Sinéad O'Connor

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sinéad O'Connor once walked into the Grammy Awards with the logo of the hip hop group Public Enemy painted on her shaved head. She was protesting because the first-ever Best Rap Performance award was being handed out off-screen. The gesture was typical of an Irish singer who treated every stage as a place to make an argument. She was born on the 8th of December 1966 and died on the 26th of July 2023. In between, she sold millions of records and drew attention to child abuse, human rights, racism and women's rights. She also spoke openly about her faith, her politics and her struggles with mental health. Why would an artist at the height of her success refuse awards and defy some of the most powerful institutions in the world? What happened in her childhood that made music the one place where anger was allowed? And what did all of it cost her?

  55144063

• 2. Dublin Beginnings

  ›

  The doctor who delivered her at the Cascia House Nursing Home on Baggot Street in Dublin was Éamon de Valera, Jnr. She was named Sinéad after his mother, the Irish author Sinéad de Valera. Her middle name, Bernadette, honoured Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. She was the third of five children, and her older brother Joseph became a novelist. Their father, John Oliver O'Connor, known as Seán, was a structural engineer who later became a barrister and chaired the Divorce Action Group. Their mother was Johanna Marie O'Grady, who had married him in 1960.

  Home was not a safe place. In her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, O'Connor wrote that her mother beat her regularly. She added that her mother taught her to steal from the collection plate at Mass and from charity tins. In 1979, at the age of 13, she went to live with her father. He had recently come back to Ireland after marrying Viola Margaret Suiter in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1976. O'Connor shared a room with her sister and covered her own side of the walls with posters of Siouxsie Sioux, to mark her difference. She loved music with noisy electric guitars. Her explanation was blunt: "in real life you aren't allowed to say you're angry but in music you can say anything".

  At 15, after bouts of shoplifting and truancy, she was sent for 18 months to the Grianán Training Centre in Drumcondra, run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity. She flourished in some ways, especially in her writing and music. She was allowed to attend an outside school, listen to music and write songs, freedoms the other girls did not have. Even so, she bristled at the enforced conformity. Bad behaviour was punished by sending a girl upstairs to sleep in the home for elderly residents. O'Connor recalled lying in the pitch black among old women moaning in their sleep, and said she had never felt such panic and terror over anything else. She later attended Maryfield College in Drumcondra, then boarded at Newtown School in Waterford for fifth and sixth year. She never sat the Leaving Certificate in 1985.

  On the 10th of February 1985, when she was 18, her mother died at the age of 45. She lost control of her car on an icy road in Ballybrack and crashed into a bus. In June 1993, O'Connor published a letter in The Irish Times asking people to "stop hurting" her. It included the lines "If only I can fight off the voices of my parents / and gather a sense of self-esteem / Then I'll be able to REALLY sing..." The letter repeated accusations of abuse by her parents that she had already made in interviews. Her brother Joseph defended their father to the newspaper. He did agree with her account of their mother, describing "extreme and violent abuse, both emotional and physical".

  2221233017

• 3. Rise to Fame

  ›

  A volunteer at the Grianán centre, the sister of Paul Byrne, drummer of the band In Tua Nua, heard O'Connor singing "Evergreen" by Barbra Streisand. The band recorded a song with her called "Take My Hand". They felt that at 15 she was too young to join. In mid-1984 she placed an ad in Hot Press and met Colm Farrelly. Together they recruited a few more musicians and formed a band called Ton Ton Macoute. The group moved briefly to Waterford while she attended Newtown School. She soon quit school and followed them to Dublin, where their shows won positive reviews. Farrelly's interest in world music shaped the sound, yet most observers thought her singing and stage presence were the band's greatest strengths.

  That attention brought the music industry calling, and she signed with Ensign Records. Her new manager was Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh, the former head of U2's Mother Records. U2 had fired him after he complained about them in an interview. He was outspoken about music and politics, and O'Connor picked up the habit. She defended the actions of the Provisional IRA and called U2's music "bombastic". She later retracted the IRA comments, saying she had been "too young to understand the tense situation in Northern Ireland properly". Her first major job was singing "Heroine", which she co-wrote with the Edge of U2 for the soundtrack of the film Captive.

  Her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, came out in 1987 on Chrysalis Records and was "a sensation". She named Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Bob Marley, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Pretenders as her influences. It was the first of many albums she co-produced. "Mandinka" became a college radio hit in the United States. A remix of "I Want Your (Hands on Me)" featuring the rapper MC Lyte found both college and urban airplay. In the Netherlands, the single "Troy" reached number 5 on the Dutch Top 40. On the track "Never Get Old", Enya recited psalm 91 in the Irish language.

  In 1988 she sang "Mandinka" on Late Night with David Letterman, her first appearance on American network television. The song earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and she performed it at the 31st Annual Grammy Awards. In 1989 she sang a duet, "Kingdom of Rain", on The The's album Mind Bomb. That year she also starred in the Northern Irish film Hush-a-Bye-Baby and wrote its music. Her second album would turn her from a college radio favourite into a household name.

  2833353639

• 4. Nothing Compares to Defiance

  ›

  I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, released in 1990, went on to sell over seven million copies worldwide. Reviews were mostly positive, and NME named it the second-best album of the year. Critics praised her voice and her original songs. They also noticed her look: the shaved head, the often angry expression, and the sometimes shapeless or unusual clothes. Many read the shaved head as a statement against traditional ideas of femininity.

  The album's breakthrough hit was "Nothing Compares 2 U", written by Prince and first recorded by the Family, one of his side projects. It became her signature song and was named top world single at the Billboard Music Awards. Her collaborators on the record included Marco Pirroni, formerly of Adam and the Ants, and Andy Rourke of the Smiths. John Reynolds, her first husband, played on it too. Hank Shocklee, who produced for Public Enemy, remixed the follow-up single "The Emperor's New Clothes".

  Success did not soften her. In 1990 she declared that she would not perform if the United States national anthem was played before one of her concerts, because she felt the American music industry was racist. She was attacked as ungrateful and anti-American. Frank Sinatra threatened to "kick her in the ass". People steamrolled her albums outside her record company's offices in New York City. O'Connor attended in a wig and sunglasses and gave a television interview while pretending to be from Saratoga.

  At the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards she was nominated four times and won Best Alternative Music Performance. She refused to attend or accept the award. Instead she wrote an open letter to the Recording Academy, accusing the industry of promoting materialistic values over artistic merit. She skipped the Brit Awards in 1991 as well, though she won International Female Solo Artist. She did accept the Irish IRMA in February 1991. She had earlier pulled out of an appearance on Saturday Night Live when she learned the host would be Andrew Dice Clay, whom she called disrespectful to women.

  The follow-up, Am I Not Your Girl?, collected jazz standards and torch songs she had grown up hearing. It received mixed-to-poor reviews and disappointed commercially. She then studied bel canto singing with the teacher Frank Merriman at the Parnell School of Music. In The Guardian in May 1993, she said the lessons were the only therapy she was receiving and called him "the most amazing teacher in the universe". In 1992 she also sang on "Come Talk to Me" and "Blood of Eden" for Peter Gabriel's album Us.

  434475651

• 5. Church and Conscience

  ›

  On the 3rd of October 1992, O'Connor stood on the Saturday Night Live stage and sang Bob Marley's 1976 song "War" a cappella, with new lyrics about child abuse. She then held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II. It had hung on her mother's bedroom wall, and she had taken it eight years earlier. She said "fight the real enemy", tore it up and threw the pieces on the floor. A month later she said the Catholic Church bore some responsibility for the physical, sexual and emotional abuse she had suffered as a child. She claimed the church had destroyed "entire races of people" and that priests had been abusing children for years. John Paul II publicly acknowledged child sexual abuse in the church nine years after her protest.

  The backlash was immediate. Viewers sent hundreds of complaints. The Anti-Defamation League and the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations condemned her. So did Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra, and Madonna mocked the performance on the same show later that season. Two weeks afterwards, the audience booed her at the 30th-anniversary tribute concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden. Kris Kristofferson came on stage, put his arm around her and offered encouragement. In Rememberings she wrote that she did not regret the protest. Being a protest singer mattered more to her than being a successful pop star. Time named her the most influential woman of 1992.

  She kept pressing the point. In January 1995 she joined a British late-night discussion called "Ireland: Sex & Celibacy, Church & State", on the programme After Dark. The host, Helena Kennedy, recalled that O'Connor argued that abuse in families was coded in by the church, because it refused to accept the accounts of women and children. In 1999 a bishop of an Independent Catholic church, Michael Cox, ordained her. He made the offer after she told the presenter Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show that she would have wanted to be a Catholic priest had she not been a singer. She took the religious name Mother Bernadette Mary.

  In 2010 she spoke about the Irish abuse scandal on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° and in a Washington Post opinion piece. She wrote there about her own time in a Magdalene laundry as a teenager. In the Sunday Independent she called the Vatican "a nest of devils" and urged an "alternative church". Her views on religion were never simple. In 2007 she told Christianity Today that she considered herself a Christian. "I think God saves everybody whether they want to be saved or not," she said. Asked about Pope Francis, she argued that "we need to rescue God from religion, all religions".

  In August 2018, an open letter asked Pope Francis for a certificate of excommunication, as she had earlier asked Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II. That October she converted to Islam, calling it "the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian's journey". The Sunni theologian Shaykh Umar Al-Qadri conducted the ceremony in Ireland. She took the name Shuhada' Davitt, later changing the surname to Sadaqat. She had already changed her legal name to Magda Davitt in 2017, saying she wanted freedom from "patriarchal slave names" and "parental curses". In November 2018 she posted harsh Twitter remarks about non-Muslims. She later said she had written them to force Twitter to close her account. In September 2019 she apologised and said "They were not true at the time and they are not true now."

  6061626459

• 6. Restless Reinvention

  ›

  Her 1994 album Universal Mother produced two music videos, for "Fire on Babylon" and "Famine", and both were nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video. That year she also appeared at Carnegie Hall in a two-night concert organised by Roger Daltrey of the Who to celebrate his 50th birthday. In 1996 she sang on Broken China, a solo album by Richard Wright of Pink Floyd. In 1997 she played the Virgin Mary in Neil Jordan's film The Butcher Boy, her final feature film appearance. She also sang "This is a Rebel Song" and "He Moved Through the Fair" at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo, Norway.

  Faith and Courage arrived in 2000 with guests including Wyclef Jean of the Fugees and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. Her 2002 album Sean-Nós Nua took traditional Irish folk songs, several sung in Irish, and in her words "sexed up" the arrangements. Dance music found her too. She sang "Tears from the Moon" for Conjure One, a trance track later remixed by Tiësto. She also sang on three songs of Massive Attack's album 100th Window. Her 2003 double album, with demos on one disc and a live concert on the other, was followed by an announcement that she was retiring from music.

  The retirement was short. A bout with fibromyalgia had kept her inactive for a while, and in an interview with Harp magazine she explained that she had only meant to quit mainstream pop and rock. In late 2005 she released the reggae album Throw Down Your Arms. Theology followed in June 2007, a collection of Rastafari spiritual songs, covered and original. Its first single, released on the 30th of April 2007, was the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber song "I Don't Know How to Love Him". Two tracks of her 2007 appearance on the Ian Brown album The World Is Yours included the anti-war single "Illegal Attacks".

  In January 2010 she recorded a duet of her own song "This Is To Mother You" with Mary J. Blige, with proceeds going to the organisation GEMS. Her performance of "Lay Your Head Down" for the film Albert Nobbs earned a Golden Globe nomination in 2012, credited to its writers Brian Byrne and Glenn Close. A serious breakdown between December 2011 and March 2012 cancelled a planned tour and her other musical plans for that year. She returned to touring in 2013 with The Crazy Baldhead Tour. Her 2014 album I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss took its title from the Ban Bossy campaign. In November 2014 she joined the Band Aid 30 recording of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" at Sarm West Studios in London.

  In September 2019 she sang live for the first time in five years, performing "Nothing Compares 2 U" with the Irish Chamber Orchestra on The Late Late Show. In October 2020 she released a cover of Mahalia Jackson's "Trouble of the World", with proceeds supporting Black Lives Matter charities. Her memoir Rememberings appeared on the 1st of June 2021 to positive reviews, became a bestseller, and was listed among the best books of the year by BBC Culture. Weeks later, on the 15th of July 2021, the Irish postal service An Post issued a stamp showing her singing.

  6670767781

• 7. Private Struggles

  ›

  Her first son, Jake, was born on the 16th of June 1987. His father was the producer John Reynolds, who co-produced several of her albums, including Universal Mother. They married at Westminster Register Office in March 1989. She had an abortion that year and later wrote the song "My Special Child" about it. The couple announced their plans to divorce in November 1991. Her daughter, Brigidine Roisin Waters, known as Roisin, was born on the 6th of March 1996, fathered by the Irish columnist John Waters. A long custody battle ended in 1999, when O'Connor agreed that Roisin would live with Waters in Dublin.

  In August 2001 she married the British journalist Nick Sommerlad in Wales. They parted by mutual agreement after 11 months. Her son Shane was born on the 10th of March 2004 to the musician Dónal Lunny. Her son Yeshua was born on the 19th of December 2006, fathered by Frank Bonadio, with whom she stayed on good terms. She married Steve Cooney on the 22nd of July 2010 and they separated in March 2011. On the 9th of December 2011 she married the therapist Barry Herridge in Las Vegas. The marriage ended after they had "lived together for 7 days only".

  Her romantic life fed her songs. During the tour for The Lion and the Cobra, she had a relationship with her manager, Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh, that ended in 1989 when she learned he was secretly seeing another woman. She said that experience is reflected in "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance". Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers claimed a 1990 relationship with her, but she denied it. Between 1992 and 1993 she had an affair with Peter Gabriel and joined his Secret World Tour in May 1993. In October 1993 she said she had attempted suicide with sleeping pills after he refused to make the relationship permanent. That experience inspired "Thank You for Hearing Me".

  She also described a disturbing encounter with Prince, the writer of her biggest hit. In 2014 she said she "didn't get on at all" with him. In her memoir she wrote that he insisted she visit his home, served her soup she kept refusing, and hit her with a hard object hidden in a pillowcase after suggesting a pillow fight. She said he later stalked her with his car after she left.

  The health struggles were more public still. On The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast on the 4th of October 2007, she revealed that she had attempted suicide on her 33rd birthday, the 8th of December 1999. She said she had since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In August 2015 she announced a hysterectomy after more than three years of gynaecological problems. She later blamed the hospital's refusal to give her hormone replacement therapy afterward for her worsening mental health. "I was flung into surgical menopause," she said. She went to rehabilitation in 2016 to end a cannabis habit of 30 years. In February 2020 she said she was agoraphobic. She had also been diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder.

  In August 2017 she posted a 12-minute Facebook video saying she had felt alone since losing custody of her 13-year-old son, Shane. She said that for two years she had wanted to kill herself, kept alive only by her doctor and psychiatrist. The next month she went on the talk show Dr. Phil, because, according to its host Phil McGraw, she wished to "destigmatise mental illness". In 2021 she said she had spent much of the previous six years in St Patrick's University Hospital in Dublin and was grateful it had helped her stay alive. Then, on the 7th of January 2022, Shane died by suicide at the age of 17. She said he had recently been on suicide watch at Tallaght Hospital and criticised the Health Service Executive over his case. A week later she admitted herself to hospital for her own mental health.

  124331

• 8. Death and Legacy

  ›

  In June 2021 O'Connor announced that her album No Veteran Dies Alone would be her last and that she was retiring. Days later she took it back, calling the announcement "a knee-jerk reaction" to an insensitive interview. Her 2022 tour was cancelled after her son's death, and the album was postponed indefinitely. According to the producer David Holmes, it was "emotional and really personal" and complete but for one song. In February 2023 she shared a version of "The Skye Boat Song", the theme of the fantasy series Outlander. The next month RTÉ gave I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got the inaugural Choice Music Prize Classic Irish Album award. In early 2023 she moved to a flat in London, saying she wanted to feel "less lonely".

  She died in that flat in Herne Hill, South London, at the age of 56. Her death certificate gave the cause as an exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and bronchial asthma, together with a low-grade lower respiratory tract infection. The coroner said she died of natural causes. A private funeral took place on the 8th of August in Bray, County Wicklow, attended by the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins. Her family invited the public to pay their respects along the seafront where the funeral cortège passed, and thousands came with signs and tributes. She was buried privately at Dean's Grange Cemetery. She left £1.7 million (€2 million) to her children Jake Reynolds, Brigidine Roisin Waters and Yeshua Bonadio. After debts, funeral costs and legal fees, Irish probate records put the estate at £1.4 million (€1.6 million).

  In September 2023 the BBC drama The Woman in the Wall, about the Irish Magdalene Laundries, played an unreleased song of hers called "The Magdalene Song". She had given it to the producers shortly before she died. Tributes poured in from MC Lyte, Janelle Monáe, Enya, Tori Amos, Massive Attack, Public Enemy and many others. Morrissey wrote a pointed message of his own: "You praise her now only because it is too late. You hadn't the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you." Phoebe Bridgers praised her integrity in Rolling Stone. In November 2023, Boygenius and the Irish group Ye Vagabonds released a charity Christmas cover of the Scottish folk song "The Parting Glass" in her memory.

  At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, on the 4th of February 2024, Annie Lennox sang "Nothing Compares 2 U" during the In Memoriam segment, accompanied by Wendy & Lisa. She wore a painted tear on her cheek, echoing O'Connor's famous music video. She ended by calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza war and for "peace in the world". A tribute concert for O'Connor and Shane MacGowan of the Pogues was held on the 20th of March 2024 at Carnegie Hall. A Bratz doll in her likeness was announced that March, and she was posthumously nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024. The makers of Outlander dedicated Series 7, Episode 8 to her, with a card before the end credits reading "In loving memory of Sinead O'Connor."

  1440276368