HEADLINE: I've been a punk, a priest and a lesbian. But now I just want to raise children and bake cakes . . .
BYLINE: JANE KELLY
TITLE: Daily Mail
DATE: 30/07/2001
ANYONE might feel slightly nervous waiting to meet Sinead O' Connor. The pre- eminent female singer of the Nineties was never exactly friendly or cuddly.
While Barbie Doll temptresses such as Kylie and Tiffany tried to look pretty and please
their fans, mad, bad Sinead with her bovver boots and shaved head seemed a cross between
a waif with hollow, haunted eyes and a she-devil.
Apart from her beautiful singing, her act on and off stage mainly consisted of howling in anguished protest and making wild political gestures.
Even people who'd never listened to pop music knew that she tore up a photo of the Pope on American TV, supported the IRA and sent Frank Sinatra into apoplexy by refusing to allow The Star Spangled Banner to be played before her U.S. concerts.
Flaunting a T-shirt with the slogan 'If you think I'm a bitch you should see my mother', she embarrassed her relatives, had abortions, babies and breakdowns, and then came out as a lesbian.
Rather than sweet femininity, Sinead always represented unstoppable, ungovernable rage. So seeing her in an expensive-looking green wool dress and kitten heels is a surprise. She looks like a demure Dublin housewife.
Even more unlikely, after a decade making a raucous international hullabaloo, at 35
she says she wants to be a housewife and stay-at-home mum - and that is what she always
secretly wanted all along.
'I'm not interested in the music business any more,' she says, in her low, rather growly voice, like a teenage boy's, as she insists on pouring out the coffee. 'I'd like to go on dabbling with music, but I don't want a record contract or to tour. I just want to be at home with my family.' The cause of this unashamed womanliness and joy is Nick Sommerlad, 27. A journalist with the Press Association, he was posted to Dublin where they met through mutual friends.
They have just moved into a house together, which she has bought in Dublin. Her large, peat-coloured eyes gleam like a child's as she says they are getting married next year.
She sports her wedding ring already, and a three-diamond engagement ring. Despite her badly bitten nails, they help to make her look extremely smart and conventional.
They belonged to Nick's great-great-grandmother and his grandmother,' she says. 'I like having the two ancestors around me, helping me with the baking. I intend being a non-politically correct wife, baking and cooking all day and making myself sexually available.' It will not be Sinead's first marriage. In 1989 she wed musician John Reynolds who left just after the birth of their son Jake, now 14, whose custody she shares.
In addition, there is her daughter Roisin, five, whom she 'arranged' to have with John Waters, a columnist for the Irish Times she hardly knew. They fell out eight weeks after the child was conceived.
The children may have had unsettled upbringings - there has been a bitter custody battle over Roisin - but now it seems everything in the former rock star's life is as nice as pie.
'I am wonderful at cooking and making cakes,' she says. 'I've always had this fluffy and feminine side, but it is only coming out now.' It is hard to know what to make of this; there is something still very edgy about her. Perhaps it is just fragility. 'I used to hide away behind a more male image because, when I went to London aged 18, I wanted to be taken seriously as a talent rather than be seen as sexual.' She now has oily curls like black lamb's wool in place of the harsh baldness that went before.
'I was very shy,' she says. 'I used to hide behind my hair. I shaved it all off as an attempt to force myself out of my own shell.
'But I am much more confident these days. I'm back home and in touch with my family. I am not caught up with being a rock star - and I am in love. I feel as if I have died and gone to heaven.
'All along, I was working for this, just to earn money so that one day I could be a full-time mum.' Looking back on her tempestuous career, it's an extraordinary admission.
'I hardly spent anything in those years,' she muses happily. 'I've saved a lot of money. I've still got my earnings from 12 years ago. So I don't have to work and I can be at home with the children.
'The only thing I spend money on now is makeup,' she says, but that doesn't mean she is quite turning into a Kylie. 'I never wear it, I just collect it and keep it in a suitcase.' Hearing this, it is a relief to know that at least part of her is still Sinead the Strange.
In 1999, she was ordained as a priest in the Latin Tridentine Movement, an offshoot of the Roman Catholic church, which has split into sects.
The sect she joined, the Order of Mater Dei, ordains women. For a time, Sinead went about in a dog collar and clerical robes.
Her most recent album, Faith And Courage, is a collection of spiritual songs, but since she now looks like an ordinary wife I wondered if she still works as a priest.
'That is still hugely important,' she says, 'but I don't have much time for it, as
I am a full-time mum with two kids, but I am still involved with counselling, particularly
the bereaved.
'God sends people to me through prayer and I want to help them overcome grief, so they can end up, as I have done, in a garden of joy.' If she has really found joy at last, it has been after a tortuous struggle. She was born in 1966 in a smart Dublin suburb to attractive, intelligent parents.
Her father, Sean, was a structural engineer who took on a second career as a barrister. Sinead says her mother Marie, a former model, was a 'genius at dressmaking'.
Marie was in the chorus of the local Gilbert and Sullivan society but, according to Sinead, she also hated her five children from birth.
Apparently, she often kept the children without food, shut them in cupboards (sometimes naked), beat them savagely and humiliated them.
'I was bought up to hate myself,' Sinead claims. 'She would make me lie on the floor with my legs apart and she'd spit on me and kick me.
She would make me lie there saying "I am nothing" and if the phone rang, she could talk to the other person and be all sweetness and light, even though she had her foot on her child.' Eventually, when Sinead was eight, Sean left his wife because of the way she treated the children and became the first man in Irish legal history to be granted custody. But Sinead and her young brother were very disturbed by this.
'Our mother used to cry and say she loved us. We felt guilty about leaving her, so we went back.' Things only got worse as Marie took refuge from the world in Roman Catholicism, valium, alcohol and terrorising her children. 'Our father was supposed to see us every four months, but she told us he didn't want to see us any more and she told him that we didn't want to see him. He was brokenhearted,' says Sinead.
Trapped in this dark world, Sinead composed her own composite parents in the form of God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
'Thank f*** Ireland was religious,' she says in a rather un-priestly way. 'I had this huge thing with the Virgin Mary and I used to sit alone in my room praying for the Holy Spirit for help.' Not quite enough, though. At 13, she finally ran away to join her father, but it was really too late for her to be a settled schoolgirl.
She began stealing and was sent to a college for girls with behavioural problems, then to a Quaker school. She left without taking exams and, like many youngsters on the loose, ended up in London.
Sinead joined a band and was quickly signed by Ensign Records.
By 24, she was an international hit, when her single Nothing Compares 2U went to Number One in 17 countries. Even her father, who had always known she had a good voice, was astonished.
It must have seemed as if all her adolescent prayers had been answered at once, but her internal struggles were made worse by fame. 'My self-esteem was really low,' she says. 'Even when I was hugely successful I didn't feel I had any power, I had no sense of myself and I didn't believe anyone wanted to be with me because of who I really am.' She thinks even her famous baldness was connected to her experience of child abuse.
'It was about hating my feminine self,' she says. 'I wasn't comfortable with my womanhood. If anyone fancied me, or I was attracted to someone, I used to feel very uneasy.
'I was a ball of fear, acting tough but feeling total panic. My image and music were shouting about things that had happened to me, and trying to overcome my grief and terror.' BUT IT seems that time, therapy, her religious faith and the love of a good man have healed her. 'Now I've come through all that and I am ready for a good relationship,' she says. 'You know when you've met the right man. All I want to do is have more babies and look after my husband.' Sinead has even come to terms with the memory of her mother, who died in a car crash in 1985.
'She was a sadist, a rabid animal,' she says. 'These days she wouldn't be let near any children, but I forgive her because I realise now that she didn't really know what she was doing.
'I remember that she taught me to make cakes and I know I am becoming more like her as I get older, but only in the nice ways.
'I wouldn't change anything as I have learned so much from the past. Abused people don't have to become abusers themselves. I'm a very cuddly mother, a pushover, no good at discipline.
'What I want to be remembered for is as a loving mother.'