Sinead O’Connor: Why nothing compares to being the boss
SINEAD O’CONNOR does not want to talk about Miley Cyrus. Her feud with the ‘Wrecking Ball’ singer threatened to engulf the internet last year but that was then, and now O’Connor would rather move on.
This is signalled before the interview, her public relations team stipulating we focus on “the music”.
Which raises the question: How do you separate the private from the professional when it comes to O’Connor, a performer who does not wear her heart on her sleeve so much as tattooed across her body? The 48-year-old’s personal life is entwined so utterly with her art it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Add to that her reputation for bluntness — she is known not to suffer fools — and there are grounds for fearing our conversation will descend into windmill tilting, the journalist trying to cajole her into discussing Miley-gate, the singer flatly declining.
As it happens, it is O’Connor who brings up Cyrus, albeit not by name and in the most peripatetic fashion possible. Explaining the playful, provocative cover of her fine new LP, I’m Not Bossy I’m The Boss — she wears a wig and is dressed like a posh dominatrix – O’Connor suggests 'sexy' doesn’t mean parading in your all together. Given the context, it is obvious to whom she refers.
“You don’t have to be bollock naked … Everyone thinks women of [O’Connor’s age] are not sexy … let’s show everyone it’s not true. You don’t have to be flashing your minge.”
She seems slightly thrown as I mention Arcade Fire’s recent ‘tribute’ to O’Connor at their show at Marlay Park Dublin, at which a man dressed as the pope ripped in half a Miley poster. This was in reference to the Cyrus dust-up, of course, but also to O’Connor tearing up a picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992, a provocation which arguably destroyed her career in the United States.
“It’s lovely, ” she says after a pause. “You are so used to people saying shitty stuff about you. It’s not often people think well of you and come and say so. It’s lovely, if anyone says something nice. My daughter was at Arcade Fire — she was well impressed.”
Up close O’Connor looks an awful lot like Sinead O’Connor. That’s a change from recent years, when she seemed pale and puffy, a bloated shadow of herself. As O’Connor would be first to point out, women in music are scrutinised about their appearance a great deal more than men. Nonetheless, it was shocking to see her so haggard, her once luminescent skin gray and papery.
Today, in contrast, she is very much the O’Connor who sent a shiver down the world’s collective nape as she broke down in tears in the video to ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. She is skinny, with big clear eyes and high cheekbones. She says her healthier look is down to the fact that she’s been off medication which caused her to bloat in recent years.
In the afternoon light you can make out the outline the ‘B’ and ‘Q’ letters she had tattooed on her cheeks and then removed. The amateur psychologist in you is tempted to interpret them as emotional scars manifested in physical form.
Fame no longer troubles her, she says. After decades in the spotlight, she’s learned to edit out the curious gawks that follow her everywhere.
She has a friend in a wheelchair and their experiences are remarkably similar — always being looked at, always made to feel different. Her solution is to switch herself ‘off’ — to make herself as un-Sinead O’Connor- like as possible. She keeps her head down, her gaze fixed ahead.
O’Connor hates living in Ireland of course, which she considers stifling and emotionally repressed. Until everyone aged 35 and over has passed away we will continue, she opines, to live in a ‘theocracy’.
So why, after a decade and a half in London, did she return in 2000, to live in a modest suburban house in Bray? “Ireland does not suit me personally. However, as a mother is suits me. It’s a really safe place where I’m living and raising my kids. I can keep them from the showbiz crap and from drugs.”
She has four kids by four fathers. The oldest, Jake, is 26; the youngest Yeshuam seven. Bray, she feels, is the best place to bring her family up. “And I wouldn’t want to move the kids away from their dads; as much as none of us are perfect, you try to put your kids first. My daughter [Róisín] is 18 — she hasn’t had a cigarette, hasn’t had a drink. She’s as good as gold. I can’t even believe she’s my daughter. She has never done a thing wrong in her life.”
I’m Not Bossy… originally went by the esoteric name of ‘The Vishnu Room’. Then she discovered the Beyoncé ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign which protested the use of ‘bossy’ as a pejorative against women. This spoke to O’Connor.
“You may know this if you write about music… in the music industry, male or female, we are treated as if we are working for the people who are working for us… that’s the way the industry is and obviously it is exaggerated for women.
“Acting like a boss or expecting to be treated like one is discouraged from the time you sign as a teenager. It is cleverly designed to make you feel like everyone is doing you a favour. You don’t stand up for yourself because you don’t want to upset anyone. I would have experienced not being taken seriously as a boss — being dealt with like I’m difficult because I asked for certain things.”
Whatever else she accomplishes, O’Connor will always be best known for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, a worldwide number one in 1990. Does it bother her that her best loved hit was a cover of a Prince song?
“My son jokes about it. I ask him to tidy his room he’s like ‘Why don’t I get Prince to do it for me’. But no, it’ s great song. I’m a singer as much as a songwriter. In a way it’s harder to sing someone else’s songs. Singing your own songs is a piece of piss.”
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