Opinion
When I met Sinead O’Connor, she looked like a monk who smoked Marlboro Lights
Julia Baird
Journalist, broadcaster, historian and authorFearless and fragile, she trod on the lion and the cobra. There was so much to love about Sinead O’Connor: her astonishing voice, her defiance, her ferocious independence, her candour, her denunciation of the abuse of children and abuse of power, but I think one of my favourite things was the way she mixed the sacred and the profane, raw sexuality with an assertive, singular spirituality.
Take the songs on her album Faith and Courage. Her declaration, in No Man’s Woman, that she is sick of “mantrolling” and doesn’t want to be the property of any man, swings to an insistence that she doesn’t need one anyway because she has a faith – “a lovin’ man but he’s a spirit.”
She looked like a monk who smoked Marlboro Lights.Credit: AP
Then, in Daddy I’m Fine, she sings of growing up in Dublin, being transfixed by the first guitar she heard, and deciding she wants to be a “big star” with slicked back hair and black leather boots, standing up tall with her “boobs upright”, “I get sexy underneath the lights/ Like I wanna f--- every man in sight.”
This is what I was struck by when I met her in Sydney two decades ago. Then 33, she was known as Sinead Mother Bernadette Maria O’Connor, archdeacon in the Order of Mater Dei. Here to promote Faith and Courage, she was funny and tiny, preternaturally beautiful with those massive eyes, and so quietly spoken it was as though she was mumbling. She looked like a monk, with her shaved head, little round glasses and a black Chinese silk jacket; a monk who smoked a series of Marlboro Lights and laughed about how her then 13-year-old son Jake liked Daddy I’m Fine because he loved hearing his mother curse. He’d bounce on the bed, she said, and say: “f---, f---, f---, f---, f---.”
I loved her. All my friends did, blasting her tunes even louder as she was denounced as a mad, angry feral woman, a “she-devil” in the British press and worse in the American. Just a few years older than us, she was like a talisman of our collective, righteous anger – she said what few dared to, and she embodied the spirit of nineties feminism, flipping the bird to grooming, compliance and playing nice. My best mate shaved her head, and we all stomped about in Doc Martens as people told us we’d be so much prettier if we smiled, that people are wooed with honey not vinegar, that femininity is a salve.
As Michelle Griffin wrote, Sinead was the “anti-Barbie”.
For centuries, women have been pressured to soothe egos, and calm waters, to assure people everything is OK when everything is, clearly, not OK. In Barbieland, everything is sweet – women can be presidents and occupy every seat on the Supreme Court. Except, can they really? You’d imagine the more we adhere to the “girlboss” fantasy the less alive we will become to the steady erosion of our reproductive rights, for example.
The catch-cry in Ireland now is: Sinead was right. She was right when she tried to draw global attention to the abuse of children in the Catholic Church, years before the extent of it came to light, by tearing up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Which was the greater offence: ripping up a picture or protecting predatorial paedophiles on a mass scale? Which did the credibility of the church the greater damage?
Her punishment was swift and savage, and became a protracted spectacle. Women who challenge religious hierarchies, and lay a claim to any kind of spiritual authority, are often cast as wounded witches, or mad bitches. Men speak on behalf of God; women hear voices.
Sinead was a rare breed: a woman who publicly and unapologetically challenged the church and its abuse of children, its derogation of women, and yet retained a faith, which took myriad, fascinating forms: Paganism, Hinduism, Rastafarianism, Coptic Christianity, Islam, all forms of what she called “magic”.
When she said she felt a call to the priesthood on a television show, a rebel Irish bishop ordained her in Lourdes. There was no sitting around and waiting for the hierarchy to give her permission. She told me when I interviewed her: “Wake and smell the coffee, girls ... You don’t have to take no for an answer.”
She wanted to rescue God from the church; she sang of healing and compassion and spoke for the voiceless. She was open, vulnerable, and often anguished. She suffered. She refused to pretend. She wrought beauty from ugliness.
As Magda Szubanski tweeted yesterday, in many ways Sinead seemed like “one of us”, or would be if we “had more genius and damage boiling in our blood”, if we weren’t afraid of power, “if we were willing to lose it all for the sake of the truth.”
She was what so few can claim to be: original.
Rest in peace, Sinead: you sang of it, you gave it to others, you deserve it.
Julia Baird is a journalist and author. She hosts The Drum on ABC TV. Her latest book is Phosphorescence: on awe, wonder and things that sustain you when the world goes dark.
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