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“I looked like an alien”: Sinéad O’Connor in the Netherlands, 1989
MICHEL LINSSEN/REDFERNS
SINÉAD O’Connor suggests she may have been channelling The Boomtown Rats when she decided to tear up a photo of the Pope in a high-profile Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992, her fellow Dubliners having shredded pictures of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on a 1978 edition of Top Of The Pops. In more deferential times, her bid to highlight clerical child abuse in Ireland seemed like an act of career suicide, but the way she puts it in her loose-slung memoir Rememberings, it was actually the moment when she took back control. “Having a No 1 record derailed my career and tearing the photo put me back on the right track,” she explains.
A punky kleptomaniac whose upbringing was scarred by her mother’s mental health issues (and death in a 1985 car accident), O’Connor’s extraordinary voice saved her from a life of waitressing and kissograms. However, she bridled against the demands of the pop business from the off; ahead of the release of her 1987 debut album The Lion And The Cobra, she refused to take the big hints being dropped about terminating her pregnancy and responded to a request to dress more conventionally by shaving her head. “I looked like an alien,” she writes proudly. “Didn’t matter what I wore now.”