'When the press looked at me,” Sinead O’Connor said in our 1990 cover story, “they saw a woman with a shaved head and a pair of Doc Marten boots, and they assumed that I was aggressive and strong and tough.' 'I’m not really any of those things.”
Which is exactly what it appears to be doing. In the U.K., the album bulleted to the top of the charts in its first week of release. In America,climbed to Number One on Billboard’s album chart within a month of its release — an almost unprecedented feat for a relatively unknown female artist. The singer herself believes that it is the video version of the first single — a deep-blue cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” — that has paved the way for the album’s success.
At other times, the realities of O’Connor’s fame can prove less amusing. The afternoon following the photo shoot, O’Connor is walking down a hallway at the offices of her London record company, wearing dark sunglasses and a black leather jacket. She has the hood of a white jersey pulled over her head and seems deep in thought as she walks along, staring down at her feet.
For O’Connor, many of her experiences have been harsh from the start. She was born the third of four children to John and Marie O’Connor, a young Catholic couple living in the Glenageary section of Dublin. John, an engineer, and Marie, a dressmaker, had married young, and by the time Sinéad came along, the relationship had already turned sour.
Sinéad began cutting classes, sometimes spending entire school weeks holed up in Dublin’s bowling alleys, playing video games. She also began stealing — first lifting money from her father, then from strangers, then eventually shoplifting clothes, perfume and shoes from local shops. Eventually she got caught. By this time, John O’Connor had left his career as an engineer and had taken up the practice of law — and he understood that his daughter might be headed for serious legal trouble.
By the next year, O’Connor had decided it was time to leave school and become a professional singer, but her father refused. “And then,” he says, “she made the most determined statement she ever made about a professional career in music: She simply walked out of the school, saying nothing to anyone, and disappeared. She was only sixteen, and I was up a wall. I didn’t know where she was. When she came home, it was plain that she had made up her mind.
Shortly after, O’Connor moved to London and started work on the material for her first album. “She was clearly very lonely,” says Grainge. “She spent a lot of time hanging around the office, making tea and answering phones. Our big charge was to play her records. The first time we ever heard her, we said, ‘You sound like Grace Slick.
The other person that Sinéad met during this time was Fachtna O’Ceallaigh — an Irish patriot who had managed the Boomtown Rats and Bananarama and who also headed U2’s fledgling label for home-grown Irish bands, Mother Records. To the consternation of Grainge, O’Connor wanted O’Ceallaigh for her manager. “I opposed the connection,” says Grainge. “I knew Fachtna from many years before, when the Boomtown Rats were on Ensign. Fachtna gets very emotionally involved with his acts.
But within months, O’Connor felt herself embroiled in feuds and controversies. In early 1988, U2 dismissed Fachtna O’Ceallaigh from Mother Records, citing “incompatible temperaments”; O’Ceallaigh had once told a reporter, “I literally despise the music that U2 make.” Later, in an interview with Britain’smagazine, O’Connor made some disparaging remarks about U2’s “bombastic” music and found herself reproached by the band’s associates.
“I realized that I had no control over myself — that other people were in control of me, that I was expressing opinions that were other people’s, that practically everything I was doing was to please other people. So I decided I had to assume control over myself in every aspect, and that meant I had to sever some relationships that were very, very difficult to sever. I had to summon the strength to be able to say bye-bye to people that I had previously thought I couldn’t function without.
For his part, O’Ceallaigh says simply, “What is important to me is what Sinéad says. She is the one who knows exactly what occurred over the three-year period that I managed her. And even more important than that, her reaction means everything to me because she has always been and will always continue to be, as long as I’m alive, a best friend of mine. Everything else — whether. it’s success or fame or whatever, all the things that attend success — it’s all basically rubbish.
is going to be more popular than anyone imagined. “If you think about the kind of songs I write,” she says, “it’s strange that they would be commercial. I mean, they’re so personal. I think about why I wrote a song like ‘Last Day of Our Acquaintance,’ and then I think about millions of people buying and listening to it … It’s really weird.”
A month later, Sinéad O’Connor stands before a twenty-three-piece orchestra in London’s elegant Whitehall Banqueting House, dressed in a lime-green low-cut dress, singing a lush and sweet version of Cole Porter’s “You Do Something to Me.” The occasion is a press conference to announce, an upcoming double album and television special that will feature pop artists like O’Connor, U2, David Byrne, Fine Young Cannibals and Neneh Cherry interpreting the music of Cole Porter.
Earlier, Chris Hill had said something trenchant about O’Connor’s capacity for success: “I think she has a fire in her to be the biggest. In fact, she once told me, ‘I’m gonna be the biggest star there’s ever been.’ And I think she certainly likes the fame. But I also think that there’s a point where she won’t give any more than she needs to and where she’ll say, ‘Fuck it, I’m not doing any more than this. The rest of my life is mine.’ She could actually do that next week.
Whatever the sources of that look, O’Connor wears it with a brave face. “Every experience I’ve had,” she says, “is a good experience, even the bad ones. An understanding of sorrow and pain is an important thing to have, because if nothing else, it also gives you an appreciation for happiness. People who’ve been brought up happy and normal often don’t have an understanding of what life might be like for other people. Whereas people who have had an unhappy lifethat understanding.
“I didn’t intend for that moment to happen,” says O’Connor, “but when it did, I thought, ‘I should let this happen.’ I think it shocks people. Some people, I know, really hate it — maybe because it’s so honest, or maybe because they’re embarrassed by displays of emotions.couldn’t “When the press looked at me,” O’Connor says, “they saw a woman with a shaved head and a pair of Doc Marten boots, and they assumed that I was aggressive and strong and tough. The truth is, I’m not reallyof those things.” As she talks, O’Connor is tucked into the back seat of a taxi, en route to her home in the Golder’s Green area of North London. She stares out the window as the car makes its way through the rain-drenched maze of British urban sprawl, and she talks in a low but intense voice.
To Sinéad, though, singing was more a release than a pleasure. “I remember when I was very young,” she says, “I’d go out for walks, and I’d sort of be making little songs up. I think I was so fucked up that I wanted to make noises or something — like shout and scream about the whole thing. I suppose that’s how it started. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a singer: It was just that I could actuallythe pain that I felt in any other way.
It was during her tenure in the boarding schools that Sinéad moved closer to music, spending evenings in her room, playing guitar and gradually writing some of the songs that would end up on. In 1982, a teacher at Mayfield asked the fifteen-year-old O’Connor to sing at her wedding. O’Connor sang Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen,” and her full-throated delivery caught the ear of Paul Byrne, the bride’s brother, who was also the drummer for In Tua Nua, an Irish band with ties to U2.
“At first,” says Hill, “they looked like another godawful pub-rock band. Then Sinéad walked in. She had thick black hair and was so pretty — though she wasn’t made up to look pretty. Then she sang. The songs were dreadful, but her voice was incredible. It ranged from this kind of pure little folk voice to a banshee wail, like something from the depths of somewhere. Yet she was so self-conscious. If she could have crawled back into the corner and sang with her back to us, she would have.
During this period, O’Connor met two other people who were to figure prominently in her life. The first was John Reynolds, the former drummer with the British trash-pop band Transvision Vamp. Reynolds started dating O’Connor after joining her studio band, and a month later, Sinéad was pregnant. “I was the only one that felt completely sure and delighted about the idea of having a baby,” she says. “I could understand John’s reluctance. Suddenly his whole life was flashing before him.
A few weeks later, Grainge, at the prompting of O’Ceallaigh, proposed a solution. “I kept thinking about what she had done with the demos,” he says, “how great they had felt. So I said, ‘Go in with a decent engineer, Sinéad, and produce it yourself. You know what these songs are about and how they should sound.’ About that time Fachtna came heavily into the situation.
O’Connor has long since disavowed any support of the IRA or its methods, but the issue continues to plague her. “I was involved in very complex relationships during that time,” she says now, “and I was influenced by the people I was hanging around with. I wanted their approval, and I was expressing things in order to get that approval, without realizing that that’s what I was doing. I should not have condoned the use of violence by anyone.
In December of last year, Sinéad O’Connor dismissed O’Ceallaigh as her manager. Neither party is inclined to discuss the details of the separation, though O’Connor says: “Fachtna had given me a sense of my rights as an artist. He instilled in me the idea that if it wasn’t for people like me, the record industry would not exist — which is true. And he instilled in me the idea that I must have control over what goes on regarding how my image and work are presented.
Around the end of the year, O’Connor called Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill. She had been trying to rebuild relations with the pair and felt the time had come to play them the rough mixes for. “After we first heard it,” says Hill, “we were shell-shocked. I mean, it’s so personal, we couldn’t even make a judgment about it, and we couldn’t think in terms of whether it was a hit record. It is intense. I know she dunks it’s a happy record, but it doesn’t convey happiness — it conveys trauma.
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