Photograph Source: Man Alive! – CC BY 2.0
Sinéad and I had been out dancing at a Dublin disco called The Pink Elephant. It was our first date. I remember how she laughed when we saw the heavy metal band Def Leppard in a corner booth. Word was they were living in Ireland as tax dodge. Dublin was not very metal in 1985, and they were delighted that someone recognized them. “Def Leppard?” I burst out with my big American voice. “You guys are my little brother’s favorite band!” They all looked immediately deflated. Sinéad let out a big laugh. “Jesus, you’re vicious,” she said.
With the news of the passing of Sinéad O’Connor, so many memories of our time together have come flooding back. Her pain is well known to the world, but her impish humor less so. I’m both unsurprised by the news and crushed beyond repair. So much that I can barely write this. Hers was a life of pain that seeped into her music and now that pain and music are silent.
I spent a large part of the summer of 1983 living in a squat in Brixton, England, on the south side of London. Thanks to an Atlanta connection, I was rooming with an Irish violinist named Steve Wickham, who had most famously played on U2’s War album. When he headed back to Dublin to play a U2 show in Phoenix Park (with The Eurythmics, Big Country, and Steel Pulse) I tagged along and fell in love with the emerald isle. The summer of 1984 was dedicated to becoming a Dubliner (with short trips to London and Paris). This included supporting his band, In Tua Nua, who was recording a song by a very young Sinéad O’Connor. I was their roadie when they opened for Bob Dylan at Slane Castle and was there when they signed their deal with Island Records in London. I was firmly in Sinéad’s world but it wasn’t until the following summer that we would meet.
Back in Dublin for the summer of 1985, my calendar was structured around some big concerts. First was U2 at Croke Park (29 June) with In Tua Nua and R.E.M. (and Squeeze) opening, and then the show of all shows, Live Aid at Wembley Stadium (13 July). I was camped out, as had become custom, with Steve Wickham and his American wife, Babs, now living in the Ranelagh neighborhood of Dublin. That’s where I met Sinéad. She would come over to work on songs with Steve in his kitchen, her singing to his fiddle. In fact there’s a recording in my cassette stash of her singing to the sound of me washing dishes in the background.
She was small but gruff, her voice often at some frequency unreachable by my American ears. But when she sang, everything stopped. People have written lengthy tomes about that voice, so I’ll just say that once she started singing, everything else in the world, even dishwashing, seemed pointless. Her big brown eyes were easy to fall into as well. At the time she was working doing singing telegrams and would occasionally show up at Steve’s in a French maid costume. The juxtaposition was jarring, stockings and combat boots.
Steve and Bab’s roommate, Clodagh, whispered that Sinéad fancied a pint with me. For the first time, I had an actual girlfriend back home, a fellow Emory student named Starla. But I was so enchanted with Sinéad’s talent, I just wanted to know more about her. So Sinéad and I went to the movies. Eager to share “my culture” with her, I took her to see The Breakfast Club at the local cinema. She didn’t get it. Afterward, we walked down to An Lar (the City Center) to see what would happen. Besides dancing to Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood at the Pink Elephant (and our encounter with Def Leppard), we immediately got into some very deep conversations. I had just graduated from Emory and was on my way to grad school, so I was anxious to get her take on the role of the Catholic Church in Irish culture. I had gotten some amusing anecdotes from Bono, so I was curious what the singing maid had to say.
At this point there had been murmurings about the abuse of children by Catholic priests but I got a first hand testimony of the reality of that sick norm for Irish families from Sinéad herself, just 20 years old at that moment. I won’t go into detail, but it was clear that she had a legitimate anger rooted in very real trauma. And her emphatic point was that her experience was widespread in her homeland. She told me about the Magdalene Laundries and the role the Pope, John Paul II, played in protecting pedophile priests. It was heavy, so the Guinness and dancing helped to keep our heads above water.
We stumbled out to Grafton Street and headed up Rathmines Road to my kip at Steve’s. She then, in her long low rumble Irish voice, asked if she could kiss me. I remember not being sure I heard her correctly and asked her to repeat herself. That was our first kiss and I’ve revisited it a thousand times. If I had followed her lead, how different both our lives might have been. Maybe she would be here now. I felt even in those first moments, she was asking to be rescued from her pain. I wish I was the person I am now when I was 21. I would have said let’s go far away from this place.
We had more of those conversations on Grafton Street and at Steve’s. She was at Steve’s one day when my mother called asking where I was and Sinéad did me a favor by lying that I was just “out.” I was up in Belfast, Northern Ireland and had been detained during a riot and missed my train back to Dublin. She showed kindness to my worrying mother when her mother had shown her only anger. Shortly after that, Sinéad moved to London, to advance her singing career. I followed a few weeks later for an In Tua Nua show and to stay for the epic Live Aid Concert. The day after Live Aid, Sinéad and I met up for a day of shopping on Carnaby Street. She was full of confidence about the direction her career was going. The world was paying attention to the music coming from Dublin and she was on the cusp of finding an audience.
In the fall I headed home to start my work as a graduate student in Atlanta, and build a relationship with Starla. Sinéad stayed in touch and there are a box of letters somewhere full of chatter about Latin American politics and her work with The Edge on the soundtrack of Captive, a British film about a terrorist gang.
I returned to Dublin the summer of 1986, after Steve had left In Tua Nua to join the Waterboys, who had begun work on their sprawling Fisherman’s Blues album. I had spent the first part of the summer in Copenhagen, staying with Starla’s uncle, but doubled back to London to see Sinéad. She had just shaved off her short cropped haircut and was completely bald. It was striking. I was starting to pay attention to the rise of the racist skinheads in the United States and was considering making that subject of my Master’s Thesis. “Are you going to study me?” she asked. Her intensity on social issues was undermined by her darting eyes which rarely made contact, which I now recognize as a marker of lifelong trauma.
Since it was our thing, we went to the movies. This time it was Return to Oz at a theatre in Leicester Square. That filmed she loved, because Dorothy escapes a sanatorium to the magical realm of OZ. I think she felt London was her Oz. Later we went to a Russian restaurant with her roommates Spike and Clodagh. (I had to send my undercooked Chicken Kiev back – the things one remembers.) And then we headed up to their apartment, with Bob Marley pictures tacked on every wall. They smoked massive amounts of hash, while I listened to the Black Uhuru and Aswad records and watched Sinéad’s transformation in this London Bohemia. Things were coming her way.
We reconnected again in London in 1987. I was again in Dublin, after some time wandering the south of France and Italy. Sinéad let me use her London apartment as a crash pad. She had finally landed a major label record deal with Ensign and was starting the work on her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. We stayed up all night talking and listening to Joni Mitchell albums. There was a joy in her voice that was new. She was about to finally be heard and heard on her terms. This wasn’t the shy girl dressed as a French maid singing, “Happy Birthday.” This was a fully developed artist who was about to share the thing that made her one with the world. And that included her righteous anger. I remember falling asleep in her bed while she danced to the music on her stereo. I woke up the following morning and she was already up, dancing to the music. She grabbed my camera and snapped a picture of me wondering who this new Sinéad was. What I didn’t know was she was pregnant with her first child.
That album, and the follow-up, I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got, of course, set the world on fire. The next time I saw her was in May 1990 when she had a concert in Atlanta at the Fox Theater. We hung out in her downtown hotel room, ordered room service, and she showed my pictures of her son, Jake. My skinhead study was fully underway, so talked more about fascism than music but I shared with her some of the music of the Atlanta band that I had managed, Drivin n’ Cryin, who were signed to Island Records, U2’s label. She seemed good. Stable and confident, but lonely. Neither of us had been good at sustaining long term relationships. But her voice had opened up a door of adoration and she accepted it cautiously, like the love of an abusive mother who could turn on you in a flash.
And that’s what happened in 1992 when she tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. I knew exactly what it was about. I immediately remembered our conversations in Dublin about John Paul II’s role in protecting child-abusing priests. But the larger public flipped out, seeing as some type of anti-Catholic action. It got ugly fast. Two weeks later I saw the audience at Madison Square Garden boo her off the stage at the Bob Dylan tribute concert. (I was watching it on Pay-Per-View.) My heart broke watching this crowd, who was there to honor that greatest protest singer, scream their hatred at this young female protest singer. Maybe it was because she was bald.
By that time, Sinéad were on opposite paths and never met again. I bought her records and followed her ups and downs. A few years ago, when she was being very public with her mental health challenges, I reached out to her on Twitter and we reconnected. I told her that I had worked through my own issues with suicide and wrote a book about how to climb out of that black hole. But she seemed to be slipping further into that abyss and the death of her son last year was more than she could bear.
Now that she’s gone all of us that knew her are left with the sinking feeling that we could have done more. Yes, her brilliant music will live on, but so will the ache of guilt. As we focused on our own journeys, we assumed those around us will be fine when, in fact, they desperately needed us. I am far removed from the 20-year lass I met in a Dublin kitchen, but I can’t shake the feeling I could have been a better friend. I’m sorry, Sinéad. I will do better next time.
This piece first appeared on Watching the Wheels.
