Night Beat (53 page)

O’Connor was writing music and developing at a surprising pace—and the sense of change began to show in her appearance. “She was always playing with her hair,” says Grainge. “One minute she had a Mohican. That was on for a couple of weeks, and then it all went—she walked in, and she had shaved herself bald. We thought, ’Well,
there’s
a statement.’ ” Over the next few years, O’Connor’s bare scalp would strike various journalists as provocative, frightening, ugly, gorgeous, sexy, and shocking—and would also help make her one of the most unforgettable new faces in all pop.

During this period, O’Connor met two other people who were to figure prominently in her life. The first was John Reynolds, former drummer with British trash-pop band Transvision Vamp. Reynolds started dating O’Connor after joining her studio band, and a month later, Sinéad was pregnant. “I was the only one that felt completely sure and delighted about the idea of me having a baby,” she says. “I could understand John’s reluctance. Suddenly his whole life was flashing before him. But then there was the record company. They thought I was jeopardizing my career.
My
attitude was that if I had been a man, and my wife or girlfriend was pregnant, they wouldn’t be telling me that I couldn’t have it.

“I was very upset, and very hurt. How could I choose between my career or a child? They’re both as important as each other. It wasn’t a Catholicism thing—I had nothing against abortion. In fact, I was actually in the hospital bed about to have an abortion, and then I left. It wasn’t
me
that wanted to have the abortion.
I
wanted the baby—and I decided to have it.”

The other person that Sinéad met in this time was Fachtna O’Ceallaigh—an Irish patriot who had managed Boomtown Rats and Bananarama, and who also headed U2’s fledgling label for homegrown Irish bands, Mother Records. To the consternation of Nigel Grainge, O’Connor wanted O’Ceallaigh for her manager. “I opposed the connection,” says Grainge. “I knew Fachtna from many years before, when the Boomtown Rats were on Ensign. Fachtna gets very emotionally involved with his acts, to such a degree that some people would call it irrational. He can be very inspiring, but he can also be infuriating when he doesn’t get his way. I told Sinéad: ’I
don’t
want to work with Fachtna, and I don’t want him to be your manager.’ Which was the absolute wrong thing to say. It was like a father telling a child, ’You can’t do this.’ She came back to me and said, ’Fachtna O’Ceallaigh is my manager. Get on with it.’ And Fachtna became very closely involved with Sinéad. I mean, he was her mentor for a serious period of time.”

In the fall of 1986, O’Connor had begun to work with producer Mick Glossop on the first album, but the sessions soon fizzled. “The tracks sounded like a cabaret rock version of these wonderful songs,” says Grainge (O’Connor herself once described the failed sessions as “all fucking Irish ethereal and mystical”). Adds Chris Hill: “She was a young girl of nineteen years, who was pregnant and frightened that if she fucked up, she was gonna lose her record deal, and be told to go back to Ireland.”

A few weeks later, Grainge proposed a solution. “I kept thinking about what she had done with the demos,” he says, “how great they had felt. So I said, ’Go in with a decent engineer, Sinéad, and produce it yourself.
You
know what these songs are about, and how they should sound.’ About that time Fachtna came heavily into the situation. His style of management is to completely divide the artist from the record company, and from that stage, she stopped coming into the record company.”

In April 1987, at age twenty, seven months pregnant and with almost no studio expertise, O’Connor took over the production of her maiden album. Two months later, she had finished a record that all parties were thrilled by, and two weeks after that, she gave birth to her son, Jake Reynolds. In theory, it should have been a triumphal time.
The Lion and the Cobra
was a terrific album full of deep-felt songs about desire, damnation, and courage, and O’Connor produced and arranged it all in a style that spanned folk music, orchestral rock, and bass-heavy dance pop.

But within months, O’Connor found herself embroiled in feuds and controversies. In early 1988, U2 dismissed Fachtna O’Ceallaigh from his position as manager of Mother Records, citing “incompatible temperaments” (in addition, O’Ceallaigh had once told a reporter, “I literally despise the music U2 makes”). Later, in an interview with Britain’s
i-D
magazine, O’Connor made some disparaging remarks about U2’s “bombastic” music, and found herself reproached by the band’s associates. Before long, angry feelings and bitter statements had escalated on both sides, fueled by the sensationalistic-minded U.K. music press (in particular,
NME
milked the schism for a spate of cover stories). At one point, O’Connor was quoted as saying: “I have no respect for Bono and no affiliation with his music or ideas. . . . I know he’s faking that sincerity.” Another time, in a bit less gracious mood, she told
Melody Maker,
“[U2] take themselves so fuckin’ seriously. [Bono’s] just a stupid turd.”

O’Connor has attempted to make amends for the affair, but a certain rancor still lingers. “I felt ostracized and punished over that whole thing,” she says. “But I also felt guilty because I knew at the back of my mind that some of the things I was saying were
not
said for myself. I expressed anger with U2 because the band had hurt Fachtna, who was a friend of mine. I was wrong to do that, because, really, Fachtna should fight his own battles. I had been hateful toward somebody I had no right to be hateful toward. U2 hadn’t really done anything shitty to me. But I also learned that U2 was a popular and powerful band, and that the British and Irish music establishment would
not
allow you to be critical of them.”

O’Connor’s comments about the IRA—the outlawed political movement that seeks a united Ireland and opposes Britain’s dominance of the country, and has committed numerous killings and bombings to achieve its aims—were considered even more controversial. On one occasion, O’Connor was quoted as saying: “I support the IRA. . . . I don’t like the violence but I do understand it, it’s necessary even though it’s terrible.” In the British press—with whom the IRA are extremely unpopular—these comments were construed as an endorsement of terrorist violence.

O’Connor has long since disavowed any support of the IRA or its methods, but the issue continues to plague her. “I was involved in very complex relationships during that time,” she says now, “and I was influenced by the people I was hanging around with. I wanted their approval, and I was expressing things in order to get that approval, without realizing that that’s what I was doing. I should not have condoned the use of violence by anyone. I
don’t
believe that it’s right for either side involved in the war to kill people. I also don’t think for a second that the British government has any right to be in Ireland. But as I say, I was condoning violence to impress the people I was involved with, and I should not have done that.”

The period following
The Lion and the Cobra
was also rough for more personal reasons. Shortly after Jake’s birth, O’Connor and John Reynolds separated for a time. Then, following O’Connor’s appearance at the 1988 Grammy Awards, she returned to London, and to the surprise of many friends and associates, married Reynolds. “I was in a lot of pain during that time,” she says, “but it wasn’t due to John. It was the fact that I was with somebody else who was fucking me up.”

It is now late in the afternoon, and the light in the living room has grown dim. O’Connor gets up, turns on a lamp, then settles back into the sofa, lighting a cigarette. “Around the time I got married,” she continues, “I had been physically ill for a long time. I’d been going to doctors, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Then, for a whole summer, I saw a woman who’s like a spiritual healer and a dietitian, and I started doing yoga with her. That process gave me a chance to get my act together mentally, and to begin to see that I was involved with people who were bringing out negative things in me.

“I realized that I had no control over myself—that other people were in control of me, that I was expressing opinions that were other people’s, that practically everything I was doing was to please other people. So I decided I had to assume control over myself in every aspect, and that meant I had to sever some relationships that were very, very difficult to sever. I had to summon the strength to be able to say ’bye-bye’ to people that I had previously thought I couldn’t function without. Now, I feel like I’m sitting at the helm where I’m supposed to be sitting. Now, I’m the captain of my own ship.”

One of the relationships—perhaps the primary one—that O’Connor severed at this time was with Fachtna O’Ceallaigh. According to John O’Connor, “Fachtna came too close to seeing Sinéad as a possession. Management should be an arm’s-length affair; there’s a relationship that has to be kept scrupulously in its place. The manager’s first duty is that their client’s career should be maximized, and they should not let their personal feelings enter into it at all—whether they’re political feelings or emotional feelings.”

In December of 1989, Sinéad O’Connor dismissed O’Ceallaigh as her manager (she was subsequently represented by Steve Fargnoli, former co-manager of Prince). Neither party is inclined to discuss the details of the separation, though O’Connor says: “Fachtna had given me a sense of my rights as an artist. He instilled in me the idea that if it wasn’t for people like me, the record industry would not exist—which is true. And he instilled in me the idea that I must have control over what goes on regarding how my image and work are presented. Most important, he was instrumental in showing me that I should be honest and true, and not compromise myself.”

But according to Chris Hill, O’Ceallaigh’s contribution went beyond that. “He did two important things: He helped her discover a part of herself—that is, her sense of purpose and worth—but he also badly fucked her up. And the two things together are what made Sinéad O’Connor what she is.”

For his part, O’Ceallaigh says simply, “What is important to me is what Sinéad says. She is the one who knows exactly what occurred over the three-year period that I managed her. And even more important than that, her reaction means everything to me because she has always been and will always continue to be, as long as I’m alive, a best friend of mine. Everything else—whether it’s success or fame or whatever, all the things that attend success—it’s all basically rubbish. I never thought of Sinéad as a person or object who made records. I thought of her as a human being and a friend.”

Following the firing of O’Ceallaigh, O’Connor holed up in a garage studio with sound engineer Chris Birkett, and in a surprisingly short time had finished writing and self-producing the tracks for
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got—
in effect, a collection of hard-hitting and heartrending songs about the circumstances of her recent life. Says O’Connor: “It is simply a record about a twenty-three-year-old human being and her experiences, and what she makes of those experiences and of herself. Some of the experiences are angry and some are hurtful. I write about whatever it is I happen to be going through at the time, and so if something awful was happening to me, that’s what I wrote about.”

Around the end of 1989, O’Connor called Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill. She had been trying to rebuild relations with the pair, and felt the time had come to play them the rough mixes for
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
“After we first heard it,” says Hill, “we were shell-shocked. I mean, it’s so
personal,
we couldn’t even make a judgment about it, and we couldn’t think in terms of whether it was a hit record. It is
intense.
I know she thinks it’s a happy record, but it doesn’t convey happiness—it conveys trauma. Because of our reaction, she thought we didn’t like it, and she said, ’It’s not for men to like; it’s a woman’s statement.’ But Nigel and I had both been through divorces. You listen to some little girl singing ’The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,’ and you
know
what it’s about. We’ve
been
there.”

Says O’Connor: “Nigel told me, ’You can’t put that out; it’s too personal.’ I said, ’People that like me, like me
because
of that. That’s what I do.’ ”

Now, though, as O’Connor sits in her living room discussing the record, it seems evident that
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
is going to be more than anyone imagined. “If you think about the kind of songs I write,” she says, “it’s strange that they would be commercial. I mean, they’re
so
personal. I think about why I wrote a song like ’Last Day of Our Acquaintance,’ and then I think about millions of people buying and listening to it. . . . It’s really weird.”

There is a noise—actually, an ear-splitting scream—at the living-room door, and in a moment, O’Connor’s two-and-a-half-year-old son, Jake, bounds in, all smiles and whoops. He is blond-haired and red-cheeked, and has the same deep eyes as his mother, but he turns shy when he sees a stranger sitting in the room. He is followed by his father, drummer John Reynolds, a tall, gracious man, who is home from rehearsals with his own band, Max. John and Sinéad have some family business to discuss—Sinéad’s brother Joseph has just signed a contract for his first novel, and John and Sinéad are wondering where to take him and her father for a family celebration next evening. Finally, they settle on a local transvestite club—where a drag queen is reportedly delivering an impression of Sinéad singing “Nothing Compares 2 U,” replete with tear—and then John and Jake take off to begin dinner. Before going, Jake emits one last glorious yelp. “He’s mad, that child,” says O’Connor, shaking her head and smiling. “I feel like he really wanted to be born—he’s such a happy kid.”

She falls quiet for a few moments, pulling at her forelock. “A couple of years ago,” she says, “I was having a hard time as far as my personal life was concerned, and that mattered much more to me than whether my record was doing well, or anything like that. But at the moment, I’m very happy. I have a lovely husband, a lovely son, and everything’s going wonderfully.