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Sinéad O’Connor never wanted to be a pop star. A waif-like warrior with a mesmerising voice, the shaven-headed Irish singer, who has died aged 56, wanted to be like Bob Dylan — “not just an entertainer, but an activist”.
The image of her ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on US television show Saturday Night Live in 1992 confirmed her hallmark refusal to compromise her beliefs, and endeared her to a nation stifled by religious repression.
The act was a protest at the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church in Ireland, by a self-confessed “troubled soul” who suffered violence and neglect at home and was sent as a teenage tearaway to a Catholic institution which ran an infamous Magdalene laundry for so-called fallen women.
“Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I’m a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest,” O’Connor wrote in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings.
Ireland was stunned when the news broke on Wednesday of the singer’s death. A radio programme aired on national broadcaster RTÉ shortly after the announcement felt like a wake, as the country revelled in songs from her 10 albums that spanned a variety of genres, from the cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” that launched her as a star, to her own material, traditional Irish ballads and reggae.
Born in an affluent suburb south of Dublin on December 8 1966, O’Connor was the third of four children; her father later had another son and she had three stepsisters. Her childhood, marred by her parents’ separation, was turbulent. She recalled being beaten by her mother, locked in her room with no food and even being put in the passenger seat of a car while her mother deliberately smashed into an oncoming car. When she was young, she would knock on neighbours’ doors asking if she could be their child.
Angry and “not a nice person” during her teenage years, O’Connor wrote that she was “addicted to stealing”, even selling flowers to her neighbours that she had pilfered from their gardens.
She was sent to An Grianán Training Centre — “what is politely called a rehabilitation centre for girls with behavioural problems” — at 13, but left two years later to go to a boarding school. The poetry of WB Yeats inspired her to write songs and aged 16, she ended up running away from education to pursue music.
An advert in Ireland’s music magazine Hot Press led to a stint with the group Ton Ton Macoute, a move to England at 18 — months after her mother died in a car crash — and a record deal.
O’Connor said that aged 19, she shaved her head to defy the record label’s desire for a more feminine look. Soon after, she gave birth to the first of her four children and her acclaimed first album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released.
But even after the runaway success of “Nothing Compares 2 U”, which O’Connor recorded for her second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, she felt hollow. “I couldn’t understand why anybody liked my songs or why anybody clapped or thought they were good,” she wrote. “I really had no self-esteem when it came to songs or anything else.”
The award-winning artist’s papal controversy was preceded by her refusal in 1990 to allow the US national anthem to be played before a show. Both decisions provoked a public outcry. She was booed and jeered at a Madison Square Garden tribute to Dylan weeks after ripping up the Pope’s photograph, and protesters crushed her recordings with a steamroller.
“A lot of people say or think that tearing up the Pope’s photo derailed my career . . . I feel that having a number one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track,” she recalled in her memoir.
Even posthumously, her career is set to continue. A longtime friend, BP Fallon, told RTÉ on Wednesday, hours after the news of her death broke, that a “fantastic” new album by O’Connor is “waiting to come out”.
Fans loved the artist’s integrity, as evidenced by the tributes that have poured in from all corners of the globe. Irish president Michael D Higgins praised her “authenticity” and “fearless commitment to the important issues she brought to public attention, no matter how uncomfortable those truths may have been”.
Live performances and her children were O’Connor’s enduring passions. One of her last tweets, on July 17, recalled her son Shane, who died by suicide last year aged 17. “Been living as undead night creature since,” she wrote.
The singer had long battled mental health problems, attempting suicide on her 33rd birthday and suffering, in her words, “a total breakdown” in 2015.
Besides child abuse in the church, the singer also spoke up for the rights of women and immigrants. A deeply spiritual person who explored Rastafarianism, she converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat. “I hope that if there’s a heaven, I qualify,” she wrote in her memoir.
Irish president Higgins spoke for many when he ended his own tribute: “May her spirit find the peace she sought in so many different ways.”
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