I spent an hour with Sinéad O'Connor over lunch at her Kensington hotel in July 2014, to discuss her album I'm Not Bossy, I'm The Boss. I don't know if the record company had booked the restaurant out, but we were the only two there. Or so I recall. That's definitely what it felt like. We sat opposite each other, and I remember her smile and her blazer and her tattoos and her quietness - she was softly spoken - it all felt so intimate. Yet, reading back over it now, what power. Most of the interview was me pushing back - maybe a bit too much? - on her insistence that this new album wasn't autobiographical. I didn't believe it. And I'm pretty sure that a couple of years later she admitted elsewhere that it was really quite autobiographical after all, but she hadn't wanted to get into all of that with the press at the time. I think the truth came through in our interview regardless. She was everything I could have possibly wanted - open and honest and just really fucking funny. Not a bit of bullshit in sight. A dream. The dream.
I'm shellshocked, now, in July 2023, to know that that would be her final album. As a journalist, doing hundreds of these things over years and years, so many interviews just vanish from your mind. I never forgot this one. I'll never forget it. How lucky I was to spend the time with her. How lucky we all were to have her.
Sinéad in 2014. Photo by Donal Moloney
This album seems to me like part two after How About I Be Me (And You Be You). Were they recorded closely together?
No. Not at all. But… it’s not so much part two, but it definitely has links, yeah.
Musically it feels like it’s from the same place.
Yeah. I seem to have changed – without necessarily meaning to – the platform from which I wrote songs. Starting with the last album. They became almost character songs that weren’t necessarily autobiographical. Which meant a certain freedom. When I was younger I was writing songs because I had to get shit off my chest. But once I got the shit off my chest and shut down a bit and then made the three records, the rasta record [Throw Down Your Arms] and the Irish traditional record [Sean-Nós Nua] and Theology, those records weren’t about my life and that was good, it meant I could shut down that part. So with the last record and this there’s a different platform. Is what I’m trying to say, basically. I’m saying it in a very long-winded way.
I took that last record to my heart. Some of the songs felt really cinematic. Lots of imagery.
Yeah, good. Because some of them were written on the basis of scripts I had read, some of them were inspired by movie scripts, so I’m glad that came across.
That’s how it came across to me, maybe because of them being less autobiographical-
Yeah, you kind of invent characters.
‘Take Off Your Shoes’ gives me the shivers, because it’s terrifying.
Yeah, good! That’s the whole idea, it’s supposed to be scary.
It really is, and it takes me to the place you’re singing about, it scares the shit out of me really.
Good, good, that’s what it’s supposed to do, I’m pleased! That’s good. Very happy with that. The character in that song is supposed to be the Holy Spirit talking to the Vatican, so the object of the game is to scare the shit out of them. The object of the character’s game, their motivation. I’m quite pleased if it comes across as quite scary.
Have you heard anything from the sort of people you wanted to hear that song?
No, because I don’t actually write them for other people, I’ve not written it in the hope that anybody will hear it. The only reason you should ever make a record is you’re gonna go mad if you don’t. If you’re starting to communicate with anybody outside of yourself or you’re doing it for any other reason you probably shouldn’t be doing it. I think the difference perhaps between entertainers and artists, not that one is better than the other, that’s not the case, but perhaps an artist is someone who’s more expressing themselves, perhaps even narcissistically, communicating with themselves the whole time. And that perhaps can seize upon a zeitgeist or whatever, other people can identify with it. But with a character like that [in ‘Take Off Your Shoes’], if you’re consciously thinking that the Vatican are gonna hear the record, you’re fucked. You’re playing the character because you’re gonna lose your mind if you don’t.
These two albums seem like they’re just you being you.
Yeah, it’s a different platform. It’s just somebody writing from a completely different platform and creating characters and perhaps not having a whole load of shit to get off their chest, perhaps a bit more freed up to be the type of writer and performer they would have been had there not been a whole load of shit to get off their chest.
You’ve said elsewhere that this isn’t an autobiographical album, but to me that sounds like a generalisation. Maybe they’re not about you per se, but it all comes from you, and surely still comes from your perspective and experiences.
Yeah, what I mean is they’re not about my life, I haven’t necessarily experienced the things that the characters are talking about. One of my favourite songs on there is ‘Voice Of My Doctor’, I love that character. No, I haven’t experienced what that character’s experienced, but something in me can still identify with the feeling of it enough to deliver it. But it’s not about anything particularly that happened to me. I suppose it’s like being an actor, where you couldn’t play a part if a part of you wasn’t in a character. It’s the Stanislavski method singing and songwriting basically, creating a character and playing it.
You’ve got to understand and empathise with the character enough to make it work.
Yeah, which you can. But if you take the word ‘autobiographical’ literally, which I am, ‘this happened to this person’... it’s just inventions or things you’ve seen or read or wish you’d seen or read.
Would you say most of what you’ve written in the past autobiographical?
I would say it’s completely autobiographical, yeah.
So why the sudden line drawn? Was there a conscious decision to stop writing songs like that, or do you just have less of yourself to put in now?
No, I think what it was was, the reason I was writing songs in the first place was, the way that I had grown up in ‘70s Ireland, and we all know what that was like, and I’d grown up in a very abusive set of circumstances, there was no such thing as therapy, music was my way out, and it was perhaps therapy. There was a whole load of shit to get off one’s chest. And I think literally what happened was I did that, and got it off my chest, so then all that was left to express was the stuff that I would have expressed had I not had all of the shit on top of me. Had I been born in The Little House On The Prairie I would have just started making records like the last record or this record. The object of your game when you go to get shit off your chest is that one day it will be off your chest. And I think that’s what happened, I reached the point where it was off my chest.
Maybe it took longer than expected.
No. It didn’t take very long really, in the great scheme of things.
Yeah, but in the scheme of what it was I was recovering from, that’s not very long to be honest.
I mean to get yourself free at all, creatively speaking, is quite miraculous. However long it takes.
‘Take Me To Church’ is a brilliant pop song, but what you’re singing about is a big statement, especially for a first single off an album, and it certainly sounds like you’re saying something about yourself. In fact in context of what we’ve been discussing, it sounds like you’re saying, “I’m not doing that anymore. This is who I am now and this is what I’m doing from now on.”
One could say that! One could say that, yeah. It’s funny, you might go to write a character and fucking can somehow accidentally echo your own thing. It’s really more when you listen to the album in sequence, in context... I’m from the ‘70s when records had a sequence and perhaps a story across an album, as opposed to separate tracks. There are approximately three or four female characters on this record. One of them appears more often than the others, and that character in particular is sort of the centrepiece of the record. It’s really a record about... illusions and not illusions, put it that way, romantically speaking, it’s a very romantic record, it’s a pop record basically. The character is maturing in a way when it comes to attitudes towards romantic shit. ‘Take Me To Church’ is the moment one’s illusions get shattered, except it’s a great thing. It’s more the character really talking about not necessarily wanting to be the silly type of romantic, which is a quite dangerous thing to be perhaps. But I don’t write songs about Sinéad O’Connor. That’d be really uncool. I really don’t.
But you’ve done it before and it wasn’t uncool.
Well no, because I never was writing about Sinéad O’Connor as such.
You mean the public concept of Sinéad O’Connor.
Yeah. It’s always a weird thing to talk about, music, because if you could talk about it you wouldn’t need it. So it’s always a very hard thing to describe. It’s a very hard thing to describe what a character means in one song when really that song is part of a whole journey in a way, it’s like taking a page out of a play and saying, “What are you saying with this one page?” It’s her pivotal moment, this particular character. It could equally be a male character, it just happens to be female.
The album sounds like it’s made by someone in love with life. Musically at least, it’s not a dark album, it feels very positive, and even though some of the lyrics are about longing or desperation or getting fucked over-
Well they’re not all about that, even the longing ones like ‘Your Green Jacket’, that’s very romantic, it’s very positive. I wouldn’t see it as a dark album at all, there are a couple of dark moments where one of the characters gets a fright, but it ends up being a good thing because that’s how she can make her mind up to love herself more than anything else. Yeah, I think it’s quite a positive record. It’s a very romantic record.
Yeah, and despite it not being autobiographical, it sounds very positive and comfortable. So in that way I would imagine it does represent what you’re up to.
Yeah, exactly. I’m comfortable and free to a point where I can enjoy playing these characters and writing these characters and just rocking the fuck out and having a laugh. Obviously they’re coming from me, it was my intention to make a romantic record, all of the feelings expressed are expressed the way I would express them. There are characters but I suppose it is a fine line, it’s just that the experiences they’re uttering are not my experiences, but they’re my feelings.
Yeah, it’s a hard thing to explain. In a way you’ve got to go out of your way to say that things are not autobiographical because you don’t want anyone else offended who might be implicated in matters! Sometimes you might have taken essences of situations and created something else with them. As songwriters we kind of milk life for songs. We have to be careful! ‘Faction’ is what my brother says, he’s a novel writer, he says what he writes is faction. And I guess that would probably describe what I do.
I was wondering if writing an album like this a sort of process of self-fulfilling prophecy, becoming what you want to be by writing and performing it.
Yeah, I mean... What’s the best way to put it... The only reason as I say for having expressed any of the other more painful stuff musically is because that’s what was going on. The only reason you bother doing that is because you believe that some day it’ll be over if you do. So when it’s over, yeah... I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh I must create a happy loving album,’ my life was happy and loving, and that’s where I was, I’ve been listening to Chicago blues for the last two years, which I love, funky happy blues, I had a great band around at the time, a great guitar player, there just happened to be some great musicians around and a whole lot of shit came together. And I was musically having the time of my life, that’s what was behind it I think. Because the whole tour that I did last year was the best musical fun I ever had. So I think what happened was I fell really madly in love with music, and I’d always quite liked it but I’d never fallen madly in love with it. So it didn’t need to be that I had to create a prophecy for myself, except... you’re not entirely out of the arena with a song like ‘Take Me To Church’, even though it’s a character to some extent, I was aware writing that song that what you write is what you create. So I deliberately wanted to create the type of life that perhaps I want the character to have, and that also somewhere in me I must want also. That was the only song I’ve ever written where I wrote that with that in mind, that this shit will come true in my life.
Ah, so I wasn’t completely off.
No, not at all, no. But obviously look, you can’t trust a fucking thing a musician will tell you as to what songs are about or not about. Bob Dylan had everyone believing he grew up in a circus for a while. We’re not at liberty to be 100% honest.
Also it fucks things up for the audience. If you hear what was in the mind of your favourite poet when he wrote your favourite poem he’d fuck it up for you forever, because next time you hear the poem you’ll be in his head and not yours. If you tell people what songs are about there are a whole load of dangers involved. The most important being you take away from the audience the right to project onto the song what they think it means to them. I don’t wanna know what Bob Dylan is talking about because I can’t imagine then what he’s talking about, I can’t imagine he’s talking to me. If he told me he was talking to that fat bird around the corner I can’t imagine he was talking to me.
Lines like, “I love to make music but my head got wrecked by the business” – it’s hard to hear that and accept that it’s not autobiographical.
Oh yeah, no, ‘Eight Good Reasons’ and ‘How About I Be Me’ are extremely autobiographical. The other songs not so much so, but there are glimpses obviously.
I took some solace in that line about being wrecked by the business being past tense. Is that right?
During those 25 years or so when you were getting everything out of your system with your music, did it feel like catharsis, did it work for you on a sort of physical level?
It actually did, very much so. That’s the way singers are and that’s the way we’re built, we need to vocalise shit, and certainly for abuse survivors the issue is voice, that you didn’t get to voice yourself. So it was very lucky to be in a situation where one could voice oneself, because so much of what goes on with abuse also it isn’t verbal, and sometimes it’s pre-verbal. There aren’t words, only sounds. And it you’re a person who responds to sound as a recovery method, which I did obviously because that’s the way I’m programmed, and I didn’t have any option because I was in ‘70s and early ‘80s Ireland where there was no therapy anyway. So yeah, it got it all out of my body, and the thing with abuse also is it’s the body that’s been wounded, so you can do all the therapy in your head but the last stage of recovery is getting it out of the body, so if you can be doing that as you’re going along... Sound is a very powerful way of getting shit out of your body. So there definitely did come a point where it was gone. And that was quite wonderful. I didn’t actually expect it to be gone so soon to be honest. You’re saying 25 years is a long time, that’s fuckin’ no time [laughs]. That’s fuckin’ no time. I thought it would take a very long time.
There’s also… You were very active on Twitter for a year or two, but it’s now an HQ promo account, it’s not personal. Is that choice, to not give people access to that part of you, connected to the less autobiographical musical approach? Does it all tie in?
Insofar as I’ve deliberately decided to go quiet on all fronts other than music while I’ve got an album coming out... I’m sensible enough I suppose to keep all distractions out the picture.
Was Twitter a distraction?
It becomes a distraction. Anything that you do outside of music becomes a distraction. Unfortunately you’re followed by every fuckin’ newspaper in town, or if you write something on your site or whatever, and that’s fine, it’s as it should be, I have no problem with it generally, but while I’m trying to focus on music I’d rather not have any distractions. So it’s best to avoid the Twitter. Anyway I like dipping in and out of Twitter, Twitter’s the type of thing you couldn’t spend your daily life on. Anything I wrote about anything anywhere else would be a distraction. I actually do write a tour diary most nights, there’s a section on my site called Tour Musings, but I don’t actually put it in there, I’ll save it and use it some other time. But even those things would be a distraction, somebody will be writing about the fact that you wrote about menstruating rather than writing about your album. There’s a lot about menstruating in my tour diaries.
Yeah. It’s a big issue for women like me. That’s what I mean, that’s why I keep off Twitter, off everything while I’ve got a record coming out because otherwise everything will be about menstruation and not my great record.
Has that annoyed you over the years, that things non-related to your music have got the headlines.
Yeah but look, I’m 50% responsible for that. There are two of us in that relationship, me and the media, so we both have 50% responsibility. That’s the way it was and that’s the way it is. So now I really try to keep things separate. So if there’s extra-curricular stuff I wanna rant on about, I’ll do that on my site. I try as much as possible to avoid talking about that shit when I’m trying to flog records.
When you were on Twitter did you interact with people?
Oh yeah. I still have really good friends I met on Twitter that I’ve never actually met but we’re really good mates. Yeah yeah yeah. Then you get in rows with people. The best thing about Twitter is you can block people, which you can’t do in life, it’s fucking great, just press Block, it’s fucking the greatest feeling ever. It’s so good! I nearly go on there just to block people, it’s brilliant. The day that you’ve learnt not to respond to a troll and just block and move on, it’s better than therapy actually. You know that you genuinely stopped giving a flying fuck what anyone thinks.
I know exactly what you mean because a guy who was harassing me a lot on email, and I didn’t know you could do it but-
Divert his emails to Trash.
Yeah! I told him I was doing it.
Was it something you wrote that he didn’t like?
I wrote a really positive piece and he interpreted it all as negative. He’s clearly a troubled guy and he probably needs help.
Yeah but you don’t have to put up with this shit. It’s great when you can divert people. I do that as well. Because then you never know they wrote to you. And it’s brilliant because they think that you’re ignoring them. A big mistake is to tell them you’re diverting them, because then they set up fake email addresses and abuse you from that. But also if you just divert them to Trash but don’t tell them, they think that you’re stronger than you really are because you’ve ignored them.
I didn’t care how strong he thought I was, I just wanted him out of my life.
No I always got off on them thinking that I’ve been strong enough not to react. Which I would never be. But if I ever told anyone that I was diverting them they’d set up a fake email address.
Video directed by James Lees.
I loved the video for ‘Take Me To Church’, which my friend directed. He loved working with you. I saw the behind-the-scenes video yesterday.
I haven’t seen that, I’m afraid to watch it.
I’m afraid to watch any of it because I’d be mortified at the state of me in the wig and the dress. I’m afraid of it.
In terms of the wigs – you’re wearing wigs in the new promo shoots and the… is it PVC?
It’s latex. Just get that right because the woman who made the dress is rightly extremely upset that everyone has not noticed that it’s latex.
No, PVC is cheap. Latex is very expensive.
Well connecting again to the lyrics and the non-Twitter activity, with these promo photos it’s almost like you’re wearing a disguise, or even a shield.
It could be the opposite though actually. To some extent. The thing is I’ve never really written love songs before, no one has actually clicked, perhaps including me, that I am actually a woman. That underneath this there is actually a woman.
What do you mean?! That’s not true.
No, do you know what I mean... I’ve always written and sang and performed and been the kind of warrior woman, and that’s great, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I never actually was the other woman. It wasn’t supposed to be the cover, it was just a few publicity shots, and I thought, ‘Let’s throw in some hair and some sexy dresses and we’ll get loads of publicity for the record, it wasn’t meant to be the cover. But in a way it sounds like the woman that made the record, and that’s me obviously, those are aspects of myself. So in a way it could be the opposite of a disguise, it could actually be more a revealing of something. And this [gestures to herself] is a disguise actually.
Yeah. Very much so, yeah.
Because... what’s the best way to put it... for protective purposes, put it that way. Soft girls have to act a lot tougher than they really are.
You mean like wearing this suit jacket?
No, the shaved hair, everything, all of that. It’s been safer to wander the world as a female looking like this than it would have been to be a female looking like, whatever. So in one way you could argue that the shaved hair and all of that is in fact the disguise. That’s all I’m saying. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the latex woman is a disguise. The dresses are mine, put it that way. The hair is not mine, but I would wear those clothes.
Okay. What was the original plan for the cover art?
It was just a picture of my ugly mug in front of a picture of Vishnu. I don’t know quite what I mean... the record’s very romantic and there are all these different women, or different aspects of women in a very romantic womanist kind of way, so it’s not that it’s a vulnerable record, but it’s a record perhaps from a more... Nobody’s really seen I think that particularly feminine part of me, other than the warrior feminine. And I’ve never been particularly comfortable with displaying that I’m actually a female [laughs], particularly other than the warrior female. In a way yeah, it’s not a disguise, it’s the opposite.
That’s amazing. Okay. So the opening track, ‘How About I Be Me And You Be You’, you say is autobiographical, and-
Can we just clarify something about ‘Take Me To Church’, it’s not actually about church, everybody thinks it’s about church – I can’t imagine why. It’s not. It’s only referencing that song from My Fair Lady when the main character’s father’s going to get married and he sings “Get me to church on time.” It’s really about relationships, the song’s saying that it’s all very well being married and all, but love is a thing that hurts.
Okay. So ‘How About I Be Me And You Be You’, does that relate to what we’ve been talking about? Although I think, on reflection now, I’m confused about what that song’s about.
I’ll tell you what it is, it’s hard not to be confused. I wrote these three articles three or so years ago for an Irish newspaper and they were actually quite funny, they were funny articles, it started as one article, because I’d read this piece about a woman who married her truck.
Her truck. And I had no boyfriend at the time and I wrote this very funny article about was this gonna happen to me, I was gonna end up marrying my fuckin’ truck because there were no fellas around, then it ended up being, it was such a scandal in Ireland that a woman would talk about sex and talk about such things, that the child in me got more bold the more scandal there was, I wrote another one, and then another one, so there were these three articles that were actually very funny but got portrayed as if it was some lunatic, purely because women aren’t supposed to talk about shagging bananas or whatever. It did generate my favourite headline ever, which is ‘Sinéad Admits Sex With Popular Fruit,’ which I thought was fuckin’ hilarious. Apart from ‘Tweet Revenge.’ So yeah, there was all scandal and outrage and how awful it is that a woman would talk like that. So that’s what I wrote this song about, it was actually a response to the kind of sexually repressed Twatterati in Ireland.
Okay. I got that, and I was thinking that it was a comment on what happens when you are yourself and open to people and how it was received – it’s the first song on the album, so I thought it was you saying, “If this is what happens when I’m myself, then I’m now gonna close off,” and then the rest of the songs aren’t so personal.
Oh no, no... they’re factional. One can be extremely personal but not be writing about oneself.
It’s a very hard thing to describe. Really it’s just a romantic song, it’s just saying, why would you be bothered writing about sex and love and giving out that you haven’t got a boyfriend and crying that you might have to shag bananas for the rest of your life. It’s more about saying, look, whatever anyone might say you should be at the end of the day, you’re just a little 5ft4 female the same as any other 5ft4 female. That’s what the whole record is really, it’s just love songs, just pop little love songs for some little tiny woman.
Do you think it’s bad for you to be sitting with someone like me prodding at everything and deconstructing it more than maybe you think it needs?
No I think it’s natural and to some extent that’s what we got taught to do at school, deconstruct things. I think it’s natural, especially if you’re an artist who has traditionally been very autobiographical and very open and perhaps a little too honest about what things are about or not about. No, there’s nothing wrong with it and I don’t find it difficult or a pain in the arse, the difficult bit is lying your way around it [laughs].
Given that you say there are three different female characters on the album, that seems to be a musing on the different parts of our personalities, and the fact that when you’re telling stories as you are, you can siphon off different parts of yourself and attribute them to different people for the purposes of saying different things. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it very much does, it very much does. Absolutely. I suppose it goes back that thing, a writer couldn’t create characters unless those characters were somehow part of themselves. Even if they’re not at the point that they’re created, they certainly stay in you once you’ve created you. The character becomes a part of you.
Okay one more question. You started off busking, is that right?
Yeah, well I did do a lot of busking.
So in terms of everything that’s happened since then, your career, life, media, being part of the music industry, when you’re singing are you still just that person busking, is it still just you getting joy out of the music? Or has it all been corrupted and jaded by all the baggage that comes with it.
No, it’s always the person that went busking, but it’s better than the person who went busking, because it’s the person that went busking and then fell in love with all these other musicians, the Chicago blues stuff or whatever. It’s a person who’s in love with performing live. I get real inspired by all the Chicago blues guys, I watch them performing live and it makes me wanna perform live. I think there’s something in me, I don’t know if it’s the same with other musicians, but I just love performing live, I couldn’t give a shit who or what the audience is, it could be a street with nobody in it or it could be a stage with a bunch of people. It’s getting off on making music, and the feeling you get, the adrenaline, the excitement, it’s all a bit of a drug. All the feelings you get when you’re making music.
And that’s never gone away.
No. Not at all. It’s obviously nicer in the studio than it is in the street in the winter, but otherwise it’s the same thing. In fact I definitely get more excited about making music as I’ve got older.
Well I don’t know that I appreciated the fun it could be when I was younger. Because I was real shy. And I still am, insofar as I have to close my eyes when I’m singing, I can’t look at the audience or I’m fucked. I used to be quite crippled with shyness whereas now I relax and just have fun and even tell inappropriate jokes in-between songs or whatever. Relax and get off on it. I used to be a deer in the headlights, but now I get off on it and think of how lucky I am to be making music. I like to watch Howlin’ Wolf before I go on, I watch a lot of his live stuff on YouTube, he’s just so fuckin’ funky that you think, “Oh my god, I’m getting to do a Howlin’ Wolf gig.” It just makes you excited.
Photo from Sinéad O'Connor's official Facebook page.
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