How many interviews did I have under my belt by the time I met Sinéad O’Connor? Too many I think to have been as heedless to my subject as I was. For an hour (or approximately 8000 transcribed words), Sinéad was generous and candid and unguarded – every writer’s dream. She spoke, as a child might, of a different world, one in which she imagined the Southern Baptist preachers, who had inspired her in Atlanta, crossing the Atlantic to save Irish Catholicism from moldering away into insignificance. She imagined a huge building in which all religions might congregate and pray to their deities. She had communicated with the dead, including her mother, and believed the soul lived on forever. She said that the word “God” was simply missing an “o.” That state of wonder comes through in my original profile, but equally as often it’s buried by my tendency to reach for effect instead of letting Sinéad speak for herself. There are moments when I editorialize horribly, and now resent myself for it. Why, for example, did I describe her lovely smile as “the kind that pious people do so well.” There was nothing pious about Sinead. Reading my profile today I see that I was just glib and callow – the voice of a young journalist trying to prove that he could create a cool, objective distance between himself and his subject.
When Sinéad died on July 26, I found myself wanting to replay our long-ago conversation, to hear it unfiltered by my posturing. It was not easy. I found the microcassette on which I’d recorded the interview, but could not play it. Neither of the two recorders I’d held on to, nor the one donated by a friend, worked any more. I searched on eBay where I found a working machine, but when I slipped in the tape–warped with time and use – it sounded as if we were talking underwater. I was thrown back to a time when I’d spent endless evenings, days, weeks, painfully transcribing cassettes, playing and rewinding them. Forward, back, forward, back. Sometimes they would unspool without warning, and I had to use a pencil to spool them back. Or – worse – the tape would snap, or I’d hit the record button when I meant to hit play, and wipe out a section of conversation. And there were always interviews when I’d be lost in a conversation and forget to keep an eye on the tape. It would reach the send of side A and just pause there until I remembered to turn it over (as in this interview with Sinéad). I do not grieve for the lost age of tape recorders. They are gone, and good riddance.
What joy, though, to hear Sinéad’s voice, her occasional unsteady chuckle, her ample cursing. The interview was tied to the release of her album, Faith and Courage, and much of the conversation veers towards her spiritual life – her relationship to Rastafarianism, to Catholicism, and with the soul. Whatever my own thoughts about religion, I find her unshakeable conviction that death is not the end deeply moving now. “I do believe in life after death, that the soul can go on forever, and can communicate quite well, in fact more intimately often, after we’re dead than when we’re alive,” she says at one point. “We’re quite present, quite contactable, and when we die we become pure compassion, and that’s all there is in the world.”
This interview, recorded on the 31st floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, New York, sometime in the spring of 2000, has been edited from its original length and is the first time it’s presented in Q&A form.
Aaron Hicklin: Do you mind if I just talk while you are eating…
Sinéad O’Connor: No, go on. I speak a bit quietly. You might want to move to the middle of the table, because sometimes people complain they can’t hear…
AH: One of the most galvanizing musical moments of my life was seeing you on television singing “Mandinka.” I loved the anger and fury of that first album. Where did it come from?
SO: I think it was that I really was so angry. Also I grew up in a very musical family with a very broad range from traditional Irish music to opera, right through to John Lenon, Johnny Cash, and the stuff my parents were listening to: Rodgers and Hammerstein, My Fair Lady, Barbra Streisand – people that blew my mind. When I was 11-years old my brother brought home Slow Train Coming, which was Bob Dylan’s Christian album. I’d never heard anything like it. What I loved about him was that he was raging. You could tell about him that it was real. He’d been very private, and never told anyone why he ran away from home at 14, for example. I think that’s what I identified with. And that’s where my own thing came from, in that it was coming from real rage and anger that came from being brought up in abusive circumstances. Singers by nature are people who have to feel everything 10 million times more than anyone else does, or they wouldn’t sing. They feel everything so much that they have to fucking sing about it. It isn’t always that they have to get something off their chest, but it is by nature the fact that they’re singers. It’s this phrase that many are called but few are chosen. Some people just sing, but some people are born singers in every fiber of their being, and they are terribly sensitive people, do you know what I mean? And I’m definitely one of those. I was always very tender, and I still am, but when I was younger I covered that with defenses and came across a lot more angrily than maybe I meant to, or wanted to, but I had to defend myself.
AH: Was there a point when you felt you could stop being defensive?
SO: I think because I was lucky enough to have music and a voice and a place to direct all of this shite, verbally expressing myself to get it out, that meant I could work through it as I grew older… I was 20 when my first record came out, I was 23 when all the shit hit the fan. I’m 33 now, and that, I think, helps as well. You grow in self-confidence. Having expressed early pain you grow away from it, you know? It becomes something very much in the past, you almost feel reborn. You get given a new life. Thirty-three is a quite magical age in a lot of ways, you do go through a symbolic death and rebirth, it’s a weird, freaky thing.
“I was always very tender, and I still am, but when I was younger I covered that with defenses and came across a lot more angrily than maybe I meant to, or wanted to.”
AH: When you look back at who you were in 1988 when The Lion and the Cobra came out, and who you are now, does it feel like looking back on a different you, a different person.
SO: No, very much the same. Remember, I’d just had a baby, and I was a baby too, and I look at myself and see how young I was.
AH: The song “Daddy I’m fine” is deeply autobiographical as well as a paean to your father.
SO: What’s a paean, a tribute or something?
AH: Yeah.
SO: Yeah, yeah, an honoring. The album is also partly dedicated to my father.
AH: It’s also dedicated to Rastas. I admit,I was puzzled by that. Maybe it’s a misconception but the popular image of Rastafarianism is that it’s quite chauvinist.
SO: Equally I’m a Catholic priest, and Catholicism is quite chauvinist, also. But I believe in not throwing the baby out with the bath water. I’m someone who is very like a sponge, but I’m lucky in that I don’t soak up the bullshit. I believe that if you can join those groups, and present yourself as a friend, you can help change their ways of thinking, which is partly why I’m a Catholic priest, but equally I’m a Rasta priest. To me it’s the most rastafarian act to become a Catholic priest, and try to lay yourself down as a bridge between what’s good about the old and traditional and what’s good about the future, and what’s good about all the religions, and what’s bad about them. Equally I’m influenced by Hinduism, I’m influenced by Christinaity, by Judaism, I’m just very interested in the study of religion, but I think God and religion are two separate things, and I’m interested in rescuing God from religion, do you know what I mean. [laughs]. It would be nice to try and pool all the religions together, I know this is a bit ridiculous, but say that building over there was just a place where anyone from any religion could go and worship, there could be billion different types of voices in there, chanting different prayers, or saying different masses or different rituals. I love the idea of that, everyone getting in the same place, but I love the idea of this cacophony of it all blending together in one place.
AH: What does God represent for you, if not a deity?
SO: To me it represents, as I say, good. I think it’s the idea of soul, that there is a universal soul, of which we are a part, therefore God is a part of all of us, which is why I like Rastafarianism or Hinduism, because they respect the magic of religion, that God is in you and me.
AH: Was it cathartic for you when you started to talk about the abuse you received from your mother?
SO: Well, I wasn’t talking about it so much, but singing about it, and writing songs about it. The only reason I started talking about it was because that’s what I was writing songs about. So obviously I wouldn’t advise it for anyone as the only method of recovery [laughs]. You need to go and do your counseling, your therapy, or whatever it is, as well. But certainly, voicing it all out got rid of it.
AH: A week or so before your mother died, you’ve said you almost had a reconciliation.
SO: There’s been a misconception about it, I was never unreconciled with my mother as such. I hadn’t seen her for some time before she died, but I always had a very compassionate relationship to my mother, and understood the idea of separating the sin from the sinner – that I was hurt by what she did but I loved her and understood that she was ill. So it wasn’t a question of reconciling as such, it was simply that we hadn’t seen each other for a while.
AH: Your new music is beautiful, there’s a certain grace to it.
SO: I do think very much what the Billboard review said is very true that for me, the 13 years I’d been making music had been a warming up for making this record, that this is in a way the record I always wanted to make, that if I could have when I was 20, I would have communicated a loving record, but being young at that age you can’t do that. There’s a kind of a rooting that comes with age–a confidence and security about what the fuck it is you are trying to actually say. When you are young you don’t really know. In fact you are only doing it because you want guys to fuck you, do you know what I mean?
“I’m not saying I’m sorry I did what I did. I’m saying I’m sorry that my having to do these things caused pain to people. It’s asking for permission to have a career respected as an artist, and not have all this controversy and chaos overshadow me as an artist.”
AH: A lot has been made of your new album as a kind of apology to America, particularly in the song, “The Lamb’s Book of Life”? Is that what you intended to do?
SO: It’s about humility. I think I learned something over the years, and I almost want to get the word humility tattooed across my fingers, just to be reminded every time I look at my fingers. Say we disagree about something and it pisses you off, if I want to remain in a relationship with you I have to be able to communicate with you and say, ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’ That doesn’t mean I don’t stand by what I did or what I said, but I’m sorry that my action hurt you.’ There’s a difference. I’m not saying I’m sorry I did what I did. I’m saying I’m sorry that my having to do these things caused pain to people. It’s asking for permission to have a career respected as an artist, and not have all this controversy and chaos overshadow me as an artist. But it also very much represents Ireland in America, acknowledging the great help we’ve had politically in Ireland from America in recent years, which is fucking amazing, but acknowledging, too, that we need spiritual help as well. I lived in Atlanta for four months last year and I was really inspired by the Baptist preachers, and again not everything blah de blah is great, but that’s besides the point. I was so impressed by the way they shared the magic of Christianity, and the passion that they had… I would have loved to bring them to Ireland to teach the priests there how to preach, and to inspire the people to believe again in magic. That’s what I think God is – magic. So that’s what the song is about, Ireland in America asking for spiritual help. For example, in Catholicism often the priests are often very uninspiring, they drone a lot, like they’re bored. While they’re reading they’re picking dust off the altar. They turn people off, they don’t attract anyone, or make anyone believe in magic. In fact they hide a lot of the magic, you know. So if some of these guys could come around the world, or stand up and be more prominent in America and let people believe more in magic…
AH: Is your work as a priest more important to you than anything else now, preaching the…?
SO: Well, I don’t believe in preaching or that I have the right to shove anything down anyone’s throat, and I’m not a perfect person by any fucking means. You probably have far more right to preach to me. I’m still at a point of my life when I have a lot of learning to do, and I would rather listen than preach as such, but being a priest is, apart from being a mother, obviously, and they are linked, and being a singer, the most important thing to me ever, and the best thing that ever happened to me, the most magical thing that ever happened to me, and the thing that gave me the most sense of self, that I knew at last what the hell I’d been on about all this time. I would say very much that my music is my priesthood in a lot of ways.
AH: Artistically, how do you see Faith and Courage? It seems to me that it could be a bridge in your career, from where you’ve come to where you are going.
SO: In a lot of ways I see it as my first album. It’s the first real, real Sinéad. And that’s not to say the other things weren’t really me, but all those other things were layers which were on top of this love that I have, basically, which isn’t a romantic love, but a desire to love on a massive scale which a lot of people have, to put a lot of love into the world, or to inspire people to get into relationships with their soul.
AH: You worked with a lot of producers, I particularly like the songs produced by Dave Stewart (of the Eurythmics).
SO: A lot of people dis Dave and they shouldn’t. He was wonderful. That’s the most important thing whether you’re working remotely, on tour, or in a studio, you’ve got to be friends with the people you work with. It’s almost like love-making or being married. That was a wonderful relationship, and Dave is a very mischievous character and that was very good for me. And as I say it is a bit like love-making; it’s so intimate that you have to feel very safe, and he is someone who is very good at making you feel safe, and producers should be like that, and very un-controlling, but also he the kind of guy who is doing ten fucking things at the same time–literally, like phoning me up saying,’Come on, we’ll do ten minutes,’ while he’s rehearsing a band and shooting a commercial for a French fucking TV show and doing an interview for MTV, and also making a load of cards for Christmas on his computer, at the same time as he’s in the middle of writing a song, fucking crazy. He’s really a workaholic in a lot of ways, but he’s a real angel.
[Side one of tape ends… by the time I remember to turn it over, we are in the middle of a conversation about psychology]
AH: Are you a Freud fan?
SO: Well you know the joke about Kentucky Fried Chicken? It’s mother-fucking good. Um, I feel about Freud the way I feel about religion. I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I think there’s an awful lot of bloody bath water. And I think he could have done with seeing a shrink himself… But I think there’s one thing he did say which I think is very true. He said the Irish are the only people who could never be analyzed, and that I admire and respect him for.
AH: But you’ve been analyzed, or you’ve done therapy?
SO: I’ve done therapy, yeah. I couldn’t be analyzed because I’m Irish – that would be impossible. [Laughs].
I don’t believe in gay or straight. I could fall in over with a pink, dotty piece of whatever. I believe you fall in love with the spirit of someone.
AH: Are there things that came out of that therapy that you had never revealed to anyone?
SO: Well, I guess not, because I’m not inclined to believe in shame, and I think often the only reason people don’t reveal things is because they feel ashamed. I’m a pretty honest person, and I’m pretty much revealed through my music or other things, older and done, you know. But people, I think, often have misconceptions about therapy, because you don’t spend all your time in therapy talking about abuse or all the shitty things that have happened; what in fact you do is deal with the present and you learn to have a relationship, because the terrible effect of being a survivor of abuse is that you don’t know how to conduct normal relationship so when you are in a therapeutic relationship you are not talking out the past all the time, you are really learning how to conduct a relationship.
AH: You’ve learned that?
SO: Yeah, I’ve learned to know what I want from relationships and what I don’t want.
AH: Was it hard for a long time to know what you wanted?
SO: Yeah, being young because obviously the world brings us up to want particular things, you know, what you should want, that you should want to be a wife or a girlfriend or a secretary, or a philosopher, do you know what I mean?
AH: You said that as a child you fought your sexuality. You’ve recently come out as a lesbian. Are those two things related?
SO: To be honest I don’t believe in gay or straight. Normally I wouldn’t talk about this stuff in public because it attracts a lot of attention, but what happened was that a fan interviewed me in Ireland and asked me directly if I was attracted to women. I said I was, but that I am more often as attracted to men. This hurt some women who I had gone out with. So I then decided to clarify that I don’t believe in gay or straight, and that I am neither gay or straight. I could fall in over with a pink, dotty piece of whatever. I believe you fall in love with the spirit of someone. But then Curve magazine put out a press release and made it seem like a great coming out, which it really wasn’t. They said to me, ‘Why did I think lesbians liked me,’ and I said, ‘Well because I’m one of them,’ meaning that I’m bisexual, if you like, although I hate labels, but I kind of overcompensated in some ways because my fans were upset, but equally I don’t want to act like I have any shame about anything, because I don’t. Let me be very clear: I prefer having sex with women, I prefer making love with women, I find that sexier. I’m more suited to going out with women. However I’m celibate and choose to be celibate. I have gone out with men and find men sexy as well, so if it comes down to the bottom line, I prefer making love with women, but that doesn’t mean I am gay or straight, it doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t go out with a man. What I actually am is celibate.
AH: You said you were inspired by singers like Chrissie Hynde and Annie Lennox… very strong women.
SO: And equally other Irish women, there’s one called Twink and you wouldn’t believe I liked her. She’s a pantomime performer and she is hugely inspiring because she wore lipstick and she was very sexy, which is rare for Irish female artists.
“With Alanis I know, because her record company told me, and Madonna told me, that they sent her home with The Lion and the Cobra and said, ‘Do that,’ basically. So I know it’s fake rage, really.”
AH: I have to say that in your turn, without Sinéad there wouldn’t be Alanis… only you could come first.
SO: I don’t think I was the first something at all, but I think there were a lot of imitators that came after me, people with fake rage, whose rage was not real, apart from Dolores O’Riordan, of The Cranberries. But with Alanis I know, because her record company told me, and Madonna told me, that they sent her home with The Lion and the Cobra and said, ‘Do that,’ basically. So I know it’s fake rage, really. I think after me came a lot of fake ragers. But it wouldn’t be true to say I was the first angry woman, because before me there was Janis Joplin, there was Patti Smith, there was zillions – back to the age of Billie Holiday, all these fucking women who had to go in the back door of places to work because the audiences were white, all this kind of shit.
AH: What other albums do you think are important to you?
SO: Well, Slow Train Coming, Straight Outta Compton, Astral Weeks.
AH: Is Faith and Courage your Astral Weeks?
SO: In a lot of ways, I suppose, maybe, but I don’t want people to think I’m trying to imitate Van, which I’m not, but he’s a huge inspiration to me, obviously. A master. I look at Bob Dylan, I look at Van, I see the journey they were taking but I don’t see it ending in happiness. My want and desire is to take on what I can learn from them but really bring it into joy, and really shine a light on the place of joy. I wouldn’t be trying to imitate him, but I’d be trying to take from him and people like Bob Marley, the kind of priesthood of what they were trying to do, and really carry it on, further into joy.
AH: You see music in a way as a kind of true religion or a church.
SO: Yeah, it’s the only way in this world in which the soul is manifested or acknowledged–even religion doesn’t talk about soul much, movies don’t talk about soul. Music is the only thing that really speaks to people’s soul. It goes straight to your soul. It’s probably the only way in this world that the soul is made real.
AH: You talk in “The Healing Room,” of having a universe inside you. What is the healing room for you?
SO: I’ve been involved since 18, on and off, in the area of psychic studies which I kind of intensified over the last three years, observing the training of mediums, and then later training as a medium myself, although we now call them sensitives, just studying the whole idea of the psychic, and that introduced me to this idea of soul. As I say, this idea that there is so much fucking more going on in this world than meets the eye. Part of the training as mediums is learning to go inside yourself and do guided meditations, you learn how to shut down and quieten down, and the song is really about those guided meditations and it becomes a guided meditation, the song in a lot of ways, so the song talks about going inside, and learning to discover what goes on inside your soul. Like the fact that dogs can hear things that we can’t hear, noises we don’t detect, that proves that there is so much more going on than we as human beings can begin to understand.
I do believe in life after death, that the soul can go on forever, and can communicate quite well, in fact more intimately, often after we’re dead than when we’re alive.
AH: You believe in a world inhabited by spirits and ghosts.
SO: Yeah, I don’t believe in bad spirits, I don’t believe there’s any such thing, I think people have seen too many horror movies, I believe there’s only pure compassion. I do believe in life after death, that the soul can go on forever, and can communicate quite well, in fact more intimately, often after we’re dead than when we’re alive. We’re quite present, quite contactable, and when we die we become pure compassion, and that’s all there is in the world, but being human is a test. That song is about the excitement of what goes when you go on a guided meditation – they guide you through this healing room. And they say, ‘OK, these healers will come to help you,’ and every person sees their healers in different ways. You might see yours as little spotty creatures. One woman in my class saw hers as being fucking Tinky Winky. Everyone has their own way of communicating. Mine were these lovely creatures, almost lines of light.
AH: Have you tried communicating with your mother?
SO: When I was younger, that’s how I got into the area of psychic studies in the first palace, because my mother died when I was 17 and then a lot of weird shit began to happen to me, like if I was sitting here talking to you I’d suddenly get pictures and I’d be able to see the inside of your house and could describe to you the entire inside of your house, where you keep your private letters. And I couldn’t understand why this shit was happening to me. I definitely got through to my mother with various different mediums, but equally working as a medium and being able to communicate with someone who has passed on is an amazing joy. So actually my mother gave me that great gift of bringing me into the area of psychic studies.
AH: Do you often wish she was still around?
SO: She is [laughs]. And she’s a lot happier. But yeah, of course I do, everyone misses their mother. I know a man in Ireland called Brendan Kennelly, a hugely famous poet in Ireland, and he’s 65 or 66 years of age and he cries every day for his mother. Nobody who has lost their mother or father doesn’t miss them every day of their life.
AH: Do you cry a lot?
SO: Oh yeah, an obscene amount [laughs]. I don’t cry over my mother a lot, as such. I’ve kind of grown through that. Sometimes when I go through airports and I see little things like thimbles with roses on them that I’d really like to send her, but instead what I do is send them to my sister so that’s kind of nice.
AH: Do you miss your children?
SO: Yeah, the last few days I have. In fact this morning I had a cry, and it was the first time I cried in weeks, but I’m going home today to see them. I have a ten day limit with my kids. I can go for ten days, and then bang on ten days a pain in the heart comes in.
AH: Have you brought them presents?
SO: Yeah. My son is too old for toys, he’s into basketball, and he likes to dress up as a gangster, and Roisin, my daughter, is into the Powerpuff Girls, so I’m wandering around with this little Powerpuff Girls suitcase for her.
AH: So your son is at an age where you talk to him as an adult?
SO: Absolutely. It’s really wonderful for both of us – he’s really, in the last three weeks, got to the age where he’s that much bigger than me, like half an inch, and he walks around with his arm around my shoulder, and I’m pushing the baby, and it’s the nicest feeling in the world to have your big son protect you like that. He’s about to be 13 in July. But it is now lovely to be able to talk to him as an adult. He feels free enough that he can curse around me or play these records he likes, that I can’t bear, like flippin’ Eminem, that kind of thing.
AH: You don’t like Eminem?
SO: Well I have compassion for him because he’s had terrible suffering and I think that’s where all these guys are coming from.. They don’t really know what the fuck it is they are really angry at – they can’t bear to face it. What they are really angry at is inside not outside. But anyway, Jake’s very relaxed, and down to talk about anything. We ring each other up and use all the insults from South Park at each other – ass-ramming, unclefucker, shitface and cocksucker, it’s great to have that kind of relationship with your son. That’s obviously one of the benefits of having children when you’re young.” Kids are very different now – when we were kids we were quite frightened, really, all of us. It’s very different now, kids are allowed to make decisions at 13 years of age, or be a lot more expressive and open than we would have been. That’s because parents of our age in their late 20s and early 30s have decided they’ll allow their children more freedom than they had.
AH: I was amazed when I was back in Britain to see all these 12-year-olds with their own cellphones.
SO: I think that’s crazy because it exposes the child to being mugged, but in Ireland also, it’s the height of spoiled-ness to give a child a TV in the bedroom. You never give a kid a TV in the fucking bedroom, no way–even now in Ireland, that would be the height of Little Lord Fucking Fauntleroy. They can watch any shit, you know. Luckily my son tells me, but the stuff they’re watching and the stuff that gets sent to them, like porn sites without the kids even asking for them. There’s a site that my son showed me called Assassins, where you can go on and kill famous people, you can blow up Britney Spears, this kind of shit. And it’s not funny. And they have the culling of baby seals, the same fucking site. You can kill Barney, which I think is OK, because he doesn’t really exist.
AH: Do you think that games like that can create violent reactions in children?.
SO: I think they can, obviously. Look what’s happening in America – the kids are fucking killing each other. Kids are shooting each other. Like, what is it going to take. I couldn’t believe when I was putting Jake into school in Atlanta, in both of the fucking schools I had to fill in forms to swear that they had never been done for rape or grievous bodily harm or armed robbery… I couldn’t fucking believe it. That’s the thing. If I was president I would be declaring a fucking state of emergency. What is it actually going to take? How many kids have shot each other? The thing about games is terribly important because in those games when you shoot someone there’s no consequence, there’s no blood, there’s no pain, do you know what I mean. And I think that’s what the ies then grow up with, they think there are no consequences, they are brought up not to associate these things with feelings, or think that this could affect another person or their family. They think it is a fucking game. Kids live in a magical world, they don’t live in a grown-up world where everything is rational.
AH: Do you protect your children from that, or try to?
SO: I can’t. I try to, and I’ll never let violent video games into the house. That’s the one thing that I am strict about because I grew up with violence andI know that violence is not a game, but I can’t control what my son watches, which I hate. But I’m strict about video games.’ I’m sorry, and I know this is controversial, but I do think one of the problems is that they took away this idea of prayer at school. I actually think they should have a moment at the beginning of each day where each child can, whether they believe in God or not, have a moment to themselves, communicate with their soul, and the idea of soul and spirit and compassion.
AH: Are you anti-drugs?
SO: I’m anti drugs that can kill people – I’m anti the use of cocaine and heroin particularly, and ecstasy, drugs which kill people, but I’m a weed head, I don’t have any problem with drugs that are not going to kill people.
AH: Have you taken hard drugs?
SO: No, never. I’ve taken some drugs once or twice, like I’ve done coke twice, didn’t really like it. First time I quite liked it, second time I hated it, have done ecstasy twice, fucking hated it, it was horrible. I love acid, I could live on acid happily. I’ve done that about seven times in my life and love it, but I’m not addicted by nature when it comes to that shit.
[Tape cuts off]
