Rememberings

by Sinéad O'Connor

I have left some people out because I know they prefer privacy and others because I want them to be pissed when they look for their names in the book and don’t find them.

I go to the record player. I make my brother Joe play it again. I say, “Who’s he?” “Bob Dylan.” I see from the album cover he’s as beautiful as if God blew a breath from Lebanon and it became a man.

Me and my sister used to talk to all the Mormon men in town just because they were American, even though our mother told us not to. They looked so handsome, like movie stars in their suits. They worked in pairs, standing in the streets trying to convert Irish people (so sweet they thought such a thing could ever succeed). But all they were converting were teenage girls from lusting after teenage boys to lusting after grown men, particularly grown men in suits.

Joe plays guitar. He says he doesn’t play well, but he does. My sister plays harp and my younger brother plays drums. I always thought it would be brilliant to make one album together and call it Fuck the Corrs. But the fights would have made Liam and Noel Gallagher seem like pussycats.

It was horrible on the news, fire and blood, and kids and old people screaming in the streets. And shit all over the prison walls and hollow-eyed skinny men whose coffins were so light, they could have been carried by one small child. And gunmen at funerals and men torn from cars there and killed. Through it all, Margaret Thatcher’s hair was always perfectly set.

And from observing them, I’ve come to realize that if not for nerds, no records would ever be made. There’d just be a load of stoned musicians and coked-up record executives, the latter too busy pleading not guilty to aggravated sexual harassment on the grounds of being over-coked, and getting away with it, to be of any service in the recording process.

It’s so lovely when people like Andy or Mike or John Reynolds or John Keogh or John Maybury’s gang don’t treat me any differently because I’m a girl. Except in nice ways, like when Maybury, the video director, gets someone to put makeup on me and keeps telling me I’m pretty. He’s gay as Christmas so it’s even nicer than when a straight man says it because straight men all say it to get laid. John Maybury and all his friends say it because they love girls.

There’s a very good reason that God made the word touring rhyme with the word whoring. In fact, most of what I can remember about touring, especially in my younger days when I was doing huge U.S. and European tours to support my albums, was it was nothing but sex.

In the showbiz parts of Los Angeles, the white walls have beautiful dark pink flowers. The Mexicans live elsewhere. So do the African-Americans. The only time you see those people, they’re cleaning someone’s house.

Between you and me? Anthems have petrifyingly contagious associations with squareness unless they’re being played by Jimi Hendrix. Also, for the most part, people come to shows so they can forget about the outside world, not be reminded of it.

The only technical part is you must always vocalize in your own accent; as everyone’s muscles are formed by the age of fourteen, and these muscles form the sound of your accent, it follows that you’re going to end up in vocal trouble if you constrict your accent. That’s why you see Bono, you see Adele, you see certain performers who have put on a fake accent having vocal trouble—they’ve constricted their vocal cords to act in a way that they’re not built for.

These are sad songs, of course, because nobody in Ireland ever writes a happy fucking song.

There’s a very fine line between corny and cool when it comes to writing religious songs, and I grew up in the 1970s with all these terrible charismatic Christian songs on the airwaves. So I didn’t want to risk making that mistake.