OBITUARY
SinĂ©ad OâConnor, Irish musician, dies aged 56
SinĂ©ad OâConnor, the Irish musician, has died at the age of 56.
OâConnor achieved international fame in 1990 with the release of her hit single Nothing Compares 2 U, and international noteriety two years later when she ripped up a picture of the Pope on live television.
The news of her death was first reported by The Irish Times, but no cause was given. She had a long-documented struggle with her mental health. Her son Shane died in 2022 aged 17.
Her family said in a statement: âIt is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.â
OBITUARY
When SinĂ©ad OâConnor appeared at a star-studded tribute concert at Madison Square Garden in 1992, she was meant to sing Bob Dylanâs I Believe In You, a tender ballad of love and devotion.
Instead, she delivered an angry version of Bob Marleyâs War, for which she was booed and jeered. As she ran off the stage, she had to be consoled by the avuncular figure of Kris Kristofferson, who held her in a bear hug while she sobbed.
It was just one of many troubled moments in a troubled career, yet her choice of song was fitting. Throughout her life, OâConnor seemed to be permanently at war, whether it was with her family, the Catholic church, the music industry or the world in general.
Above all, she frequently appeared to be at war with herself. On hits such as Nothing Compares 2 U she sung like an angel but she was haunted by demons and her life became a harrowing personal psychodrama, played out in the public glare of the media.
She carried the pain of a troubled and abused wild-child into adulthood. Sometimes this produced great music, but peace and redemption eluded her.
There were four marriages, all of which ended in divorce, abortions, custody battles over her children, numerous breakdowns, spells in psychiatric hospitals and suicide attempts. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder she spent years on various prescription drugs, including lithium.
It was a tragic waste of a potentially stellar talent that reached its defining moment when at 23 she topped charts around the world with a brilliant, poignant arrangement of Princeâs Nothing Compares 2 U, accompanied by a compelling video that starkly framed her shaven head in dramatic close-up with a single tear rolling down her cheek. She later revealed that the tear was real and she had been thinking about her dead mother, with whom she had a fiery and at times violent relationship.
The performance won her four Grammy nominations, although typically she boycotted the ceremony and became the first artist ever to refuse an award. She said her no-show was a protest against âextreme commercialisationâ. In truth it was another manifestation of the war she seemed to have declared on everything and everyone, including herself.
If anybody told or even asked her to do something, she made it a point of contrarian principle to do the exact opposite. As a young woman starting out in music, Nigel Grainge, who had just given OâConnor her first recording contract, gently advised her that if she stopped wearing her hair short and dressed in a more feminine style, it would be easier to sell her to the record-buying public. In response she went straight out and had her head shaved and bought a pair of bovver boots.
Once she had scored her first hit, she struggled to cope with the pressures of her new-found celebrity. âI donât like being famous. I donât like the effect it is having on my life,â she said. Stardom undoubtedly amplified her emotional fragility. She put it more bluntly in her 2021 autobiography Rememberings. She was, she admitted, âas nutty as a f***inâ fruitcake and as crazy as a loonâ long before she became a star. The Guardian called her book âa tremendous catalogue of female misbehaviourâ.
A series of outrageous public outbursts led the tabloid press to rename her âSinĂ©ad OâControversyâ. She declared her support for the IRA and opined that âpeople like Thatcher and Ian Paisley should be shotâ. Saddam Hussein was no worse than George Bush, she said during the 1991 Gulf War.
When on tour in America she refused to appear if The Star-Spangled Banner was played before her concerts, radio stations banned her records and Frank Sinatra expressed a desire to attend one of her concerts in order to âkick her assâ.
To her credit, she never lost a sense of humour in her distress. When protesters hired a steamroller to crush piles of her albums outside her record company HQ in New York, she donned a wig and sunglasses and joined them, even giving an interview to a news crew in which she claimed to have come from Saratoga to add her patriotic voice to the protest.
Similarly, when the rap star MC Hammer said she should be kicked out of America and he would personally pay her fare home, she sent him a ÂŁ2,600 bill for her first-class air ticket back to Dublin.
When she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II and denounced the Vatican as âa nest of devilsâ live on television in 1992, she received death threats. As she fled America she donated the five-bedroom house with a swimming pool that she had purchased in the Hollywood Hills to the Red Cross and asked that the money should go to children in war-torn Somalia.
It was the fruition of a promise she had made in childhood when she had confessed to a priest that she had stolen money from a charity collecting box. He told her that if she promised to give the money back when she got a job she would be âsquare with Godâ.
Some attributed her controversial outbursts to attention-seeking but it seemed that she could not help herself and a psychologist suggested she suffered from coprolalia, a compulsion to shock that was beyond her control. âI donât do anything in order to cause trouble. It just so happens that what I do naturally causes trouble,â she said.
Her love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church was rooted in her childhood experience, when at 13 after repeated truancy from school and an arrest for shoplifting she had spent 18 months in a Magdalene laundry run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, during which she endured âunbelievable panic and terror and agonyâ.
Yet she suggested that if she had not been a singer she would have liked to have been a priest and in 1999 she was ordained in a rebel Tridentine Catholic sect and for a while was known as âMother Bernadette Marieâ.
Her calling did not last long and was just one manifestation of a promiscuous spiritual longing. She flirted with paganism, Rastafarianism and Buddhism and in 2018 converted to Islam. Taking the name Shuhada Sadaqat she was photographed wearing a hijab and called her conversion âthe natural conclusion of any intelligent theologianâs journeyâ.
Her relationships were similarly complicated. She claimed to be bisexual and there were numerous affairs, including one with Peter Gabriel, and four husbands. In 1987 she married John Reynolds, her drummer, when she was pregnant with his son Jake. The marriage was short-lived but they remained on good terms and continued to be musical collaborators.
Her daughter Roisin was born in 1995, the result of a relationship with the Irish journalist John Waters. She insisted that he had merely been a âsperm donorâ and a bitter custody battle ensued.
In 2001 she married the journalist Nick Sommerlad. They divorced and in 2004 she had her third child, Shane, with the Irish musician Donal Lunny. She had another son, Yeshua, with Frank Bonadio, the estranged husband of the Irish singer Mary Coughlan.
In 2010 she married for a third time, to Steve Cooney, a musician, but they separated within a year. She met her fourth husband, Barry Herridge, an Irish therapist, through the internet and they married in Las Vegas in 2011. Within days she was back online reporting that they were no longer together.
For a while her children lived with her in a rented house in Dublin, but after another breakdown, her eldest son Jake, by now an adult, organised a family intervention. Shane was placed with foster parents and Yeshua went to live with his father. OâConnor berated her family on social media, telling them, âYou killed your mother. You stole my sons.â
She is survived by Jake, Roisin and Yeshua. Shane took his own life last year at the age of 17.
A week after his suicide, OâConnor was admitted to hospital after tweeting that she also intended to take her own life.
SinĂ©ad Marie Bernadette OâConnor was born in Glenageary, Ireland, in 1966 and named after the wife of the Irish president Ăamon de Valera, and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. Her father, Sean OâConnor, was an engineer who later trained to become a barrister. She had a tempestuous relationship with her mother Marie (nĂ©e OâGrady), particularly after her parents separated when she was eight. After her father was denied custody he became chairman of the Divorce Action Group, which campaigned for the rights of fathers.
Her older brother, the novelist Joseph OâConnor, recalled their motherâs âextreme and violent abuse, both emotional and physicalâ towards her daughter and it left profound scars. She wrote about the experience in several songs and in adulthood spoke out in support of abused children.
Despite this difficult upbringing, all four children went on to creative careers. Her sister Eimear OâConnor is a noted art historian and her brother Eoin OâConnor a successful painter.
At 13 Sinéad went to live with her father but he was unable to control her waywardness and she was placed in a Magdalene laundry. She later moved to a Quaker boarding school, where she was encouraged by her Irish language teacher Joseph Falvey to record a demo of the songs she had begun writing.
On leaving school she joined the Irish band Ton Ton Macoute but after her mother died in a car crash in 1987 â a loss that despite their difficult relationship left her devastated â she moved to London where she recorded her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. It made her an instant sensation as the album went gold, spawned the hit single Mandinka and earned her a first Grammy nomination. The follow-up album, I Do Not Want What I Havenât Got (1990), was even better and included Nothing Compares 2 U.
It was the highlight of her career, artistically and commercially, and amid the chaos of her dysfunctional life, her music suffered. During one bout of manic depression, she sold all her guitars and announced that she would never play again. She did, but although her voice remained potent, there were long gaps between her records and she lost artistic focus. Later releases included a misfiring reggae album and a collection of âsexed-upâ versions of traditional Irish folk songs. After Iâm Not Bossy, Iâm the Boss (2014), produced by her first husband John Reynolds, there were no more albums but she made occasional fleeting reappearances, most recently singing the Skye Boat Song over the opening credits of the 2023 season of the TV series Outlander.
She once said that on her tombstone she wanted only her name and mobile phone number, so that everyone would âknow I am still contactable, though Iâm elsewhereâ.
SinĂ©ad OâConnor, musician, was born on December 8, 1966. She died of undisclosed causes on July 26, 2023, aged 56
