Night Beat (52 page)

A FEW MINUTES later, O’Connor arrives at her home in North London. It is a medium-sized, two-story cottage-style house, nestled into a side street of similar residences, just a stone’s throw from an ancient-looking graveyard. “I
like
dead people,” says O’Connor, when asked if she ever minds the proximity. “I find it comforting to have them close by.”

Inside, O’Connor’s home is strewn with careworn toys and a few stray strands of Christmas lights, left over from the holidays. In the smallish living room, she turns on some heat, takes off her leather jacket, grabs some cigarettes and a lighter from beside a portable cassette boom box—the house’s main stereo—and settles down in the corner of a weather-beaten sofa. A gray cat patiently watches O’Connor’s moves, and then leaps onto the sofa and curls into a contented ball beside the singer. There is nothing in this scene of domestic modesty that would tell you that you are visiting in the home of what one critic has called “the decade’s first new superstar,” and apparently, O’Connor likes it that way.

“I
never
think of myself as Sinéad O’Connor,
rock star,
she says with a bashful smile. She picks a Silk Cut cigarette from her pack and lights it, and thinks quietly for a moment. “The truth is,” she continues, “music doesn’t really play a huge part in my life. I know it seems that way at the moment, because I’m just putting an album out, and of course, that means a lot to me. But the most important part of my life
isn’t
the album: It’s the experiences that are written about in the album. To me, these records are like a chronological listing of every phase I’ve been through in my life. They’re simply an accumulation of everything I’ve experienced. And it’s those experiences—not the music—that have made me happy or pissed me off.”

For O’Connor, many of her experiences have been harsh from the start. She was born the third of four children to John and Marie O’Connor, a young Catholic couple living in the Glenageary section of Dublin, Ireland. John, an engineer, and Marie, a former dressmaker, had married young, and by the time Sinéad came along, the relationship had already turned sour. It was a tense, sometimes brutal home life, and the violence was occasionally carried over to the children—particularly the two daughters with whom Marie had a strained relationship. “A child always thinks that it’s
their
fault that these things happen,” says Sinéad. “I was extremely fucked up about that for a long time. Between the family situation and the Catholicism, I developed a real capacity for guilt.”

One thing the family shared good feelings about was music. Marie O’Connor had sung Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in her youth, and she encouraged her children to explore their vocal talents. “Sinéad, in particular, had a good musical ear,” says John O’Connor. “The first time she cut a record, I had her out for a walk one Saturday, up in the Dublin mountains, and I had a business Dictaphone along. It was never meant for singing, but Sinéad sang so pretty and nice this one time that I kept it on the tape. It’s interesting to hear how true Sinéad’s voice was, even at that stage. She could hit a note on the head and hold it for fifteen seconds or so—just like she can today.”

To Sinéad, though, singing was more a release than a pleasure. “I remember when I was very young,” she says, “I’d go out for walks and I’d sort of be making little songs up. I think I was just so fucked up that I wanted to make noises or something—like shout and scream about the whole thing. I suppose that’s how it started. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a singer: It was just that I could actually
express
the pain that I felt with my voice, because I didn’t have the facilities to express it in any other way. It was just all bubbling up in there and it had to come out.”

In 1975, when Sinéad was eight, John and Marie O’Connor separated (divorce was not allowed by Irish laws). For the first few years, Sinéad lived mostly with her mother. Though Marie was
“extremely
strict,” Sinéad felt sorry for her, and also felt guilty for preferring the protection and freedom that her father’s home offered. By the time she was thirteen, O’Connor found life with Marie too grim and repressive, and she settled into her father’s. “I think I took everything out on him,” she says. “I’d just come out of years of being severely abused. Suddenly I had all this freedom, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Sinéad began cutting classes, sometimes spending entire school weeks holed up in Dublin’s bowling alleys, playing video games. She also began stealing—first lifting money from her father, then from strangers, then eventually shoplifting clothes, perfume, and shoes from local shops. “Any book that you read on child psychology,” says Sinéad, “will tell you that you can’t take a child who’s been in a violent or psychologically intense situation for years and expect it to be able to cope with normal life. I wasn’t
used
to life being normal. I was used to it being melodramatic and awful.”

Eventually, Sinéad got caught shoplifting—in fact, she got caught a few times. By this time, John O’Connor had tired of working as an engineer and had taken up the practice of law—and he understood that his daughter might be headed for serious legal trouble. “She had good bloody reason to be unhappy with her home life,” he says, “though maybe it’s my own feeling of guilt, my failure to do what was right for the kids at the time, that is speaking here. Anyway, Sinéad never did anything seriously wrong—she wasn’t a sex fiend or a dope fiend. But after she got caught nicking a pair of shoes in a shop in downtown Dublin, there was a fear that she was getting wayward.”

In the early eighties, Sinéad’s father sent her to Sion Hill in Blackrock—a school for girls with behavioral problems, run by Dominican nuns—and then to a succession of boarding schools that included Mayfield College in Drumcondra, and Newtown School in Waterford. “I sent her to these places,” he says, “because I couldn’t handle the problem any other way. She was resentful, but she also knew that she needed help. And she
did
go through a tremendous change pattern while she was in Waterford. That kid came out of that school and she never looked back insofar as moral integrity is concerned. She’s now absolutely and fiercely honest, and she wasn’t when she went into that school.”

For Sinéad, though, it was a hard stretch. “Being sent off,” she says, “just refueled the whole thing about being a bad person. Also, I had few friends at these schools. I didn’t know how to tell people, “I’m not nasty and horrible and unfriendly. I’m just fucked up.’ I’d been through a whole lot of shit that they could never understand in a million years, these people from fucking great happy families. They had no understanding of what life was like for other people. So, I didn’t enjoy it at all. I was extremely withdrawn and slouched over. I thought I was mental.”

It was during her tenure in the boarding schools that Sinéad moved closer to music, spending evenings in her room, playing guitar and gradually writing some of the songs that would end up on
The Lion and the Cobra.
In 1982, a teacher at Mayfield asked the fifteen-year-old O’Connor to sing at her wedding. O’Connor sang Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen,” and her full-throated delivery caught the ear of Paul Byrne, the bride’s brother, who was also the drummer for In Tua Nua, an Irish band with ties to U2. The two struck up a friendship, and later, O’Connor co-wrote In Tua Nua’s first single, “Take My Hand.” For a time, there was talk of her touring with the band, but her father insisted she stay in school. However, Sinéad’s brush with recording had enlivened her, and with another friend, Jeremy Maber, she began singing in a folk duo around Waterford’s coffeehouses and pubs, where she became known for haunting and unusual originals like “Never Get Old” and “Drink before the War,” and for her forceful covers of Bob Dylan songs, like “Simple Twist of Fate” and “One More Cup of Coffee.”

“Whatever depth and intensity was inside me,” says O’Connor, “it was coming out in my music. I didn’t know whether it was mystical or religious or what, but it was as if I was pulling a big rope out of the middle of me—a rope that had been there since before I was born.”

By the next year, O’Connor had decided it was time to leave school and become a professional singer, but her father refused. “And then,” he says, “she made the most determined statement she ever made about a professional career in music: She simply walked out of the school, saying nothing to anyone, and disappeared. She was only sixteen, and I was up a wall. I didn’t know
where
she was. When she came home, it was plain that she had made up her mind. So we sent her to the College of Music in Dublin. She had this big booming voice, and I was hoping that she would get some classical education in singing so as not to damage the vocal cords. She also studied piano. She’s
not
a naive composer. She knows where she is in music.”

Then, in early 1985, Marie O’Connor was killed in a car wreck. It had been almost two years since Sinéad had seen her mother, and at the time of the death, their relationship was unreconciled. “I was completely and utterly destroyed,” she says. “I felt that we had never really
had
a relationship. But looking back, I know that my mother knew I loved her very much, and I know that she loved me. More than anything, I just felt sorry for her. Her life had been such misery, and as a result,
our
lives had been misery. It just must have been hell for her. She had lost her career when she got married, she’d had baby after baby, and I don’t think she ever had time in all those years to figure herself out, like I’ve had since leaving Ireland.

“More than anything, I think she is the reason why I sing.”

BY 1985, GALVANIZED by the international success of Irish heroes U2, Dublin had become something of a hotbed for aspiring rock and folk acts. In the early part of the year, Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill, the director and manager of London’s Ensign Records (and early supporters of Ireland’s Thin Lizzy and Boomtown Rats), paid a visit to Dublin, auditioning area bands at a local rehearsal studio. Nothing much caught their attention until the last group on their list—Ton Ton Macoute, who had acquired some acclaim for their new lead singer.

“At first,” says Chris Hill, “they looked like another godawful pub rock band. Then Sinéad walked in. She had thick black hair and she was
so
pretty, though she wasn’t made up to look pretty. I mean, she looked scruffy, dressed in a baggy jersey, and staring at the floor. Then she sang. The songs were dreadful, but her voice was incredible. It ranged from this kind of pure little folk voice to a banshee wail, like something from the depths of somewhere. Yet she was
so
self-conscious. If she could have crawled into the corner and sang with her back to us, she would have. We thought, ’This girl’s got a
remarkable
voice. Pity it’s such a dreadful band with no songs.’ At the end, Nigel said to her, ’What you’re doing now isn’t right for us, but if you feel you hit on something, get in touch.’ The usual thing.”

Six weeks later, back in London, Nigel Grainge got a letter from Sinéad. “Dear Nigel,” she wrote, “I’ve left the band. I’m writing my own songs. You
did
say you would be interested in recording some demos of my stuff, so when I finish the songs, will you do it?” Grainge had made no such promise, but he was impressed by O’Connor’s sly ambition and sent her an airplane ticket. Two weeks later, when O’Connor arrived, Grainge had forgotten about her impending visit. Flustered, he called Karl Wallinger, who had just left the Waterboys to form World Party, and asked him to help the young Irish singer through her demos. That night, when Grainge visited the session, Wallinger met him at the door with a smile. “I think you’re gonna get a real surprise here,” he told Grainge. As Grainge walked in, O’Connor was in the middle of taping her last song, “Troy”—a mesmeric account of sexual need and romantic betrayal. Grainge was riveted. “We
never
sign anybody,” he says. “We’re as choosy as can be.” But on the basis of the demos with Wallinger, Grainge signed Sinéad O’Connor to Ensign. “Her performances,” he says, “were absolutely devastating.”

Within days, news of O’Connor’s signing spread through the Dublin scene. According to some sources, U2’s Bono was so impressed by the demos that he offered to help Sinéad find a better deal with a bigger label. O’Connor insisted on sticking with Ensign, though she later agreed to collaborate with the Edge on “Heroine,” a song for the guitarist’s 1986 soundtrack LP,
Captive.

Shortly, O’Connor had moved to London and started work on the material for her first album. It should have been a heady time, but at first O’Connor found it isolating. “She was clearly very lonely,” says Grainge. “She spent a lot of time hanging around the office, making tea, and answering phones. Our big charge was to play her records. The first time we ever heard her, we said, ’You sound like Grace Slick.’ She said, ’Grace
who?’
Another time, I asked, ’How much Aretha Franklin have you ever heard?’ And she said, ’I don’t know—who’s Aretha Franklin?’ ”

“To get someone that early in their development was remarkable,” says Chris Hill. “I asked her once, ’Where do you think you fit in musically?’ And she said, ’Well, somewhere between Kate Bush and Madonna. I’m not sure where.’ And we thought,
’That
covers every fucking angle, right?’ ”