SINEAD

ADAPTED FROM A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK 'SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM", PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND BOOKS

Sinéad O’Connor’s death yesterday was yet another reminder of how often child abuse litters the background of great music artists.

Blunt, uncensored, passionate, cool, hyper and unstoppable - solid as a rock yet completely unstable - Sinéad was the only artist I ever managed who gave me a Christmas present and the only one where my management ended in a legal dispute.

The sound of her voice was not just the sound of her childhood pain but also the sound of Ireland’s pain. Confronting her country’s history of oppression was her passion. Her friends were mostly people who shared it with her.

In the dressing room after a gig in Dubai her phone rang. She didn’t want to answer it so she handed it to me.

‘Can I talk to Sinéad?’

 ‘Who is it?’

‘Gerry Adams.’

It didn’t seem strange, even slightly, to be talking to the head of the IRA. He was simply one of Sinéad’s long-time friends, as you’d expect. And she didn’t give him any special courtesy either. Just took the phone from me and told him, ‘Sorry, Gerry - can’t talk now.’ Then clicked off.

As a child Sinéad was abused by her mother. When she told me about it, it was shocking; when she wrote it in her memoir, it was beyond shocking. Aged 10, she’d be thrown to the floor and kicked, mostly in the groin, often till it bled. When her mother grew tired of kicking her, Sinéad would pull herself up and set the table for tea. Then cry alone in the garden.

Eventually, she found life so unbearable she went knocking on people’s front doors. When they answered she asked, ‘Can I be your child?’

They were nice and brought her home and her mother acted normally. When they left, Sinéad found herself pushed against the wall, her mother’s knee in her stomach.

Yet when her mother died, Sinéad was devastated. And stayed that way forever.

The first time I heard her sing live, I found the sound of her voice overwhelming, almost blood-curdling.  It contained all the pain of her childhood yet instead of sounding wretched, it sounded glorious. And she could sing sweetly too, which wasn’t surprising when you knew her father’s favourite records were mostly Frank Sinatra.

But annoyingly for Sinéad, her biggest claim to fame came not from her singing but from the evening she was on Saturday Night Live in 1992. She carried a picture of the Pope onto the set and after an a capella performance of Bob Marley’s ‘War’ she tore it in half, then in quarters, and scattered the bits into the lens. It wrecked her career.

It’s not that the music industry has any moral qualms, it cares only about sales. But her actions killed them. Over the following twenty years she slowly built back a career as a serious artist, singing and writing her own songs and performing to crowds who liked her political stance. But the industry still remained wary of her. When people knew I’d become her manager they said they hoped I’d be able to stabilise her, get her back on track, pull her away from her own worst instincts.

What they didn’t know was that I thought her behaviour on Saturday Night Live was brilliant. It reminded me of my own compulsively confrontational behaviour at school, upsetting authority anywhere and anytime I could. Tearing up a picture of the Pope may not have made Sinéad a superstar in the music business’s eyes but it certainly made her one in mine.

During the time I managed her she got involved in no such wonderful fights, but she was still a magnet for problems. She had a massive following on Facebook, fervent supporters in their hundreds of thousands. She’d wind them up to agree with her. Then anytime she argued with someone, she’d launch them against that person. It was powerful and dangerous. She was trying to right the wrongs of two hundred years of Irish history and fifty years of her own life. She was always near the edge, but it was the edginess that made her so attractive.

In Sydney, after a gig at the Opera House, a happy dinner with her musicians went awry when we started discussing coffee. How did we take it? How many cups a day? Did we need it to wake up in the morning?

For some reason something snapped in Sinéad’s mind. For ten minutes there was unabated fury. Then we got her back again. No one knew why.

A year later, things went completely wrong when she needed a hysterectomy. She opted to have it the old-fashioned way, by knife rather than laser, and it left her in a bad way both physically and mentally. For two years she was in and out of hospitals receiving psychiatric treatment, frequently posting suicide notes to her Facebook page. But she recovered remarkably when she discovered Islam.

At different times since she’d torn up the Pope’s picture, Sinéad had renounced Catholicism, become a Rastafarian, turned to Judaism, then entered the Christian priesthood as an Independent Catholic, singing at gigs with her priest’s cross around her neck.

Her religious fixations were understandable. If you find no one you can trust in childhood, then continue to find no one to trust in adult relationships, it’s not surprising that your search for trust turns to ideas rather than people. In Sinéad’s case, religious ideas.

I have no sympathy for religions, but I have every sympathy for people who need them and benefit from them. Islam got Sinéad singing again, which is more than any medication did.

But now we’ll never hear that heart-stopping voice again

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