From the Advertiser archives 2015: 'Prince didn't like my personality': When Sinead took WOMADelaide by storm
The world is mourning Irish firebrand Sinead O'Connor, who has died aged 56. In 2015 she spoke to Patrick McDonald about being a woman in the music industry, her strained relationship with Prince and coming into her own as a songwriter.
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From tearing up pictures of the Pope on TV to blasting Miley Cyrus for sexualising minors, nothing compares to Irish singer Sinead O’Connor when it comes to controversy. This piece was first published in 2015 ahead of O'Connor's appearance at WOMAdelaide.
Controversial. Contradictory. Contrary. Sinead O’Connor constantly attracts attention for being all of these things, often at the expense of what the Irish singer wishes people would really focus on: her music. If headlines were hits, O’Connor would be a regular chart-topper.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that she agrees to this interview on the proviso that we don’t discuss her recent social media battle with Miley Cyrus, her mental health issues or “anything speculative”, whatever that means.
She’s even gone so far, in other recent interviews and the press release for her latest album I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss, as to state that because of the constant media tendency to make people “appear crazy” she no longer writes autobiographical songs and that “these are characters that don’t in any way represent my own personal experience”.
Except that, when asked about lyrics that clearly parallel her own life and views, the 48-year-old O’Connor — who will perform at Womadelaide next month — soon admits the ploy was a lie.
“To some extent I was being disingenuous for protective purposes, because if you’re gonna write love songs it’s not just your private life you’re writing about, it’s other people’s (too),” she says from her home in Dublin.
“I invented the idea that there are characters — because I didn’t want to be talking about either my private life or, more importantly, the private lives of anyone else.
“You should never really trust an artist,” she laughs. “And certainly, you should never trust them when they tell you it’s a character they’re writing about.”
Despite its confrontational title — drawn from O’Connor’s support for the Ban Bossy campaign, which aimed to stop the word being applied to women — this is her most romantic album to date.
“It is an album of love songs. It’s something I had never really done. I was studying a lot of songwriters: Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry even. Chuck Berry kept talking about writing songs about stuff people are interested in, like sex or cars or school if it’s young people. So I just figured, well, what are women interested in? Romance and love … plus Adele’s album had done brilliantly and she’s so brilliant, and it was all love songs.”
This sounds odd coming from someone so well known for fighting against the stereotyping of women, particularly when it comes to image and marketing.
Can it be the same O’Connor who defiantly still shaves her head, who produced her own debut album at age 20 while seven months pregnant, and who has taken to her website to publicly criticise Miley Cyrus for presenting an image that is the “exact opposite” of female empowerment and “engaging in the sexualisation of minors”?
O’Connor says her decision to call the album I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss was actually aimed at the music industry.
“All artists were traditionally treated as if we were working for the people who are working for us,” she says of record companies. “It’s not really encouraged that we should expect to be treated like bosses, or that we should behave like bosses.
“Sometimes you can be paying people tons of money on retainers and they won’t take your instructions, or you’ll be asking to see documents and they’ll tell you that you don’t need them.”
She says the situation is exacerbated when the artist is female: “So I found the (Ban Bossy) campaign very inspiring.”
You don’t have to look too hard to find these sentiments echoed in the lyrics of O’Connor’s supposed “character” songs, such as the new single 8 Good Reasons:
You know I love to make music
But my head got wrecked by the business
Everybody wanting something from me
They rarely ever wanna just know me
“I think it’s probably related to any musician who has any kind of global success or is a money-making thing. You get f…ed over and you get ripped off,” she says.
The same song alludes to contemplating suicide, except the singer finds “eight good reasons to stick around’’, and “maybe nine now’’ in the form of a new love:
If I could have gone
Without it hurting anyone
Like a child, I would have found me mum
Like a bird I would have been flown
“It’s a song about suicidal ideation, and it’s discussing the reasons why one wouldn’t leap off something,” she says. “The song is completely autobiographical, obviously. I find hope in the eight good reasons. The song describes the reason that I felt suicidal, as I was having to cope with the music industry, which can be really challenging, but the song is about events that went on a couple of years ago rather than anything recent.”
O’Connor once told Oprah Winfrey that she had attempted suicide when she was 33, and that she had later been diagnosed with bipolar disorder — a diagnosis she has since said was proved wrong. She again posted remarks on Twitter about contemplating suicide four years ago while undergoing psychiatric treatment after the breakup of her third marriage.
Named after the wife of the then Irish president, Sinead was the third of five children who include the novelist Joseph O’Connor. Her parents separated when she was eight and the three eldest children went to live with their mother, where Sinead claims they were regularly subjected to physical abuse.
She later moved to live with her father, but at 15 her truancy and shoplifting led to her being placed for 18 months in a Magdalene Asylum, a training centre for wayward women run by the Our Lady of Charity nuns. Finally, her father sent her to Newtown School in Waterford, a more progressive and creative environment where she was encouraged to record her first music demos.
After winning attention with her first band, Ton Ton Macoute, O’Connor was devastated when her mother was killed in a car accident in 1985, despite their strained relationship. She left the band and moved to London, where she came to the attention of U2 guitarist The Edge, performing vocals on his soundtrack to the film Captive, and was soon signed by Ensign Records.
O’Connor found international success in 1990 with her dramatic reworking of Nothing Compares 2 U, a Prince song originally recorded by one of his side-projects called The Family.
It has been said Prince didn’t approve of her version, but she says it was actually her that the Purple One had a problem with.
“He didn’t like my personality,” she says. “It was down to the fact I use a lot of bad language and that, when he demanded that I cease using bad language in interviews, I told him to go f... himself.”
So have they had any further contact? “We would really not like each other,” she says with a mischievous hint of humour.
Recently, however, O’Connor revisited the Prince catalogue to cover his song I Would Die 4 U for Purple Reggae, a tribute album by Radio Riddler, alias Brian Leiser and Frank Benbini from New York band Fun Lovin’ Criminals. “I really only did it ’cause I like Frank. I actually don’t really like the recording,” she says.
The Chicago bluesmen that O’Connor looked to for songwriting techniques have also influenced the sound of her new album, especially on the track James Brown, which she says is “definitely” the funkiest thing she’s ever done.
The song is a collaboration with saxophonist Seun Kuti, son of the late Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti, whose life and music will be celebrated in another Adelaide Festival production this year.
O’Connor still works closely with her first husband, producer and drummer John Reynolds, who played on her debut album The Lion and the Cobra and fathered the first of her four children.
“We’ve known each other so long we’re like brother and sister, and we’re very comfortable with each other,” she says. “If you’ve had a baby in front of somebody, you’re going to be very comfortable with that person. A great producer is a person who can just make you so comfortable at being who you are that you don’t even realise you were recording a take.”
O’Connor is also becoming more confident with her own songwriting ability, to the point where she would like to compose material for other artists.
“I love songwriting … I’d like to not just be writing songs when I need an album. If you’re a writer of any kind, you’ve got to be writing every day.”
More recently, she has also expressed a desire to join Sinn Fein, the political party most often associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or IRA.
“I’m going to have a meeting about it to decide whether it would be more useful for me to join or better to work alongside them — because the limits of being in a party might be a bit odd for somebody like me, insofar as you’ve got to toe the line.
“My main area of interest is ending partition. I would like to achieve the finishing of what was started in 1916 (the Easter Rising) … so that we could be one country, so that we could begin to have a sense of sovereignty.
“I think that all the problems we’re experiencing now are coming from the fact that, on paper, we’re divided in two but in practice we’re divided in three communities, which is the people of the Republic and the two communities up north. I’d like to see Ireland be one country — I don’t really care if it’s called Ireland or Fred or Daisy. In fact, I would love to see us declare ourselves a new country entirely, which doesn’t identify as Ireland or even Northern Ireland.”
O’Connor, who says she has studied Christian theology, is less optimistic about healing the rifts within organised religion.
Ever since she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, the Catholic Church has been one of her recurring targets, especially in regard to its abuse of children.
On the surface, O’Connor says her new song Take Me To Church “is referring back to the song Get Me To The Church On Time”. But the chorus comes with a caveat:
Take me to church
But not the ones that hurt
‘Cause that ain’t the truth
And that’s not what it’s for
In 1999, O’Connor was ordained into the breakaway Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church and she appears in the video for 8 Good Reasons dressed as a priest.
“When you have an understanding of Christian theology you see that, in fact, there is no way that religion can survive — certainly not Christian religion,” she says.
“When you read the books of the prophets and you read the Book of Revelation, it spells out what will happen: Religion has never been anything but an obstacle to God. It’s described in the Bible as a broken cistern which can’t even hold water. So that’s how I feel about religion.”
It’s also likely O’Connor, who now bears a large tattoo of Christ on her chest, relates to the persecution that can follow speaking out against authority.
“Jesus was an extraordinarily anti-religious character. When you study the Gospels, you see the whole reason the guy came was to tell us religion is full of sh.. and he preaches very, very clearly against religion, which is of course why he gets murdered so horribly.”
●This piece was first published in 2015 ahead of O'Connor's appearance at WOMAdelaide.