Sinéad O’Connor, uncensored
Even before her now-notorious appearance on SNL, the Irish songwriter was a new breed of rock star. From Esquire 1991, Marcelle Clements reveals how the most misconstrued performer of her time also became the most prophetic.

This article originally appeared in the January 1991 issue of Esquire.
FROM FAR AWAY she looks like a sprite stuck in a nimbus, a punk angel, a mod collaborator, a waif, a defrocked nun, or maybe a planetary alien. I could go on, but the truth is, Sinéad O’Connor’s head is a sucker trap. You can’t leave it out. It’s too hot a signifier. But let me say this: The first thing you notice when you get close enough to Sinéad O’Connor to study her stubbled scalp is that there are little nicks in it, little white punctuation marks where the hair doesn’t grow. The nicks are distracting and kind of cute, kind of endearing, marring the perfect solemn weirdness of her perfectly shaped skull.
She understands the kind of attention her shaved head gets. She has absolutely no coyness about it. “It’s different when you’re a woman,” she says in her very soft Irish lilt. “Let’s face it, if I had long blond hair and big tits and I wore stilettos, that’s what they’d be thinking about, they wouldn’t be thinking about what I said. They wouldn’t particularly give a shit, and I wouldn’t be saying what I was saying in the first place.”

The last time I saw her, when I felt I knew her well enough, I asked her if people often wanted to feel her head.
“Oh, all the time,” she said. “Constantly.”
“It’s tempting,” I said.
“Want to?” she asked. I put my fingers on her skull, which was frightening, partly because it was warm. One forgets that hair is insulation, literally protective. But, also, I was surprised by its texture: I had thought it was going to be soft, like a newborn’s. It was rough, even though she had just shaved it that morning.
“My goodness,” I said.
“It’s good if a man has stubble and you’re rubbing against the stubble; it’s the nicest thing in the world,” she said.
The celebrity in me has an awful lot to be paranoid about
I suggested to her that she should see a current movie in which the lead actor displays a magnificent growth of stubble. Privately, I wondered if she mightn’t like to go out on a date with him, but didn’t suggest it. It would have seemed too stupidly maternal, a feeling I was doing my best to suppress or at least hide. And besides, she’d already told me she prefers black men. “Oh yeah, always. Since I was a kid. They just seem to be much more, I don’t know . . . I feel I have much more in common with black people culturally, maybe because I’m Irish and it’s a similar culture. But I appreciate black music far more than white music, so I always end up fancying Jimmy Reed or people like that instead of Phil Collins or something. I don’t know, they’re nicer, although that’s not necessarily the case all the time, I must stress. . . .” Later, she specified: “I don’t just like black men, I like dark-skinned men and men with dark hair and with dark features.” It was only recently, she told me, that she had begun to enjoy sex. She leaned over the tape recorder: “So if anyone is listening. . . .”
To tell you the truth, our conversations about men were our lighter moments, so I enjoyed them. “My persona intimidates them.” We’d soon agreed that this article would be an excellent opportunity for what she called an “advert.” The requirements are: over thirty, drug-free, with stubble.

The last time I saw her, I asked, “Is there anything about this hair question that I haven’t asked you?”
“I did what I did because I didn’t want to look like a woman,” said Sinéad with a straight face.
“Do people ask you that?”
“Oh, yeah! Yeah! They don’t ask me, they tell me. Or they say it about me on TV. That I shave my head because I don’t want to be a woman and because I’m a fascist!”
“Doesn’t anyone suggest that it’s sexy?”
“No, they don’t,” said Sinéad. “I don’t know, most of the time you get negative comments. Very, very rarely do you get a positive comment from a male about your hair.”
“Of course, it’s so hard to get positive comments from males about anything,” I said.
“. . . that doesn’t have anything to do with their penises or their wallets,” she concluded.
She does it herself once a week, with a barber’s automatic clippers. It takes her about ten minutes in front of the mirror.
THE MIRROR
“I talk to the mirror like, you know, I imagine what I’m going to say to the record company when I go in there and I stand going . . . [she pounds on her chest]. That kind of thing, yeah. And I imagine the sort of arguments I’m going to have with people, you know. And I never end up saying to them any of the things I say to myself, which is just as well. I mean, I probably would if I didn’t say them to myself, you know. I’m a real dance-in-front-of-the-mirror kind of person. I also have fantasies of people I would have really affectionate or tender relationships with, but that’s different. When we meet, then I don’t have fantasies, no. Because I have too much to be frightened of. The girl in me does. But the celebrity in me has an awful lot to be paranoid about.”

Even the first time I interviewed her, in a hotel room in New York the day before her appearance on Saturday Night Live last September, I was aware of Sinéad’s unusual willingness to share her self-image. That is, whatever her self-image may be at any particular moment, since it seems to shift and shimmy with extraordinary flexibility, according to her mood. It’s more than the still-evolving spectrum of identities of a twenty-four-year-old in unusually fluid circumstances; it’s also the continual, psychic locomotion of the performer seeking authentic expression.
When she’s on, in a conversation or onstage, Sinéad’s openness is eerie. It took me a while, actually, to gather myself for a visual scan of her notorious head; her eyes are so huge, blue, and mesmerising that even when they were obscured by blue-tinted glasses, it was difficult to look away. Her physical presence, though she’s small, is intense. Her hands sometimes abruptly fly about her body. Sinéad speaks very, very softly, and she slips easily into a kind of monotonous incantation. I got semi-hypnotised. It’s not exactly a trance state; it’s more like lucid dreaming, like her performances, which are gripping without the necessity of suspending disbelief. You never forget that it’s Sinéad O’Connor singing, howling, contorting her face and her body, dancing, touching herself. Not for a second do you forget the audience, the proscenium, the heat, the lights, and the troubling hyperreality of the pain, anger, and yearning the singer expresses.
But all of this rage and pain, Sturm und Drang, all of this tempestuousness is tempered by a sweetness that is not conveyed by her public statements or her performances. In print she can come off as brutal and defiant. In performance, her intensity is overwhelming. In person, just before and after she does her musical numbers, you see Sinéad number three: smiling like a kid, a little shy, a little gauche. On the Saturday Night Live show, the cameraman catches the moment: After her performance of one of her most scathing compositions, “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” Sinéad stands stock-still while she is applauded, holding her guitar a little awkwardly, looking really pleased that the audience likes her. The bashful body language, combined with the black lace blouse over a black bra, is irresistibly charming. In the dressing room, several of her friends, blond, rowdy, and punk-gorgeous in waistcoats, leggings, diaphanous skirts, jackboots, and leather jackets, have been watching intently on the monitor and cheering her on. At the end of the song, they all smile when she does.
“Look at that face!” says her best pal, Ciara. “And they say she’s aggressive!”
Sinéad retreats, smiling but timid, backward toward the drummer’s stand, like someone at a party who thinks maybe no one will ask her to dance. The audience keeps applauding.
When she gets back to the dressing room, two of her pals are stationed at either side of the door with electronic ray guns. “You were really kickin’, girl!” “Brilliant!” They whoop and cheer. Sinéad submits to being zapped. “How was I?” she asks, wide-eyed and superexcited. “Really? Really? It went by so fast!”
She is friendly but doesn’t pretend that you are her friend. Yet she sometimes goes off on these jags of talk, and you know that despite how much she needs to protect herself, she is truly speaking her mind
O’Connor is sneered at by some of rock’s old guard, who don’t understand her paramusical appeal. But her transgression of current stylistic boundaries is precisely what has galvanised her audience and turned on the often-jaded rock press. Articles and reviews of O’Connor’s work rarely compare her with other rock musicians. Occasionally, John Lennon is mentioned, and now and then Prince, Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman. But these convey emotional immediacy or sociopolitical context rather than musical tradition.
Sinéad acknowledges an artistic debt to an almost awesomely odd pair: Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand. What these two peculiar Jewish-American performers would have to offer the little rebel from Dublin is that kind of magical, cultural synthesis that is better left unanalysed. Suffice it to say that Dylan was the hero of her youth: “I would have slashed my body to shreds if he had asked me to, you know what I mean? The songs he sang applied to me. I knew what he was talking about. So he was a big inspiration, in that he wrote really personal songs, really exposed songs. I wasn’t ever really into the political stuff. I was into the love songs that he wrote, and the religious songs that he wrote.” Her favourite was “I Want You.”
And it was a Barbra Streisand tune she sang, at age fourteen, at her guitar teacher’s wedding. The guitar teacher’s cousin, a member of In Tua Nua, must have enjoyed the performance, for he promptly asked her to attend the recording session that inaugurated her career, but Sinéad recalls it with embarrassment. “I had to sing ‘Evergreen,’ which was great because I became Barbra Streisand for the afternoon. It was a big white wedding and I remember the dress I had — it was purple and had purple and black stripes and had this big collar-like thing, this big turtleneck and I thought I looked great. And I had these boots, you know — and I remember being really embarrassed because my legs are really horrible and they were sticking out.”
Her unusual stylistic tics, even the strange stylised vaulting from one register to another that critics often describe with the word banshee — “flinging my voice about,” as she calls it — are too diverse to trace. It was her older brother’s guitar playing that set her on a musical path, combined with the nearly unrelieved misery of the Rehabilitation Center for Girls with Behavioral Problems. But, as one of her Irish friends points out, many people go through that, and they don’t have it. Undoubtedly, Sinéad’s got it, whatever it is, and audiences respond with an intensity unseen in a number of years. Sinéad O’Connor is an original, for sure, and comparisons are therefore more fun than necessary, but, frankly, the only artist to share any of O’Connor’s musical attributes is the infinitely disturbing lyric soprano Maria Callas, who was, as Sinéad is, willing — or perhaps compelled — to vocalise an almost unbearable vulnerability. This quality also characterises her lyrics, which are pure emotional autobiography, the basis of Sinéad’s approach to songwriting. “Usually I’m going through something in my life, something personal, and I just write down whatever comes into my head about it. That’s how I communicate with myself. That’s how I explain things to myself when I’m freaking out.”
INTERNAL MASSAGE
“That’s why I like hip-hop. It bangs you in the womb. For a while I did yoga and sound therapy. And each chakra in your body represents the colours of the rainbow, and each note represents one colour. And certain notes respond to different parts of your body. Bass notes respond to this area of your body [she pointed to her flat, boyish abdomen under her monk-like robe]. That’s why hip-hop is so brilliant, apart from all the other reasons why it’s brilliant, it does that massage, if you like. So you can use music to heal emotional problems connected with these areas. Say you’ve got a sore throat and you wear something blue — that doesn’t necessarily work, but if you imagine filling yourself with blue, it helps you to feel better. And that certainly can happen with hip-hop — you can’t help but want to sort of waggle your reproductive system around, you know?”
I asked Sinéad if she had some happy moments in her childhood and she said, “No, I wouldn’t say I did. No.” But she liked singing hymns in school. “‘The Colours of the Day,’ ‘Bells of the Angels,’ and all that sort of thing . . . ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace,’ I just loved the melodies and harmonies. I liked the textures, I liked the feeling of the voices singing all together, so many notes that sort of sat on each other. It was nice . . . it was like rainbows if it was colours, it’s the same sort of shape . . . because that’s how I see music, in shapes and textures. It’s so fucking hard to explain — I always have trouble trying to explain this to musicians as well. The balance of each part has to be equal, if you know what I mean, each little segment has to be of equal texture and of equal width and equal volume, if you like. It’s like an internal massage and you want to feel it from here to here, as all your points are being zapped all at once. It sounds completely hippie, but if you imagined they hit all of them at the same time, so that your body felt aligned . . . do you know what I mean? The texture of it, the colour of it makes you, gets all of you rather than just your head, or just your womb, or just your lungs.”
She’d held up two fingers when she used the word chakra.
“I like the way you make the peace sign every time you want to disassociate yourself from what you’re saying,” I said.
I JUST asked my MATES, but EVERYONE’s welcome. That was the POINT of it.
“I don’t want to disassociate myself because I really do believe those things, but I am aware that people think you’re full of shit when you say those things. I do genuinely believe them and I shouldn’t excuse myself. Do you know what I mean?”
She is friendly but doesn’t pretend that you are her friend. Yet she sometimes goes off on these jags of talk, and you know that despite how much she needs to protect herself, she is truly speaking her mind, letting words run into one another without censoring, just riffing. And she has an unusual ability to maintain eye contact, even while wading through disturbing subject matter. These combine to provoke in her interlocutor the same feeling of uneasy voyeurism one sometimes experiences while watching her videos, or listening to her records, or looking at her bare head. Yes, she agrees, the shaved head is about stripping down. And about the records, too, she concurs: “They are me. That’s what they are, me, you know. It’s like I took my skin off and had my picture taken.” And yet she somehow keeps the distance she needs.
Talking to Sinéad, you feel captivated by her appearance, her powerful aura, her recollections, and yet you never forget the banal hotel wallpaper, the whir of the elevator just outside, the fact of the conversation. Straddling reality and spell, aware that if you slip too far in either direction you will lose her, you can start to feel in sync with her. It’s an experience of dividedness: Perfectly poised between awareness and fancy, she connects with you.
It’s easy to forget that she is a twenty-four-year-old rock ’n’ roll singer. Unlike nearly all of her contemporaries, Sinéad has made her voice heard on political matters. And what an argumentative, argumentative, argumentative voice it is! Like it or not — and many people don’t — her stands on censorship, racism, and sexism are front-page tabloid news. It can’t all be her lack of hair. . . . Despite rave reviews for her two albums, despite a single that shot to number one, and despite raking in top honours at the MTV awards, Sinéad gained her notoriety for two offstage incidents. One was cancelling an appearance on Saturday Night Live last year when Andrew Dice Clay, the well-known racist, sexist, and homophobic comedian, was scheduled to host the show. The second was just a couple of weeks before we met: To protest the recent spate of censorship in this country, Sinéad refused to go onstage at a show in New Jersey if the national anthem was played before she went on.
IRISH SINGER SNUBS U.S., shrieked the front page of the New York Post, next to a photo of Sinéad looking particularly punk-grungy. Despite her subsequent attempts to explain her respect for Americans, the press whipped up quite the brouhaha. What a bad girl, we were told in countless articles and television sound bites. “The twenty-three-year-old Irish rock star [now twenty-four] who has a history of throwing tantrums and getting her way was singing a different tune yesterday about her concert in New Jersey on Friday,” chorused The New York Times. She’s gotten quite a reputation. She is willful, rebellious, aggressive, defiant. Even Frank Sinatra said so, and threatened, onstage, to kick her ass.

FRANK SINATRA
“I mean, I’m not frightened of Frank Sinatra, I mean, fair dues to him you know, he’s prepared to shoot his mouth off for what he believes in. But after he threatened to kick my ass, I was booked into the same hotel as him in Cincinnati and I was quite frightened then, because I really did think he was going to . . . and I can’t hit this man back, he’s like seventy-eight years of age and I’ll probably kill him. So I was actually frightened because of that. But I didn’t think my career was going to be ended by Frank Sinatra. I suppose he would, he’s done it before, hasn’t he? Supposedly he’s kicked a few people’s asses. He’s not renowned for being Mr. Peace and Love, is he? But shit, God love him, he’s an old man.
And I have a huge thing about having respect for old people. I don’t like anybody speaking disrespectfully about old people, or to them, so I wouldn’t. It’s funny though, because the hotel that we booked into — I was terrified. Like, I really was. We went in and there’s a newspaper at everyone’s door and it had a big picture of me and this huge interview and so I thought, Frank is going to wake up and see that and then he’s going to bump into me in the lift and kill me. It was funny because he didn’t show up in the end. So I figure he was probably afraid. Maybe he was afraid he might lose his temper. Yeah, I have a fantasy of what I would have done if I’d bumped into him. Absolutely. I thought I’d just stick my ass in front of him and say ‘Look, come on, kick it,’ you know? And then sue him for millions. For assault.”
Now she’s stuck with the bombastic rep, even though the entire anthem fracas, including Frank, was a somewhat specious (and lucrative) confection of a media that, as Sinéad will tell you, often treats artists in a brutal fashion. “With no regard for a person’s feelings,” she points out. “Artists, musicians, and people like that are treated like animals. A lot of times they behave like animals and deserve to be treated as such, but a lot of the time they are just treated as if they’re pieces of meat, with no feelings. People don’t care that things fuck them up.” Not a new problem, but Sinéad gets more, much more than her share of such lashings. At a delicate moment in her life, one journalist referred to Sinéad as “a loudmouthed little pregnant upstart,” a remark that still torments her. Why does she make people squirm so much? Why are so many people riled by her? “I think that I’ve been misunderstood,” she says. “I think that people are not used to dealing with someone who speaks exactly, directly, what’s on their mind. And they take offense because they’re not used to it.” Even if her anger comes out of her compassion, even if she means to be just, she’s got the ultimate PR problem: She doesn’t aim to please.

INJUSTICE
“My mother always told me I was going to get into trouble for having a big mouth, and don’t forget I grew up in Ireland, where you’re brought up to have manners: If somebody says to you, ‘Is your dinner all right?’ and even if you think it’s the most disgusting dinner you ever had you say, ‘Oh, it’s lovely!’ I did that, too, but as far as something was unfair or I felt it was unfair even if I was wrong to think that, I would never sit there and tolerate it. I would never, I just didn’t see the point, it’d be completely ludicrous for me to do that, and so I would stick my nose into other people’s business; if somebody else was having a fight I’d go and help.”
In America lately we’ve gotten used to entertainers “helping” only in the most organised and circumscribed fashion: mainly benefits for this and that cause, easy for the unconverted to ignore. Sinéad participates in organised activities: She recently sang at an Amnesty International benefit in Chile, for instance; she appeared in an anti-censorship “Gathering of the Tribes” concert in California; she donated her time to a television special produced by ACT UP, the AIDS activist organisation. But she now also finds herself in possession of a media-created bully pulpit she doesn’t quite know how to handle. She thinks she’ll learn, but some find her public education irksome.
“I think she’s naive,” a rock journalist says.
“You mean ‘not cynical,’” I say.
“No, I mean naive,” she says. “For instance, she used to support the I.R.A., and then changed boyfriends and changed her mind. She strongly believes in her convictions but then those convictions change.”
“I’m only a twenty-three-year-old girl,” Sinéad keeps pointing out. She’s not equipped with the maturity, the staff, or the desire to become a floating flack for this or that cause, but she finds herself unable, by virtue of her history, her politics, and the nature of her spiritual journey to refrain from saying what she thinks is right.
They called her Swiv in boarding school because she made a habit, when she was upset by how her schoolmates addressed her, of giving them the finger and telling them to swivel on it.
REFORM SCHOOL
“I remember how I felt inside more than anything else, for most of these times, like in the reform school, for the entire time I had this awful feeling of just complete loneliness and desperation, and I know that the other girls did, too, a lot of them. It just felt like there was a big hole in your stomach, you know, like you feel when you’ve broken it off with somebody that you really love or they just dumped you, you know, and you just have this big hole in your belly when you wake up the following morning. It’s like that permanently. And that’s how I felt in boarding school, as well, to a lesser extent. I wanted to be at home, I wanted to be a normal person, I wanted to be accepted, to be allowed in and treated like a normal human being.”
Sinéad O’Connor represents the heart of the new politics: victims empowering themselves
“So, at a certain point did you stop hoping for that and realise that that was something you would never have?”
“Yeah, and I ran away from school and got myself a flat in Dublin and was offered a record deal and moved to London.”
These then, are Sinéad’s thesis and antithesis: vulnerability and bravado. An old story, but the young Irish singer recounts it with phenomenally powerful, often excruciating honesty. She may upset people by insistently transgressing the boundaries of art and self-presentation, and by forcing the listener to share her pain. This is what makes her a modern artist and, not incidentally, a proponent of the new politics.
Like the hip-hop musicians she admires, like performance artist Karen Finley, whom she has worked with and supports, like the ACT UP phenomenon with which she has associated herself, Sinéad O’Connor represents the heart of the new politics: victims empowering themselves. Their issues are arrived at organically, on the basis of personal experience. And it follows that censorship would seem among the most evil of crimes to people like Sinéad, who once were the victims of silence. No phrase recurs with more rage in her vocabulary than her reminder that in Dublin people sweep things under the carpet.
CENSORSHIP
“Things were brushed under the carpet. Yeah. Things still are. That’s why, you know, they’ve got to be spoken, even if they upset people. They’re examples, you know. What happened to me is an example of what is still happening to millions of people, which is why it’s important to talk about it. You know what I mean? There was an occasion where . . . some neighbours of ours called the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to come out to our house because they heard my mother hitting us; and they wouldn’t come out because they said that people who lived in this middle-class area of Dublin that we lived in did not hit their children. So no help was offered to my mother and no help was offered to us. Do you know what I mean? My mother was very unstable emotionally. Who knows what might have happened to her. I don’t think it was a result of anything particularly that anybody did to her. She was just . . . in Ireland there wasn’t . . . there’s no help. There wasn’t any. . . . You know, like, over here or in England or in Ireland now, you know, you can look at the TV and there’s child line, you know, or there’s . . . or, ‘If you have a problem with losing your temper with your children, you can phone us up.’ There was nothing like that. But things were always brushed under the carpet. There was no public talking of weaknesses, you know, or asking for assistance with them. So what could she do? She was very unhappy. She was very violent. She was very um . . . She was sick, you know? She was a sick woman and there was nobody to help her and there was nobody to help us as the victims of her illness.”
Sinéad O’Connor is not fond of secrecy. “I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” she says.
The beatings Sinéad describes were savage and seem to have alternated between frenzied rage and almost ritualistic sadism. “It could have been anything, really. She was completely irrational. You know, like a button would be missing from my dress, you know, that kind of thing. Somebody would be eating some peanuts or a spoon would be missing from the drawer, or somebody’s room would be untidy. I had a sock tied around a roller skate once and this really irritated her, and she started to strike me. Things like that.”
Sinéad recalls that she and her siblings went to school bearing bruises and black eyes and that, for years, there was only silence. Later, she recalls being expelled from schools where she was labelled “mental,” and sent home to certain beatings. While her father, separated from her mother, fought for custody from courts that did not want to take the children away from their mother, she recalls being made to hide her relationship to her mother so that boarders could be taken in. She recalls being taken out to steal. Sinéad recalls being beaten, naked, being struck with “. . . everything. Hockey sticks. Carpet sweeps. My father’s tennis racket. Any implement. Dishes. You know, anything.” She recalls being locked up for several days, without clothing or food. She believes that it was the emotional and verbal abuse that did most of the damage.

“Did you yell back?” I asked. “Or say things back?”
“No. No way. Absolutely not. No,” said Sinéad.
“What would you do?”
“Kneel on the floor and let her kick the shit out of me. If you’d put your arm up to protect yourself you were accused of trying to hit her back. So you didn’t. You just knelt on the floor and had it done to you and then it was over, until the next time.”
Did your father try to help you?” I asked her.
“He did his best,” she said. “He genuinely did his best. I could never say that he didn’t do his best.”
Finally, the father did obtain custody. Sinéad, viewed as mental by others and herself, was perpetually in trouble. Caught stealing one too many times, she was sent to the Rehabilitation Center for Girls with Behavioural Problems. She continued a relationship with her mother, who was eventually briefly institutionalised and finally became addicted to Valium and Mogadon. Sinéad believes it was her mother’s addiction to the tranquilisers that ultimately led to her incontinence and caused her hair to fall out.
The beatings continued.
“When did it stop?” I asked. “Did it ever stop?”
“She died. It stopped when she died,” said Sinéad. “And, it’s a terrible thing to say, but if she hadn’t died I don’t know what would have happened to us. I thank God that she died, for her sake and mine and everyone else’s. She died in a car crash when she was about forty-five, about five years ago.”
For some reason, I remember exactly how Sinéad looked as we talked. We were in Los Angeles by then, where I had followed her shortly after her appearance on Saturday Night Live. We sat on a single bed, downstairs in her rented house in the Hollywood Hills. She sat, cross-legged, at the end of the bed, sometimes leaning against the wall, other times leaning forward tensely, or, now and then, tilting with zany grace to one side or the other. She wore a big, swirly purple T-shirt, extra large, with a smiley face on it, and black bicycle shorts. She held a green apple in one hand. A nearly full moon was rising; the room grew darker. Now I could see her and also her silhouette: She was perfectly framed between the bed and a large poster. She waved the apple as she talked.
“You look like a child,” I said.
“Well, I am,” she said.
A CHOICE
“I think that people choose their lives and set out what they’re going to achieve and what they’re going to learn and what mistakes they’re going to rectify before they’re born, and they choose their parents and they choose their own particular set of circumstances. I think there’s a whole — I don’t know how to explain this. I think it’s just a learning ground. I think the planet is just like school. It’s just learning all those things just so you can then go off to wherever’s next.
“No. Never. I never hated her. Absolutely not. Never. I always understood my relationship to her, you know? I’ve never, never hated her. I hated what she did but I never hated her and I never thought that it was her fault or that she knew what she was doing. Because I chose her as my mother, before I was born. You see what I mean?”
“Did you save any objects after she died?”
“I have all her makeup.”
“Her makeup? Do you sometimes take it out and put it on?”
“I don’t put it on. But I play with it. See, I can remember her puttin’ it on. I associate it directly with her, so it makes me feel better to play with it. It’s particularly pots of eyeshadow cream. Charles of the Ritz was her favourite.”
“Did you keep anything besides the makeup?”
“I kept a mother-of-pearl necklace that used to belong to her mother. It was my grandmother’s, whom I was very attached to.”
“Do you wear the necklace sometimes?”
“No, I never wear it. So, if I have a daughter I’ll give it to her.”
Lately, Sinéad feels much better. She has work that is meaningful to her and that has made her rich, and although her celebrity is a mixed bag for her, she loves being loved by so many people. As she puts it, “If none of those shitty things had happened to me I would not have written songs in the first place, in which case I wouldn’t have my shit together.”
When she was twenty, she produced her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, which got great reviews. The record was finished a matter of days before she gave birth to a boy. Her decision to carry the pregnancy to term was as dramatic as all the other salient events in Sinéad’s life: Lying in a London hospital bed with her cervix being dilated in preparation for a curettage, Sinéad realised she couldn’t go through with the abortion into which business associates had attempted to pressure her. I wish I could tell you this story as she told it to me, and also the story of how she once went to Lourdes with her mother and got a crush on a tour guide and called him on the phone afterwards from Dublin, and also the story of how the day her father drove her to reform school she made him stop the car because she had to buy a Bob Dylan album, she couldn’t bear to go without it, and considered running away, but her father used to be an all-Ireland sprinter, so she couldn’t because he would have caught her. Also, about the time she took a whole lot of her boyfriend’s asthma tablets to get stoned and almost died but one of the nuns at the reform school figured out what she had taken so she didn’t die because the doctor found an antidote but they thought it was a suicide attempt so she wound up having to spend six months more at the reform school. Also, about the healer she found in London, when her “reproductive system was fucked up,” and about studying the cabala, and about her spiritual journey, which started when her mother died, and about her personal cosmology, all this business about choosing everything before you’re born. Also, about the love affair she had last year with someone who treated her shamefully badly, but she doesn’t want me to mention his name because he shouldn’t get the publicity. “Make sure you say he’s a little shit, though,” she requested. Also, about the two guys she and Ciara had met that morning at the deli and the argument they’d had about sexism but they were going to see them again at a club that night and maybe not slag them off.
BOYFRIENDS
“Everybody needs affection, you know. I just like to think there’s somebody I can dress up nice for, put a bit of lipstick on for, somebody who thought I was beautiful, you know, for a day. I don’t want a boyfriend, but you’d like to think that somebody out there has a little candle burning for you, you know. Somebody you could have a crush on and think about and somebody to make your day seem worthwhile, you know?”

Last March she put out her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which has already sold more than three million copies, and is still selling like mad. She’s about to finish a tour for that album. She’s written one new song, “My Special Child,” which she’s begun to sing as an encore. “I used to be, like, in shreds afterwards.” In the last conversation I had with her, shortly after she allowed me to feel her head, I asked her about her scars, and she showed me which nick on her head was from the roller skate that had the sock around it, and which were from the old toilet brush, “and things like that,” and also the scars from her boils that she got because that’s how things came out in her. And so on.
As you can imagine, that’s not even the half of it.
That afternoon, we set off in the red Jeep, listening to Queen Latifah and Shinehead cassettes, and went to the zoo; Sinéad and her best friend, Ciara, who went to school in Ireland with Sinéad and now lives with her and is her assistant — “Basically, that’s, you know, an excuse to have her here” — and the three-year-old charmer, Jake, and Jake’s nanny Jeneal, who is Australian but by a strange coincidence also blond, everyone wearing extra-large T-shirts and leggings and Reebok high tops. At Griffith Park, Jake got his first pony ride ever. Or rather, his first three rides, twice around the ring each, because Sinéad said yes every time he asked for another ride, until it was closing time. The little boy’s expression was an exquisite cocktail of surprise and bliss. As his pony trundled around and around the sandy path, Sinéad ran barefoot along the outside of the ring, so he wouldn’t be lonely.
A GOOD PART
“I think I’d like to play roles where I could draw from my own personality rather than having to become another person, because I don’t think I’d be good at that. I’m so used to expressing different elements of myself that it would probably have to be something like that. But I wouldn’t do musician things or anything like that. I think the more melodramatic, the better. That’s what I like, I like old stuff, like Wuthering Heights and that sort of thing, you know. Because I fancy myself as . . . I want to be Kathy, I want to be Scarlett O’Hara, I want to be St. Bernadette.”

Maybe she’ll take acting lessons in L.A. She’s not sure. Meanwhile, she’s spending a few months in the Hollywood Hills with Jake and Ciara and Jeneal and a little dog named Muffy, a long-haired Chihuahua. For all that is unconventional and playful, her household seems surprisingly efficient. She eventually did get married to Jake’s father, drummer John Reynolds, but they only lived together briefly. “He’s my best friend,” she explains, “but marriage isn’t for me.” Now that she’s feeling pretty good, she has to figure out what she wants to learn next. She doesn’t know when she’ll make another record, but she says she has no plans to have another number-one record.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“No?” I asked.
“No, absolutely not,” she said. “That’s not the kind of artist that I am, luckily. Otherwise I’d never be taken seriously. Who gets taken seriously that puts out a number-one record? I’ll tell you who. No one, that’s who.”
“Well, let me think about that,” I requested.
“No, because then you’re immediately relegated into superstar status. And nobody . . . you’re pop then.”
“Well, I don’t know how many records John Lennon sold, but he was very . . . He sold a lot of records and he was taken seriously.”
“How many number-one records did he have?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted.
“Well, there you go,” said Sinéad.
This article originally appeared on Esquire US.