Sinéad O’Connor had always been a multi-piece jigsaw. Once she got the time, for she never seemed to have it, she needed to lay the pieces out on the floor and see if she could make any sense of them
therapist, asked Sinéad O’Connor to show him a picture of the life she hoped for in future. She held out a sketch of a spiky-haired woman in trousers and a stars-and-stripes top, singing into a microphone. He asked her to sign it, and she did: Magda Davitt. To his nonplussed look, she explained hastily that Sinéad O’Connor had gone. She didn’t want to be that person any more.
To begin, she was resigned to girlhood, but wanted to look like a boy. When her first album, “The Lion and the Cobra” came out in 1987, a squarer-than-square exec told her she should wear short skirts with boots, necklaces and bracelets, and grow her hair long. Immediately she went to a barbershop and had it all shaved off. The barber cried, but she looked in the mirror and saw, without her hair, herself. Ever after she was either close-cropped, or completely shaved.
She found world fame in London. It rested essentially on one song, her cover in 1990 of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2U”, which she sang on video with a face as pale as death. The song topped almost every chart, and she was a star. But she never wanted to be. Pop stars had to be good girls. She was a handful, a troublemaker. They lived in a sort of prison; she needed to be free. She was just a troubled soul who needed to scream into mikes now and then.
Abuse was something she knew plenty about. Her mother, an alcoholic, hadn’t wanted a daughter. So she had made her lie on the floor, arms and legs apart, and stamped on her to try to burst her womb. She made her say “I am nothing, I am nothing”, over and over. Sinéad’s job was to clean the house. If so much as a lampshade was crooked, the shit was beaten out of her, usually with a hockey stick. She recorded the tortures in her songs; they were her only therapy.
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