Kristin Hersh’s introduction to this book seems to be written honestly; when I read it, I felt a huge tinge of sadness that a huge figure who stood for honesty is dead.

“Where do they learn to do that?” She put the gum in her mouth and nodded toward an entourage actively worshipping the star in the center of their commotion. The group radiated a strange energy: buzzing and alert, they focused on the star while appearing to deflect stranger danger, keeping people away. It looked like a kind of cellular patterning. “Yeah.” I watched the huddle jealously guard its nucleus.

“Some people learn the narcissist side of the equation and some learn the sycophant side. But it’s the same equation.” She touched her fingers to her face in a V shape as if they held a cigarette.

“Do they even like each other?”

“I don’t know. They seem kind of angry.” The entourage made its way across the room, through other entourages, past bowls of fruit and bottles of wine, and then disappeared through a door on the other side—still buzzing, still deflecting.

“What do you think?” Chewing my terrible Dentyne, she squinted at the door closing behind the group.

“I think . . . that the people who treated me like that were the same ones who ended up hating me.” I looked at her, struck by this.

“Hating you?” She nodded, distracted, and I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s because I don’t keep my mouth shut.”

“Oh.” We watched a line of people applying makeup in mirrors, their faces surrounded by hot yellow light bulbs.

“Why should you keep your mouth shut? What do you say?”

“All kindsa stuff. Stuff I believe.” Staring, blank eyed, she looked stricken.

“Didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do that.” I shrugged.

“Maybe they aren’t supposed to do that. If it’s stuff you believe . . . seems important to say it. Some people don’t believe in anything. You’re lucky you care.” She looked at me.

“Do you?”

“Care?” She just kept staring, so I kept talking. “I guess, but nobody seems to know what I’m talking about, so . . . they don’t take offense.”

“Offense,” she repeated, laughing. “That’s what I do. I offend.”

“You’re offensive?”

“Indeed.”

In the landscape of today, Sinèad O’Connor wouldn’t make many people gag. That would be due to many things: the barriers of offensive things to say is broken down the same moment that they’re erected. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, what O’Connor said was inexcusable because of a few things: she was woman, artistically successful from her first album, extremely successful from a record-label point-of-view all over the world, and she said things against the Catholic church. In a Chuck D way, she was Public Enemy Number One, all over the world.

I can’t imagine what she faced. And she seemingly didn’t bask in her own public image where it came to ‘success’:

WILD: Because of the nature of your work, it’s obvious that your fans feel a deep connection with you. What sort of things do they say to you in fan mail?

O’CONNOR: I don’t know. I don’t read it.

WILD: Why not?

O’CONNOR: I’m very frightened of getting ideas about myself. It’s not that I don’t care about people, because I do. It takes a lot for somebody to actually write a letter to you, but I can’t just sit there all day reading letters from people telling me I’m brilliant, because I’ll fucking go mad. I might turn into the biggest wanker that ever walked the Earth, which I’m probably heading toward anyway at this stage.¹

She was outrageously funny in interviews. I’ve a lot of time for a self-deprecating person who isn’t afraid of speaking her mind, especially at tastemakers of the times, when she because famous in the UK:

“And Stock Aitken and Waterman! Pete Waterman was asked how he felt about the problems in South Africa— ‘What problems?’ he said. Shoot the bastard! I would like him to be in the Hippodrome when I firebomb it.”²

She thought:

O’CONNOR: I wouldn’t sing the national anthem.

WILD: Don’t like the tune?

O’CONNOR: I think of the lyrics of the song as being very dangerous. I think if you are into censorship, you should censor that, frankly. “Bombs bursting in air” and the “rockets’ red glare” isn’t anything that I’m interested in singing about. And yet N.W.A piss everyone off singing about AK-47s.

In 2021 she spoke about her autobiography:

HOSTIN: The first part—you’re welcome—the first part of your book is a very personal account of the abuse you say you suffered from your mother until she died in a car accident when you were eighteen. And, in the book, you reveal for the first time how your mother related to that particular photo we discussed of the Pope that you ripped up on Saturday Night Live. Can you tell us about that?

O’CONNOR: Yeah, well, I guess it goes back to the first question there, where we’re talking about the theocracy in Ireland, which is an unimaginable situation—thanks be to God—for anybody in America. You never—thank God—lived under religious oppression in the way we did in Ireland. The church created the type of people who abused their children in their houses, like my mother did. The protest I made when I tore the picture, it wasn’t only about sexual abuse, it was about the rest of us—do you know? The reports have been done about the sexual abuse, and everything, and that’s obviously hugely valid, and I’ve fought for that publicly and privately, but, you know, the rest of us never got mentioned. The picture, to me, symbolized the kind of monsters that Catholicism created by, first of all, beating the crap out of kids in school—forgive my language—then those kids going off and becoming parents themselves and thinking this is how you raise children. Forcing people to get married after their first kiss—you married the first boyfriend, no contraception, no choice for the women as to whether they wanted to be mothers or not. Bang, bang, bang—babies. It was illegal to work once you got married until 1985 or something, so the church created the circumstances where women were so controlled, man-trolled, that they all, when they went to the doctors depressed and postnatal, they were given Valium. They were all miserably unhappy women. What did they do? Went nuts on Valium: beat every shade of “brown stuff,” as [one] might say, out of their children.³

This book doesn’t really complement her autobiography but stands alone as a strange monument, as with any collection of interview conducted by different people from a long period of time. To be interviewed as a musician, especially from a PR perspective, must have been a hard thing for a young person, but I struggle to come up with the name of another woman artist who was launched into superstardom and then hated by the media for so many years. The fact that O’Connor put herself out like she did in interviews says a lot about what a seemingly truthful and honest person she was; she should be canonised, as she herself said Van Morrison should have been.

Through her life, O’Connor created some extraordinarily consoling music, for example her traditional Irish collection Sean-Nós Nua, and her roots music album, Throw Down Your Arms. I very much hope that the album she recorded with David Holmes is released.

Sinead O’Connor was with and of the world. She was sensational. She was deeply human and felt for others. Her humanism will be remembered along with her humour, her music, and her art. And for taking amounts of stick that most of us will never know, the wayward hate of strangers who hadn’t sorted out their own shit.