MAYBE IT’S HER startling looks that first catch you—that soft black bristle that barely covers her naked head or those soulful hazel eyes that can fix you with a stare that is hungry, vulnerable, and piercing in the same instant. Sooner or later, though, it is Sinéad O’Connor’s voice—and its harsh beauty—that you will have to reckon with. According to her father, it is a voice that she inherited from her mother, a passionate and often troubled woman. According to Nigel Grainge, the president of her record company, it is a voice that bears the lineage of her strife-torn and heartbroken homeland, Ireland. “We’re talking soul singing, like Van Morrison,” he says. “That is, real soul singing.” O’Connor herself says she never really thought much about where her voice emerged from. Like her heart and memory, it was just another sign of deep familial pain.
Whatever its origins, O’Connor’s voice is a remarkable and forceful instrument, and it has quickly established her as one of the most estimable new pop artists to emerge in years. This is a heartening development, though also—given the sort of music that O’Connor makes—a completely unlikely one. On the basis of her 1987 debut work, The Lion and the Cobra—a brilliant album about sexual fury and spiritual passion—O’Connor seemed fated for a career like that of Van Morrison, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, or many of rock’s other great truth-tellers: namely, a career of essential artistry, on the border of mainstream affection. But with her current work, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, Sinéad O’Connor has achieved both widespread success and flat-out greatness. Furious and lovely, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is the work of a young woman who has had to weather some hard and haunting losses, and who sets out to rebuild her faith. By the album’s end, she has won a certain measure of hard-earned peace, but only by venting some racking pain, and by leveling an excoriating rage at those who have betrayed her. In an era when even many of the best pop albums are increasingly subservient to the dominance of style and beat, Sinéad O’Connor has fashioned a full-length work that takes uncommon thematic risks, and that makes style entirely subservient to emotional expression. Like Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is an intensely introspective work that is so affecting and farsighted, it seems capable of defining the mood or experience of an entire audience.
Which is exactly what it appears to be doing. In the United Kingdon, where it was released in late February 1990, the album bulleted to the top of the charts in its first week of release. In America, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got vaulted to number 1 on Billboard’s Top 100 album chart within a month of its release—an almost unprecedented feat for a relatively unknown female artist. Apparently, there is something in O’Connor’s fierce and rapturous music that is touching a public nerve, though the singer herself believes that it is the video version of the album’s first single—a deep-blue cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”—that has paved the way for the album’s success. Indeed, “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a gripping performance: For five minutes, O’Connor holds the camera—and therefore the viewer—with a heartsick gaze, and tries to make sense of how she lost the one love that she could never afford to lose. One instant she tosses out sass, the next, utter desolation, until by the song’s end, the singer’s grief has become too much for her, and she cries a solitary tear of inconsolable loss.
“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.
“But I think I’m probably living proof of the danger of not expressing your feelings. For years I couldn’t express how I felt. I think that’s how music helped me. I also think that’s why it’s the most powerful medium: because it expresses for other people feelings that they can’t express, but that need to be expressed. If you don’t express those feelings—whether they’re aggressive or loving or whatever—they will fucking blow you up one day.”
SPEND MUCH TIME around O’Connor, and you’ll find that she’s a lot like her music—that is, she is smart and complex, and she can effortlessly tap into deep wells of sadness and anger. But as often as not, she can also prove sweet and goofy, and can seem truly bewildered by the rituals and expectations that accompany fame. For example, the day after her performance at BBC Radio, during the photo session for this story, O’Connor takes the occasion as an opportunity for listening to some homemade tapes of reggae oldies and recent hip-hop faves like Queen Latifah and N.W.A. (Hip-hop, says O’Connor, is the one pop form that she feels has the closest spiritual kinship to her own music.) In between shots, O’Connor dances around and shares giggle fits and hilarious private asides with her longtime friend, personal assistant, and constant companion Ciara O’Flanaghan. Sometimes, right before striking a serious pose, Sinéad will roll her eyes and crack up, as if she’s both tickled and embarrassed by the notion of her own celebrity.
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. At first, she doesn’t respond to hearing her name called. It turns out that she has just finished reading a blistering article about her in the latest issue of the pop music newsweekly New Musical Express, and it has left her near tears.
In England, O’Connor has become something of a controversial figure with both the music and mainstream press. When she arrived on the scene, she was given to uttering often acerbic views about politics, the music business, and sex—and came across, in NME’s estimation, as “the female Johnny Rotten of the ’80s, an angst-ridden young woman who shocked established society with her looks and views.”
Recently, O’Connor has done her best to undo this image, though the British press has been reluctant to let her outdistance or make amends for her past, and NME in particular still regards her as an enfant terrible. In this morning’s article, the newspaper takes several of the more controversial statements that O’Connor made a couple of years ago on a range of topics—including her views about U2, the Irish political situation, and her former manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh—and contrasts them with her recent statements on the same subjects. It’s a scathing and intentionally mean-witted piece of journalism, and at the article’s end, writer Eugene Masterson asks: “Does a leopard change its spots so quickly or is Sinéad a chameleon who changes her views to suit her moods?” NME’s implication couldn’t be clearer: O’Connor is a fickle opportunist and manipulator, who has abandoned her forthrightness at the first blush of success.
“When the press looked at me,” she 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 really any of those things.” As she talks, O’Connor is tucked into the backseat 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. “Just because I’m a woman that speaks my mind about things and doesn’t behave like some stupid blond bimbo, doesn’t mean that I’m aggressive. It really hurts me when people think that—when they make me out to be some sort of nasty person, when all I want to do is be a good person. It can hurt so much that I feel like crying.”
O’Connor pauses and pulls absently at the hint of forelock at the front of her hair. “They don’t care that if they say, ’Sinéad O’Connor’s a complete bastard,’ I’m going to sit up all night and think, ’I am a complete bastard.’ And when I’m walking down the street, I’ll be thinking, ’Everyone’s looking at me, thinking what a complete bastard I am.’ Obviously, if they list
ened to any of my music—to a song like ’The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’—they would realize that I couldn’t possibly be as secure and strong as they would expect me to be. Obviously there’s a lot of insecurity in there.
“But they don’t care about what a person has been through.”
A FEW MINUTES later, O’Connor arrives at her home in North London. It is a medium-sized, two-story cottage-style house, nestled into a side street of similar residences, just a stone’s throw from an ancient-looking graveyard. “I like dead people,” says O’Connor, when asked if she ever minds the proximity. “I find it comforting to have them close by.”
Inside, O’Connor’s home is strewn with careworn toys and a few stray strands of Christmas lights, left over from the holidays. In the smallish living room, she turns on some heat, takes off her leather jacket, grabs some cigarettes and a lighter from beside a portable cassette boom box—the house’s main stereo—and settles down in the corner of a weather-beaten sofa. A gray cat patiently watches O’Connor’s moves, and then leaps onto the sofa and curls into a contented ball beside the singer. There is nothing in this scene of domestic modesty that would tell you that you are visiting in the home of what one critic has called “the decade’s first new superstar,” and apparently, O’Connor likes it that way.
“I never think of myself as Sinéad O’Connor, rock star, she says with a bashful smile. She picks a Silk Cut cigarette from her pack and lights it, and thinks quietly for a moment. “The truth is,” she continues, “music doesn’t really play a huge part in my life. I know it seems that way at the moment, because I’m just putting an album out, and of course, that means a lot to me. But the most important part of my life isn’t the album: It’s the experiences that are written about in the album. To me, these records are like a chronological listing of every phase I’ve been through in my life. They’re simply an accumulation of everything I’ve experienced. And it’s those experiences—not the music—that have made me happy or pissed me off.”
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, Ireland. John, an engineer, and Marie, a former dressmaker, had married young, and by the time Sinéad came along, the relationship had already turned sour. It was a tense, sometimes brutal home life, and the violence was occasionally carried over to the children—particularly the two daughters with whom Marie had a strained relationship. “A child always thinks that it’s their fault that these things happen,” says Sinéad. “I was extremely fucked up about that for a long time. Between the family situation and the Catholicism, I developed a real capacity for guilt.”
One thing the family shared good feelings about was music. Marie O’Connor had sung Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in her youth, and she encouraged her children to explore their vocal talents. “Sinéad, in particular, had a good musical ear,” says John O’Connor. “The first time she cut a record, I had her out for a walk one Saturday, up in the Dublin mountains, and I had a business Dictaphone along. It was never meant for singing, but Sinéad sang so pretty and nice this one time that I kept it on the tape. It’s interesting to hear how true Sinéad’s voice was, even at that stage. She could hit a note on the head and hold it for fifteen seconds or so—just like she can today.”
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 just 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 actually express the pain that I felt with my voice, because I didn’t have the facilities to express it in any other way. It was just all bubbling up in there and it had to come out.”
In 1975, when Sinéad was eight, John and Marie O’Connor separated (divorce was not allowed by Irish laws). For the first few years, Sinéad lived mostly with her mother. Though Marie was “extremely strict,” Sinéad felt sorry for her, and also felt guilty for preferring the protection and freedom that her father’s home offered. By the time she was thirteen, O’Connor found life with Marie too grim and repressive, and she settled into her father’s. “I think I took everything out on him,” she says. “I’d just come out of years of being severely abused. Suddenly I had all this freedom, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”
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. “Any book that you read on child psychology,” says Sinéad, “will tell you that you can’t take a child who’s been in a violent or psychologically intense situation for years and expect it to be able to cope with normal life. I wasn’t used to life being normal. I was used to it being melodramatic and awful.”
Eventually, Sinéad got caught shoplifting—in fact, she got caught a few times. By this time, John O’Connor had tired of working as an engineer and had taken up the practice of law—and he understood that his daughter might be headed for serious legal trouble. “She had good bloody reason to be unhappy with her home life,” he says, “though maybe it’s my own feeling of guilt, my failure to do what was right for the kids at the time, that is speaking here. Anyway, Sinéad never did anything seriously wrong—she wasn’t a sex fiend or a dope fiend. But after she got caught nicking a pair of shoes in a shop in downtown Dublin, there was a fear that she was getting wayward.”
In the early eighties, Sinéad’s father sent her to Sion Hill in Blackrock—a school for girls with behavioral problems, run by Dominican nuns—and then to a succession of boarding schools that included Mayfield College in Drumcondra, and Newtown School in Waterford. “I sent her to these places,” he says, “because I couldn’t handle the problem any other way. She was resentful, but she also knew that she needed help. And she did go through a tremendous change pattern while she was in Waterford. That kid came out of that school and she never looked back insofar as moral integrity is concerned. She’s now absolutely and fiercely honest, and she wasn’t when she went into that school.”
For Sinéad, though, it was a hard stretch. “Being sent off,” she says, “just refueled the whole thing about being a bad person. Also, I had few friends at these schools. I didn’t know how to tell people, “I’m not nasty and horrible and unfriendly. I’m just fucked up.’ I’d been through a whole lot of shit that they could never understand in a million years, these people from fucking great happy families. They had no understanding of what life was like for other people. So, I didn’t enjoy it at all. I was extremely withdrawn and slouched over. I thought I was mental.”
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 The Lion and the Cobra. 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. The two struck up a friendship, and later, O’Connor co-wrote In Tua Nua’s first single, “Take My Hand.” For a time, there was talk of her touring with the band, but her father insisted she stay in school. However, Sinéad’s brush with recording had enlivened her, and with another friend, Jeremy Maber, she began singing in a folk duo around Waterford’s coffeehouses and pubs, where she became known for haunting and unusual originals like “Never Get Old” and “Drink before the War,” and for her forceful covers of Bob Dylan songs, like “Simple Twist of Fate” and “One More Cup of Coffee.”
“Whatever depth and intensity was inside me,” says O’Connor, “it w
as coming out in my music. I didn’t know whether it was mystical or religious or what, but it was as if I was pulling a big rope out of the middle of me—a rope that had been there since before I was born.”
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. So we sent her to the College of Music in Dublin. She had this big booming voice, and I was hoping that she would get some classical education in singing so as not to damage the vocal cords. She also studied piano. She’s not a naive composer. She knows where she is in music.”
Then, in early 1985, Marie O’Connor was killed in a car wreck. It had been almost two years since Sinéad had seen her mother, and at the time of the death, their relationship was unreconciled. “I was completely and utterly destroyed,” she says. “I felt that we had never really had a relationship. But looking back, I know that my mother knew I loved her very much, and I know that she loved me. More than anything, I just felt sorry for her. Her life had been such misery, and as a result, our lives had been misery. It just must have been hell for her. She had lost her career when she got married, she’d had baby after baby, and I don’t think she ever had time in all those years to figure herself out, like I’ve had since leaving Ireland.
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