries, but were never able to escape; those who were forced to live a life of daily humiliation, abuse, and slave labor, until they were unceremoniously disposed of in an unmarked grave or filth-ridden septic tank.

Finding herself in a leadership role, she wanted to make a difference, not just receive a series of pats on the back. She had a voice – in more ways than one – that most could never dream of having, and she was determined to use it for good, in any way that she could.

Sinéad was broken just as millions of others are broken. She could not heal humanity with her songs, or even herself. But she tried, and she helped. She is still helping. Her music – which was her therapy – is our therapy as well, even though her body has now been laid to rest. That was her gift to the world.

Despite her many flaws, Sinéad was the physical embodiment of strength, nurture, and self-sacrifice. She is one of those rare figures that makes you truly proud to be human.

The world is an objectively better place for her having been in it.

*All subsequent quotes also from Rememberings, unless otherwise indicated.

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