In 1985, a nineteen-year-old Sinéad O’Connor moved from Dublin to London. At Heathrow, she was welcomed by the suited Special Branch officers who greeted Irish arrivals at baggage claim, routinely pulling aside suspicious-looking men. Dublin, her birthplace, couldn’t accommodate her artistic dreams or the pent-up howl she needed to shake loose. Ireland was, like her, an abused child – they had too much in common. She washed up at Portobello Road Market, jackbooted, young and hungry, with a record contract under her belt, and fell in with local Rastas. They bonded over a penchant for cursing the devilry of the Pope. Among those reed-like men debating scripture and flogging tapes on street corners, she found her people. The oppositional inclinations of Rasta chants and rebel songs would go on to shape her music and visual art. O’Connor would later dedicate ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, a song on her second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got to Colin Roach, a young black man shot inside the foyer of Stoke Newington police station.
Every Friday from then on O’Connor tuned in to the Dread Broadcasting Corporation, a Ladbroke Grove-based pirate radio station founded by DJ Lepke, immersing herself in reggae and roots. St Marks Place, in the heart of Notting Hill, was a backdrop to these sonic convergences. At the nexus of Irish and Caribbean London, she joined the intermingling throngs of stylish, indifferent youths, fast-talking chancers, and shabby drifters in an area where former slum-dwellers scuffed up against brash yuppies. This was the London that intoxicated newcomers, where small-town dreamers could luxuriate in a newfound anonymity.
In Julien Temple’s 2012 documentary London: The Modern Babylon, you can view woozy archive footage of the city going back one hundred years. Temple’s sweeping collage captures a labourer sitting in a poky 1950s flat, flanked by a child. His watery gaze finds the camera. Upon arrival, the man says, he immediately knew that ‘England was the saddest and the loneliest country ever an Irishman could ever put his foot in’. I’ve never been able to shake off this fleeting scene of crackling honesty, and how its sentiment echoes across generations of migrants sifting through the wreckage of their hopes. People don’t just bring their aspirations to the city. They also come with their wounds. The city is a segregator of wounds.
Whenever I had a fight with my mother as a teenager, I would blast O’Connor’s music in my bedroom. Her voice was a shudder, her songs evocative enough to lend a cinematic vastness to my sadness, resonating long past the age of crossed wires and slammed doors. Between my mother and me, there were unbridgeable gulfs of upbringing, culture, and personality. I could feel us becoming increasingly incomprehensible to each other, and it terrified me. I didn’t want to contribute to her tally of losses. Amid London’s faceless monotony, she was already clinging to a past she felt was slipping away, a singularity that she had been shorn of. Arriving in the laboratory of disquiet that was twentieth-century England under John Major’s premiership, she had to reinvent and pour herself into a mould that didn’t quite fit. Humiliation snagged at her, the babble at council offices and clinics as initially unfamiliar as the songs on the radio. As a child, I would have a front-row view of her shrunken life in England, the pressures of motherhood, her sense of besiegement, family secrets, our financial woes, and the routine degradations that afflicted a community of recent refugees. Nothing was hidden from me, and as my duty, I absorbed more than I could handle. In O’Connor’s songs, I detected a similar sense of entrapment, an attempt to tunnel one’s way out of the constraints and devotions of inherited pain. I listened, tried to understand what I couldn’t yet articulate. I’m still trying.
–
Six months before O’Connor landed in London, her own mother died in a car crash on her way to Mass, the car skidding on ice and colliding into a bus. The two had long been estranged. O’Connor’s childhood had been volatile: Marie, her mother, was an unstable, fastidious housewife unable, or unwilling, to protect her children from her seething heartache and violence. She would strip the young Sinéad naked, beat her with sweeping brushes, kick her in the stomach until the child curled into a ball, and lock her under the stairs. In her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, O’Connor recalls being picked up by her father when he got home from work, her face crusted with dried blood. At six years old, she would knock on doors in her Glenageary suburb, asking strangers if they could take her in. Instead, they would return her home. On one occasion, her mother strapped her into the passenger seat before deliberately smashing into another car.
It was being forced to sleep outside in the garden as punishment that finally undid something in O’Connor: she pleaded to be allowed back in before sunset, but eventually gave up and slumped down in the long grass. ‘That is when I officially lost my mind and also became afraid of the size of the sky,’ she recalled. In ‘Troy’, the lead single from her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, O’Connor excavates this scene, drawing on her beloved Yeats and his poem ‘No Second Troy’, wallowing in a similar pit of rejection. ‘Troy’ is a hymnal descent, nearly seven minutes long, that places childhood on a pyre. ‘You should’ve left the light on,’ O’Connor bawls, in what is more a will and testament than a chart-topping song. It’s a song that I sometimes find too painful to listen to, at least all the way through. The album was recorded while O’Connor was staying at a flea-infested hotel – pregnant and fed-up, she fired her producer, mixing her debut album with an engineer and tape operator and twisting her voice into its own master fader. She pushed through on her terms, and racked up a hundred grand of debt.
The wretched symbiosis that can form within mother-daughter relationships haunts O’Connor’s songwriting. Motherhood, as Adrienne Rich reflects in her book Of Woman Born, has a history and ideology more ‘fundamental than tribalism or nationalism’, one which defines a social category that is both idealised and exploited. Mothers, as a group, are ‘dredged by taboos, mined with false-namings’ subject to a sentimental lens that reduces them to a set of symbols and expectations. From this institutionalised form of motherhood spills forth a bevy of maladies rooted in a patriarchal order that uses, suffocates, and discards mothers, who, in turn, inflict this damage on their children. A mother prepares your heart for the world by being the first to break it.
In interviews, O’Connor said that it took her twenty-five years to stop crying over her mother. But the louder she sang, the harder she strained, the more intertwined she was with her mother, until her whole body became a conduit for generational anguish. From this abyssal bog, O’Connor’s most tender and relatable songs emerge. Each time I revisit The Lion and the Cobra, I hear these maternal dispatches delivered from the edge: ‘Will you be my lover? / Will you be my mama?’ In songs such as ‘Just Like U Said It Would B’ and ‘Jerusalem’, registers and imagos are blurred. The daughter sees her mother reflected in every surface, every warm body, every withholding partner. It can be unbearable to live as an inversion.
‘We’ve again disappeared into this act of eating each other’, Luce Irigaray writes in her 1981 essay ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, a text filled with images of feeding, consuming, swallowing, nourishing, and starving. Mother and daughter subsist off each other’s muted rage. For Irigaray, this relationship was marked by its ‘perpetuation of exile’, with the daughter as the negative image to the mother’s diminished life.
I suppose that’s why I’ve always been in awe of O’Connor as a musician and a daughter. In publicly exorcising the mother-daughter relationship, she obliterates the hyphen at the cost of her sanity. There’s a reckless porousness to her work, a willingness to return again and again to that garden, locked-out and trembling. Formative nightmares can sometimes fuel you. An artist can decide to have her own baby, despite the stern advice of her record label. She can willingly choose the terror of motherhood. In photoshoots, her belly will protrude. ‘Wear a Condom’, her crop top reads. She will flash a cheeky grin. Her first child will be born three weeks before her debut album.
–
Even shoplifters have their patron saints – St Dismas, the penitent thief, was nailed to the cross alongside Jesus. Kleptomania is the domain of the teenage girl and her inexpressible hunger, and in her teens, O’Connor was incurably light-fingered. Singing was her other preferred art, and she admired the likes of Barbra Streisand and John Lennon. Her older brother introduced her to Slow Train Coming, Bob Dylan’s 1979 Evangelical conversion-inspired album, and she grew obsessed with this poet who looked as if ‘God blew a breath from Lebanon and it became a man’. It was then that she knew what kind of artist she wanted to be.
As she grew older, she became increasingly ungovernable, and was often reprimanded by the Catholic sisters running An Grianán, a residential training and ‘rehabilitation’ centre for girls with behavioural problems. Placed there at fourteen, O’Connor would witness and suffer imaginatively cruel punishments. The young woman sleeping in an adjoining cubicle had her baby taken away. After a night of illicit busking, O’Connor was locked up all night in the hospice wing, surrounded by the rasps of dying people.
An Grianán belonged to the international network of Magdalene asylums: those secretive workhouses designed to house and contain ‘fallen’ women, a category that included teenage mothers, orphans, victims of sexual abuse and the mentally ill. These were the ‘woe-begotten-daughters’ Joni Mitchell conjured in ‘The Magdalene Laundries’, a song released amid the mounting scandals of the nineties that would go on to irrevocably expose the church’s many abuses. In 1993, the sale of an old convent to property developers uncovered a mass grave of 155 corpses – the remains of inmates – on the grounds of a laundry operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. Some bodies could not be identified, as they had no death certificates.
In her music, O’Connor often confronts this religious trauma, wrestling with both the loss of faith and its startling endurance. When everything has been taken from you, you have no choice left but to scavenge what you can. At the height of her fame, she studied theology, absorbing the influences of various religious traditions, borrowing and repurposing with abandon. Her lyrics invoke God as addressee and witness, the light and the shadow, counting herself as one of His ‘gorgeous mistakes’. Heavy reverb, unfurling strings, and swollen beats enrich the texture of The Lion and the Cobra, backing a voice that is at turns shattering and soft, taking the listener to the top of doubt’s cliff, and dangling them there.
Even in their disillusionment, her songs scale passionate heights, approaching God as the Andalusian Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi did in his writings, as a manifestation unveiled through struggle, stripped bare like rust from a mirror. To inch closer to this unobscured, blinding realisation of the Divine is to embrace a path of self-annihilation, or al-fanaa. You could say that O’Connor sought this kind of enrapturement all along, with music as the vehicle. Listen to ‘You Cause As Much Sorrow’ and you can hear it: the fluttering tones and plucked guitars, the bounciness clashing against the melancholy. The aural dimensions of an internal conflict. You can hear the desire to reject life’s frivolities and distractions, even when doing so risks the madness of the exile, the martyr, the eternal outsider. Consummate artists have a way of romanticising such abjection, or at least the miraculous leaps of creativity that these primal states of solitude can facilitate. To paraphrase the friar and saint Albertus Magnus, to go out and mingle with the world is to lose something of yourself. Isolation can become an indulgence. O’Connor does something different: she collectivises the agonies of doubt, inviting her fans and listeners into her existential crisis. The risks of this gamble are to be embraced, even pursued.
–
Losing one’s faith is an occupational hazard of fame. O’Conner had to contend with how her growing fame obstructed the blazing earnestness she lived by. Much has been written about O’Connor’s 1992 musical performance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II while singing Bob Marley’s ‘War’, her microphone draped in the Pan-African tri-colour flag. This incident triggered an avalanche of criticism, and O’Connor was pilloried by the church, the music industry and the press. Madonna, the High Priestess of Titillating Blasphemy, thought that she had gone too far. Camille Paglia, ever the polemicist, quipped that, when it came to O’Connor, child abuse was justified. Death threats, boycotts and protests followed. Kathryn Ferguson’s 2022 documentary Nothing Compares depicts these shockwaves, including footage of a steamroller crushing piles of O’Connor’s CDs and tapes in front of her record company’s offices. All this was happening to someone Rolling Stone had touted as the first new superstar of the nineties. The mainstream had rapidly lost its patience with her.
Though the SNL scandal interrupted her whirlwind rise in public consciousness, she had already been running low on goodwill. Having refused previously to go onstage at a New Jersey concert if the national anthem was played, she had attracted the ire of America’s patriots who poured scorn on this lippy ‘bald-headed Irish girl’. The country was embroiled in the Gulf War, and O’Connor found it impossible to play along and shrug off this reality. Middle America had no time for a leather-jacketed banshee pissing all over their welcome mat. In response, Frank Sinatra, one of her mother’s favourite singers, told the papers that he wanted to ‘kick her in the ass’. Audiences provoked her, brandishing their little flags. Still, she denied charges of anti-Americanism, appearing on The Arsenio Hall Show and expressing her disinterest in acceptance and accolades. A Grammy was just a piece of metal, representing everything she despised about the ‘vampiric’ music industry. ‘We as a race are concerned with material success rather than each other’, she remarked, deadly serious despite her flirtatious jabs with Hall. On Saturday night Irish television, she was the kind of interviewee who brought up the unknowability of death. She fantasized about abandoning everything and living on a farm in Africa. This furious honesty, when filtered through her music, had earned the singer her acclaim. Now, that same honesty appeared to undermine it.
The public watched an artist lean into her self-destructive impulses, seemingly unafraid to lose it all. What drives someone to win awards but boycott award ceremonies, to embrace being mercilessly booed at Madison Square Gardens after selling millions of copies and conquering the charts? She was so happy, in her dressing room, after ripping up the photo. Being a pop star didn’t suit her, she admits in an interview from Nothing Compares. ‘I didn’t throw away any career I ever wanted.’ Celebrity was an endlessly frustrating by-product of sharing a creative self with the world, but she was always willing to let it go.
Taking out a full-page ad in the Irish Times, O’Connor wrote a poem begging the public to stop hurting her. It was 1993, and by that point, she considered her fame a cruel ‘accident’ she’d been afflicted with since she was twenty. Yet, she acknowledged, it had connected her to those who recognised the grief suffusing her music. She recognised this grief everywhere. Headlines reported the genocidal campaigns of a Serbian politician, and all she could see was a man who had lost his parents to suicide as a child. In her appeal to the masses, O’Connor’s conclusions veered away from pop psychoanalysis, straying into a gnarlier territory. If you are implicated in everything you witness, and vice versa, then how do you live with yourself? The borders of your personhood become dangerously compromised. Such hyper-empathy can be a perilous position from which to think or live, one with personal and professional costs. This resolute belief in an incriminating, boundless oneness, an ummah entangled in suffering, could explain O’Conner’s later conversion to Islam and its unbending monotheism. As a Muslim, she adopted the name Shuhada. In Arabic, the word shaheed translates as both martyr and witness. ‘There is a mirror into which we are not looking,’ O’Connor ends her letter. No matter how distorted her reflections became, at the hands of the media or because of her own flaws, she refused to look away.
O’Connor intentionally undermined her pop world ascendancy by spurning the trappings of fame, and this attracted derision from those who could not understand the path she chose. She gave away her new-found wealth as quickly as she made it. (Shortly after buying a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, O’Connor donated it to the Red Cross in aid of Somali famine victims.) Her actions betrayed a search for genuine fulfillment, marked by a shedding of indulgences and pretenses. Even at the peak of her career, she wanted to be disarmed. Attachment to celebrity, with all its glittering accouterments, stifled her. The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote that attachment ‘is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached’. The reality of the world, as Weil saw it, was a result of our attachments, and a similar philosophy seemed to govern O’Connor. The finite, dazzling baubles of prestige, success, and material reward were obstacles to approaching the truths of our lives, distorting our vision like smudged fingerprints on glass. Weil believed that heightened states of affliction exposed the true character of our attachments, peeling them back and revealing our glaring distance from the suffering. Here, again, is the metaphor of stripping away, of moulting, and dissolving. ‘An artist without a sense of self-preservation is a very dangerous thing’, O’Connor would reflect years later, older but still as unrepentant. She had made peace with losing what she had never sought.
In his 1949 introduction to Weil’s The Need for Roots, T.S. Eliot is in full fan-mode when he argues that agreement and rejection are secondary to what really matters: reading Weil’s book to ‘make contact with a great soul’. He finds much to admire in the French philosopher and mystic’s ‘almost superhuman humility’, coupled with her ‘almost outrageous arrogance’, qualities which inspired the text’s flights of genius. With such leaps, there are also lonely, deflated comedowns. Saints can be difficult people, as Eliot observed. The same could be said for artists.
It was revelatory to read the obituaries that followed O’Connor’s sudden death in the summer of 2023. Many praised her bravery and uncompromising spirit, but I was struck by how freely, in the wake of her death, we could collectively admit the costs of such traits, both in the music industry and the world at large. O’Connor enacted courage in public, flooding the mainstream with her stirring insolence. In her passing, we realised how rare people like her were all over again. O’Connor was a possibility that had made itself violently, arrestingly felt.
We can’t survive life without pretensions, but there’s nothing like an artist who shuns them, cleaving straight to the bone. I turn to O’Connor’s music when I get tired of lying to myself. Her songs are allegorical free-falls. Spiritual chiaroscuros, even. They exert themselves. When my mother first settled in England, she saw O’Connor plastered everywhere. Of all her fumbling encounters with popular culture, O’Connor left an early and lasting impression. My mother thought she was beautiful, but so sad, holding her guitar like a weapon. Her songs tugged at something a newcomer couldn’t yet name. They were too loud. Too exposing. I think my mother was staring into a television screen, unable to turn away, catching sight of herself in the glass.
Image © Houston Chronicle
