Sinéad O’Connor’s love affair with America: From public enemy number one to helping out at the veterans’ hospital

“Only an eejit wouldn’t love America,” wrote Sinéad O’Connor, detailing her feelings during the frenzied time when she was suddenly and extravagantly catapulted into the role of pop-culture public enemy number one across the United States. It was October 1992 when she made that infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live, closing a typically compelling a cappella version of Bob Marley’s War by brandishing a picture of the Pope John Paul II and tearing it in two as she shouted the words: “Fight the real enemy”. She had cleverly planned the gesture, using a photo of a Brazilian street child killed by police during the performance rehearsals at NBC studios. “I ask the cameraman to zoom in on the photo during the actual show. I don’t tell him what I have in mind for later on,” she writes in her memoir, Rememberings.

“Everyone’s happy. A dead child far away is no one’s problem. I know if I do this there’ll be war.”

So, she does it. She wears a white dress that once belonged to Sade – O’Connor had bought it in an auction when she was 19. The photograph of the pope was taken years earlier from her mother’s bedroom wall. She’d seen, in 1978, Bob Geldof rip up a photo of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta on Top of the Pops after their global hit Summer Nights was finally edged out of the number one spot by the Boomtown Rats’ Rat Trap. The image stayed with her, and she kept the picture of the pope with the intention of destroying it “when the right moment came”. What better stage than a slot on one of America’s most celebrated night-time shows?

This was just two years, remember, after the phenomenal impact of O’Connor’s cover of Nothing Compares 2 U. The video accompanying that song was – is – so mesmerising that it left an indelible impression on a generation of viewers. Here’s music writer Amanda Petrusich recalling, in a 2016 New Yorker piece, the experience of seeing it as a 10-year old:

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“In the video, O’Connor matches the viewer’s gaze in a plaintive, unflinching way. Her eyes, a clear glaucous grey, express unambiguous yearning. Her head has been very recently shaved. At 10, I didn’t know anything at all about romantic love, but the idea of physical beauty was so elusive and intoxicating to me, the thought that a person might wilfully subvert it – challenge its stronghold, deliberately reconfigure it, render it differently – seemed courageous, if not plainly revolutionary. I didn’t understand how anybody could be so brazen and cavalier about her own prettiness, a characteristic I’d by then internalised as crucial.”

“Breaking” America is one of the time-honoured quests of all singers and bands who cross the Atlantic. In 1992, when the era of Madonna and Whitney Houston was peaking, it was almost impossible for mainstream America to know what to “do” with Sinéad O’Connor, this Irish, huge-eyed firebrand with the irresistible voice. But it was clear, too, that there was a place for her in the firmament. All she had to do was play the game.

But she had already made it clear that she had no interest in the game. O’Connor was 21 when she made her debut performance at the Grammy music awards in 1989. She was nominated for best female rock vocal performance for her debut album, The Lion and The Cobra. The other nominees were Tina Turner, Pat Benatar and Melissa Etheridge and Toni Childs. The stage was big as a football field and she marched on alone to the opening of Mandinka. The insignia on the side of her head would have been immediately obvious to the millions of Americans who felt the Grammys were not for them. It was the Public Enemy logo: the silhouette of a man in the crosshairs of a gun.

1989 was the first year the industry had recognised rap by conferring the inaugural Best Rap performance. It was made clear, however, that no rap performance would be televised. Several nominees and the winner did not attend, electing to boycott the event. O’Connor’s symbolic salute did not go unnoticed. A year later came the torrent of acclaim after the release, in the winter of 1990, of Nothing Compares 2 U.

That September saw the release of a neglected movie masterpiece, State of Grace, set in the murky Irish-American gangster world of Hell’s Kitchen. The mood was steadfastly downbeat and the entire film revolves around a simple scene where Sean Penn and Robin Wright dance in one of those desolate 10th Avenue bars to O’Connor’s Drink Before the War. Already, she was sliding into the culture.

A year after that, she was back on the Grammys billboard with four nominations, including record of the year. She won for best alternative music performance, a category that included Kate Bush. But by then, she had written to the Recording Academy to make it clear that she wouldn’t perform at the ceremony or accept any award. It was no coincidence that Public Enemy also withdrew from the awards that year. She was still on stage, after a fashion: Vernon Reid of Living Colour wore a T-shirt bearing her image when accepting the award for best hard rock performance. She remains the only artist to decline a grammy.

The response, after the SNL blasphemy, was just as she imagined. It didn’t matter that SNL was supposed to be a bastion of satire and free expression. The howls of outrage extended beyond the usual voices of conservative America. Joe Pesci, the American-Italian actor, happened to host SNL the following week and holding up a similar photo of John Paul II, now taped together, declared that if it had been his show, “I would have given her a smack”. Frank Sinatra reportedly announced, in concert in New Jersey: “This must be one stupid broad. I’d kick her ass if she were a guy.” (“Which is worrying,” O’Connor will later write of the moment, “because I’m staying in the same hotel as him.”) Rapper MC Hammer makes a show of sending her $1,500 with the wish that she flies home first class.

“The cheque, like him, reeks of coconut,” O’Connor will recall in her book.

It’s a brilliant observation – funny, cutting, amused and so alive to the absurdities of the world she moved through. Perhaps one of the comforts for the many O’Connor fans who will return to her book over the coming days is that rarely a page passes without her generating a laugh. Even when she maddened all of America she saw the funny side, genuinely tickled at the practice of steamrollering her CDs in towns across America and wearing a disguise so she could join, with her friend Ciara, a protest against herself, where she chatted with some indignant Vietnam veterans and was briefly interviewed by a local television channel reporter.

The SNL moment has been a reference point through the flood of tributes to O’Connor since the heartbreaking news of her death on Wednesday. But it is arguable that what followed 13 nights later stands as her landmark moment in America. On October 16th, the underbelly of Madison Square Garden was teeming with musical royalty, all gathered to record a live album to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 30 years as a recording artist.

Because all of this happened so long ago, it is shocking when we return to it now. To begin with, everyone looks so young – particularly O’Connor herself. Kris Kristofferson tells the crowd he is proud to introduce someone “whose name has been synonymous with courage and integrity”. Initial cheers for her name are quickly drowned out by booing. O’Connor stands on the stage for a full two minutes as the boos and jeers do not subside. “I look at Booker T’s beautiful face. He’s mouthing the words, ‘sing the song,’ but I don’t. Now I’m asking God what I should do.”

Kristofferson reappears – he will later tell her he was instructed to “get her off the stage”. She sees him walking towards her. She later reports that her thought is: I don’t need a man to rescue me, thanks. Kristofferson says to her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down” and leaves again. The musicians attempt to play but O’Connor waves them to quit, orders that her microphone be turned up and gives a reprise of War, accompanied by nothing but her blazing anger. It is hard to think of any comparable gesture of sustained hostility towards any star of sound or vision. But she faced it down and wasn’t done, either.

“The day after Madison Square Garden I go to visit Dylan’s manager in his office. I tell him what’s been happening in the church in Ireland, that kids have been raped and the church is covering it up. I ask if he and Dylan will help expose it. He thinks I’m crazy. Offers no help, neither he nor Dylan are gonna speak up for me. I’m on my own. (I wonder if they still think I’m crazy now),” she wrote.

That fortnight ended whatever delusions the industry had about remoulding O’Connor into a mainstream star in America. She would never become a darling, never fill Madison Square Garden for lucrative nostalgia nights as she might have done in more recent years. In 2009, Kristofferson would return to the moment in a tribute song, Sister Sinead, which included the lyrics: “It’s askin’ for trouble to stick out your neck/In terms of a target a big silhouette/But some candles flicker and some candles fade/And some burn as true as my sister Sinead”.

As a music star, she remained, in her own words “a pariah” to many, even after the epidemic of abuses by members of the Catholic Church was exposed and the courage of her protest was validated. But that fortnight must also have freed something in her: the obligation to pretend she was interested in the stardom industry. She would return to America throughout her life and retained her chameleon-like ability to flit between the rarefied corridors of fame and the lightless corners of society that few people ever choose to visit.

If O’Connor’s bizarre visit to the home of Prince, in the early years of her ascendant stardom, is chilling and disturbing, her description of that night is also mordantly funny (not least because in her written account she refers to him as “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs” or “himself”). Still: who else could manage to find herself in a game of chasing around a car, in the dead of night, with the most aloof and image-conscious musician of the age? O’Connor treats that incident much the same as she will describe her time, a few years later, working in Chicago Veterans’ Administration Hospital with war veterans in their 90s, wheeling them about, helping them with wifi.

“There’s another old gentleman who waits for me every day in the foyer because I baffle him. He’s a ‘Nam vet. Also 92 . He doesn’t know if I’m a boy or a girl because I regularly attend the hospital wearing a full Babe Ruth baseball outfit. This is a matter of astonishment to the gentleman. The morning after he established I’m female, he’s waiting for me again. ‘So, are you a lesbian?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I tell him.”

What is that story about if not America? And has any other Grammy-winning singer ever spent an hour like this? The veteran’s bewilderment mirrored that of mainstream America’s. For all its strangeness, it didn’t quite know what to make of O’Connor. It does now. And from the beginning, she “got” America. She loved its cop shows. As an 11-year-old, she was inconsolable when Elvis died. She loved Dolly Parton, ranking a letter from Parton as one of her most prized possessions. She has written that Muhammad Ali might have been her greatest hero in life (And she met him, in Dublin. And he knew her. And she was thrilled).

Long after time had blurred the details of the Saturday Night Live furore and made it seem almost quaint, she found herself speaking up for younger music stars she felt were being bullied by the consensus. In 2007, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and voiced measured support for Britney Spears during a time when her life had become tabloid-celebrity fodder. Six years later, she would write an open letter of warning to Miley Cyrus. “The music business doesn’t give a shit about you, or any of us.”

The business does not and cannot. But the fans did. The last few days and nights have made it clear that although Sinéad O’Connor and America is a complex story, the singer was adored and revered by musicians and music lovers there as much as anywhere else. Pink sang Nothing Compares 2 U in Cincinnati on Wednesday night. On the same evening, Nina Persson sang the same song in Monroe’s in Galway, where O’Connor performed in 2019. The tributes pouring in have been striking not just in their range – from Public Enemy to Bryan Adams to Cat Stevens – but in the intensity of feeling that is a measure of her global standing among peers and fans.

Among the plethora of salutes out there is one small note from Dan Barry, the distinguished New York Times newspaper columnist. Late Wednesday night, he posted a video of Sinéad singing Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’.

“Riding a train late in the evening,” he wrote on social media, “and this, by Sinéad O’Connor has me hiding my tears.”

It’s a crowded train this weekend.