The Blindboy Podcast - Sinéad O'Connor

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

I chat with singer and songwriter Sinéad O'Connor/ Shuhada’ Sadaqat about her new book "Rememberings" We speak about art, the creative process, and religion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast, you stewing newins. I have a special treat for you this week because I, this podcast is me having a chat with the legendary Sinead O'Connor, also known as Shuhada Sadaquat. So I've got a lovely chat with Sinead if you're here just to hear Sinead O'Connor and you don't want to listen to me and you don't know who the fuck I am that's absolutely fine you just fast forward to about 25 minutes in for everyone else who wants to listen to me speak I need to have a small little bit of a rant before I get into the the chat with Sine O'Connor. So I had a bit of an eventful week this week and a controversial one because the Irish Independent, which is a large newspaper in Ireland, they published this opinion piece on Sunday written by a journalist and the opinion

piece was, it was critical of people in Ireland speaking about mental health who don't have qualifications in mental health basically people who aren't experts speaking about mental health in a public forum and it took particular swipes at me now I don't mind if someone's

like critiquing me an opinion columnist is entitled to fucking critique and offer opinions on me or anything i'm doing that's not the issue the column really i felt i was disappointed with it because it really misrepresented what i do the headline of the article was our pop mental health gurus are just blind by leading the blind and i was really disappointed with the article not because it criticized me but because it it it misrepresented what I do um like a mental health guru is someone who positions themselves themselves as an expert who is someone who says I have the solution. You must listen to me, listen to my solution and follow me and pay me money to hear my solution. That's what mental health gurus do. Now, I don't do that because I'm not a bollocks.

I'm not a prick. That's what arseholes do. And when I speak about mental health in this podcast, every time I always have a duty of care where I say to you, I'm not an expert. I am not an expert. What I am is I'm going to speak about my own experiences. with mental health issues and I use tools that I learned through training and through being in therapy that I use every single day to help me and what I'm going to do is speak about how I use these things to help me and then if you want to listen and if you get something from it then fair play to you but ultimately the only responsible and safe thing I can do is speak about my emotions, my experiences. And that's what I do. And I'm not qualified in psychology or mental health. I studied it for three years.

I studied psychotherapy, but I didn't finish my qualification. So therefore, I'm not qualified. But I tell you one thing that that three years of study gave me. I know when to shut the fuck up. I know what the boundaries of responsible mental health speak and irresponsible mental health speak are. I know what those boundaries are, so I don't fucking cross them. You'll never hear me speak about suicide. You'll never hear me speak about medication you'll never hear me speak about medication

I don't speak about mental illness what I will do in these situations is I'll bring on an expert I'll get an expert in their field to come on to this podcast and speak to me about those issues, trauma if I want to speak about trauma

I'm not going to say shit about it what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring on Dr Sharon Lambert who's an expert in trauma the brain, neuroscience I'll bring on Dr Sabina Brennan psychiatry, medication, pharmaceuticals I speak to Dr Pat Bracken

I bring experts onto this podcast when I want to discuss issues that would be really irresponsible and unsafe for me to discuss. I'm not saying anything to do with mental health. I'm not saying that I have fucking solutions. I don't do any of the things that a fucking guru does. And most importantly, I wear my fallibility. On my fucking. On my sleeve.

What could be more fallible than saying. I'm not a fucking expert. Don't listen to me. But you can listen to me speak about my personal experience. If you like. So it was a disappointing article. And I ended up becoming the top trending. Fucking subject on Twitter.

Which isn't very enjoyable. When you're actively trying to get the fuck away from Twitter 99% of the responses were people in support of me and it was great to see experts in psychology in Ireland come out in support of me and say I listen to Blind Boys podcast and he's not being unethical with mental health and that's another important thing to remember too loads of experts listen to this podcast a lot of experts in mental health listen to this podcast and I haven't slipped up yet but if I fucking did slip up one of them would contact me immediately and say that thing you said on this week's podcast you shouldn't have said that that's what would happen so I have this I have an extra barrier of

informal professional regulation there but I don't really have to worry about that because I'm 100% confident that the way I speak about mental health in this podcast is ethical and safe and responsible. I really stand over anything I've ever said. And why am I speaking about it? You know, I tend to just, I tend to ignore, we'll say bad reviews and things like that. I have to say it because this is a huge newspaper and they've misrepresented me. They've misrepresented what I do. And I don't think the've misrepresented what I do and I don't think the journalist in question was being mean I don't think they were being mean there's a few like shitty comments in there but that's that's what an opinion columnist does if an opinion

columnist is critiquing you they're going to put in some shitty comments that's part of the game that's fine I don't think they were being mean. I think they're simply, they weren't informed about what I do. And it's because of this, so there's this weird thing in the Irish media space. I don't think it's just Irish, it's global. I went into this exact issue in detail on a podcast a few months back called Crosby, Stills and Hash.

So listen back to that. But what's happening with the media space in Ireland is you have what I'd call establishment media which is television radio newspapers media that's been around a long time you have establishment media and then you have what I do which is online media. But there's a huge gulf between the two and it's widening. So there's people in this country who just read newspapers and just watch TV and just listen to radio. And to these people, they're not aware of my existence at all. They don't know that I've got a fucking podcast

that has nearly 30 million listens in three fucking years they're not aware of these things they're not even aware that I have a fucking BBC series because it's over in England so to these people they're sitting down watching TV and then every so often once or twice a year this lunatic with a plastic bag on his head comes on the television and speaks about mental health. And it terrifies a lot of people. Because they're like, isn't that fella from 10 years ago who had that song about the horse?

Because that's the last time they remember me being a part of establishment media. So people who are more conservative or older, they have a big problem with me. They're like, who is this fella with a plastic bag on his head speaking about mental health? Why do we listen to him? Who is he? Like also this week I was really coming under heavy fire online from Catholics.

In particular, some fella, he's like editor of this giant Catholic newspaper or something and he was having a pop at me for wearing a bag and giving out that I'm wearing a bag in my head. And I'm like where's this coming from? Why the fuck are all the Catholics pissed off all of a sudden? And then I realised RTE had

replayed my episode where I speak to Joe Duffy about religion. So it's like. Oh okay. They got their twice yearly dose of blind buy. On the telly. And they're fucking enraged. Because they're like.

Who is this irrelevant plastic bag. Asshole. How is he. Why should we listen to him. Where did he come from. I'm terrified. And it makes certain people get very reactionary and angry when they see me on TV. And I think that was the situation with

this journalist who wrote the article, because what they were commenting on, it wasn't this podcast. It was, I went on to the Claire Barnes show last week, which is a, it's a nighttime current affairs show, quite a serious political show they gave me a call blind by will you come on for 10 minutes and will you come on for 5 minutes and speak about your mental health experience during the lockdown so I said yeah so another problem with establishment

media is you've got 5 fucking minutes to talk about something very complex so in order to do that I keep it mad simple very very simple and basic so that it can help someone who's listening or engage them. So the critical article that was written about me was written about my appearance on that. They said that I'm basically talking out of my arse that I just read Wikipedia and listened to a few Jordan Peterson videos.

I don't listen to fucking Jordan Peterson, you know well. So the most bizarre thing about the article is that the journalist tried to give me a compliment by saying he shouldn't be talking about mental health, but he's a really talented artist, but we haven't seen his art in many years because of cancel culture. So the journalist thinks that,

oh, Blind Boy from Horse Outside in 2010 on the television, he mustn't make any music anymore because cancel culture won't let him. So now all he does is come on the TV twice a year to talk about mental health. Now the article does call me a podcaster but I don't think the journalist has listened to my podcast because if they did they wouldn't have written that article. listen to my podcast because if they did they wouldn't have written that article um i don't think they're aware that i've written two books in the past four fucking years that has nothing to do with mental health books of fiction they don't know i'm making music on twitch every week they don't know about my bbc series over in the uk because it's an in the uk on the bbc player but none of this gets represented or recorded in ir Irish establishment media because it hasn't happened on Irish establishment media. So I think this journalist was just firmly entrenched in what they see on traditional media and hadn't done a hell of a lot of research on what I'm actually doing online.

If they'd actually listened to this podcast or knew what the podcast is about, they'd have never said it because they'd hear me speaking about mental health they'd see that I'm like one of the angles of the article was we don't listen to experts enough and I agree with that but my podcast I've given more fucking air time to experts

in psychology than I'd say any of Irish television has done in the past fucking year like why why doesn't someone write an article in establishment media that says this week Blind Boy sat down with an expert in mental health

they spoke for an hour and a half and more people listened to it than watched the Late Late Show this week it's just fucking nuts it's bizarre but then I go on Claire Byrne for five minutes, speak about mental health in the most simple terms possible because I've got five minutes and it's worthy of a Sunday opinion column which critiques how simple my message was

but doesn't take into account that it's simple because I've got five fucking minutes because that's how TV works. So the whole thing boils down to this really weird problem that we have that I can't understand. Where establishment media will only recognize the words of somebody if it has occurred on another form of establishment media. And if anything happens outside of establishment media if it happens on online media then it doesn't exist and i see takes like this every week on facebook right every week on facebook someone's dad writes who's this fucking idiot with a plastic bag on his head he should stick to doing songs about horses in 2010 who made him an authority on mental health now i don't give a fuck when that's a facebook comment that's part of my now i don't give a fuck when that's a facebook comment

that's part of my job i don't give a shit about that that that person's dad's entitled to write that comment but i just i don't like it when it's when those views are represented in an opinion column in a large newspaper that's referring to me as a guru It's like don't pay attention to the five minutes on Claire Byrne. Pay attention to the hours and hours of much more in-depth work. With representation from proper professionals. That I'm putting out. For free. To a fucking way, way bigger audience.

Way bigger audience than whoever saw me on that TV show. Surely that's what should actually matter. That's what's more relevant. That's what more people are choosing to hear. And I agree with some of the points in the article. I don't agree with the, I don't think we should be hearing less from people's lived experience with mental health. Okay. It's very important for people to speak about their mental health, to speak about their personal experiences because it normalizes conversation and through normalizing conversation, we destigmatize it and through destigmatizing people have more of a chance to try and help themselves or try to access services. agree that we need to hear more from experts but you need to open up your ears and search in different places we're actually hearing loads from experts in the podcast space not just my podcast many podcasts television can't provide the space that podcasts can provide for very large robust

in-depth mental health conversations. It just can't. There's too many adverts. It needs to slot into a time. Television will figure out a way, and I say this as someone who works in TV, TV will figure out a way to fuck it up, to simplify it down so that it's not engaging.

Podcasts can go on for three hours. They can be unedited, full conversations. They're a lot more engaging and these conversations are happening on podcasts or on youtube but tv just simply can't provide the same space now how do i know this one of the things the article critiques me for is the journalist doesn't like me speaking about psychology but also doesn't like me speaking about philosophy. I've got a master's degree. I have a master's degree that covered critical theory so I am actually qualified to critique culture and society using philosophy. Does that make me an expert? I don't think it makes me an expert but it qualifies me to teach at third level which to me makes it okay to speak about philosophy on tv or on a podcast and in 2017 i made a tv show called the rubber bandits guide

to reality and it was a half an hour in which i tried to cram in a history of western philosophy into a fucking half an hour and i did my very best but was it the best I could have done absolutely not why because the format of television does not allow the space for the complexity and nuance required for such large conversations so instead I do it on my fucking podcast where I can speak as long as I like and it's far more effective and here's the most important thing. And this is, I think, where we all need to direct kind of constructive anger. Having conversations about whether there's enough experts on television or should we be listening to podcasts about mental health. Let's look at the structural issue here.

It is a bad thing that people listen to my podcast for in lieu of mental health services because i know that i get mails from people that's what some people do people in this country can't access the mental health services that they need because these mental health services don't exist there's a structural failing where people cannot access the mental health services that they need so people in crisis are turning to fucking podcasts and listening to me who isn't qualified speaking about my lived experience and i'm going to continue doing it I'm going to continue speaking about mental health but let's improve the fucking mental health

system a systematic change needs to happen so that people are listening to podcasts about mental health alongside fucking robust services maybe they won't even need to

if they feel they're getting the services they need why would they possibly want to listen to a fucking podcast if they're given the opportunity to embark on their own personal journey with professionals that's what we need to be talking about this is just distracting shit and one

last thing, one last little thing so I'm continually receiving critique and the article mentioned it of speaking about mental health while wearing a plastic bag on my head this makes people this makes some people very very angry towards me

that I speak about serious issues while at the same time looking like a fucking clown and people demand take the bag off your head. Take that bag off your head if you're going to be talking about something serious. Be serious. And what I'll say is, these people, they only think they want me to be serious. They're not asking me to be serious.

What they're asking me to be is solemn. And to be solemn is to engage in the surface level performance of seriousness and solemnity and seriousness are not the same thing I can be really passionate and critical and caring about something as important as mental health while having a big silly bag on my head if I took the bag off and wore a suit, I'd be having the exact same conversations. I'd just be doing it in a more solemn fashion. And always be cautious around solemnity. Solemnity is the performance of seriousness. That's what politicians do. They can wear a suit. They can speak properly. They can have a lovely car.

They can perform what seriousness looks like. While lying or talking out of their fucking arse. Bullshitting. Our politicians who are failing to address the mental health crisis. Or failing to improve the structural issues that we have they're using solemnity as a tool to avoid conversation to not take it seriously to lie they're using solemnity i'm a politician i speak properly i'm in a fucking suit look at my office this isnity, the performance of seriousness,

which can be used as a trick. It can be used to trick us. Solemnity is used to trick us all the time. You look at the most solemn things in society, the military, the judicial system, religion, royalty. These are all institutions that use solemnity as a performance of seriousness to sell us something fundamentally absurd. And I'm capable of being serious about something and having authentic caring conversations around mental health without needing to be solemn. I can do all this while having a big silly bag on my head. And the thing is with solemnity, solemnity never allows fun, silliness, spontaneity, play or humour in because those things are the opposite of solemnity. And I would argue that for us to have authentic,

meaningful conversations about something as complex as mental health. You have to include the full gamut of human experience. And humour, fun, playfulness and spontaneity are a part of that. Mental health conversations must have some degree of fun and humour there. These are part of the human condition. So when you choose to remove elements of the human condition from mental health conversations, now you're not having an authentic conversation. You're having a solemn conversation. Another reason I wear a bag on my head is simply for privacy so that I can live a normal life. I have like a big enough profile that

I receive quite a lot of harassment and shitty talk online. It's just a fact of my life. I really like the fact that I can park that. That it just exists on my laptop and on my phone. I would hate to receive that amount of harassment

in a public space. I really wouldn't like that. That would be a living space I really wouldn't like that that would be a living hell I wouldn't like that one bit so that's one reason I wear a plastic bag second reason the plastic bag allows me to have much more honest conversations about my mental health last week I spoke about I was I was quite vulnerable last week. I spoke to you about things that are really bothering me. Personal things. I wouldn't do that if it meant going to Dunn stores later that day

and then a stranger coming up talking to me and saying I heard your podcast this morning where you spoke about some shit that you were really insecure about. I don't think I'd like that conversation in real life. That would be too much of a infiltration of my emotional boundaries so I simply wouldn't share my inner fears and inner insecurities and vulnerabilities online in case someone said it to me in a pub. I'm a human being. I'm a fucking human being. The same as yourself. My plastic bag allows me to express more honest vulnerability on this podcast because the risk, the risk is

lessened because people can't just see me in the shop. They don't know who the fuck I am. Also, my bag is an act of performance art. There's an element of performance art to it. art. There's an element of performance art to it. Performance art that critiques things like solemnity. Performance art that asks questions around data. This is something that will become more apparent over the next decade as facial recognition cameras become more normalized, which they will. And quite a lot of people will want to start wearing masks in public places to exercise consent around their facial data. So if I go on to a serious TV show to speak about issues of mental health or philosophy or whatever, yes I'm being sincere and I'm caring about what I'm speaking about but there's an element of performance art there and how is my performance of wearing this bag on my head any different

to the performance of an expert or a politician who has a persona that they use for television like every person who appears on a panel show to speak about a subject it could be a fucking trinity college professor speaking about their area of expertise they're also wearing a mask they're wearing a mask too and that mask is the performance that they have developed for how they speak on television and you know what if that performance that they've curated for themselves is too fucking solemn then they won't communicate with an audience their words may not ring true because their mask of being a big professional academic a solemn academic

is preventing authentic conversation so all of this is in my conscious awareness when I appear on a serious TV show with a fucking bag in my head so that's the 25 minute mark there now so if you're someone who's just here to listen to my conversation with Sinead O'Connor that meant that you fast

forwarded and you know what fair play to you because yeah if you don't know who I am the previous 25 minutes would have been quite a bizarre experience for you Sinead O'Connor who also go by the name Shuhada Sadaqat,

very kindly agreed to have a chat with me this week because she has a book coming out on the 1st of June. It's a memoir called Rememberings, which is an autobiography about her life and career which

I've read excerpts from and it's fantastic not only is it interesting to read if you're interested in Sinead's life and career the way it's written is fucking beautiful, it's a beautifully written book and you can't beat

a biography that's an autobiography one like an artist writing about their own life in their own words and bringing into this their talent and skill as a as a writer so it's it's really special. It's a special book. And I recommend you go out and get it. On June 1st. Rememberings by Sinead O'Connor. I've. I've admired Sinead for years. Sinead is.

One of the most important living Irish artists. She has consistently been. Original. And creative. In her music. throughout her career. Like even to the point at the Grammys in the early or in the late 80s I think it was. They had to invent a new category called postmodern just to decide what the fuck to call her music. She has drawn from multiple influences.

She's mixed reggae with Irish chanel singing. Hip hop, punk, just consistent artistic integrity. And the critical appraisal of her work often gets overshadowed instead in the media by

comments around her behavior or her mental health and I think this does a great injustice to the integrity of her art and my personal opinion I think it exists because of misogyny and male artists get to be called complicated geniuses or eccentric creatives. Whereas women artists who exhibit the same behaviour are questioned, chastised, paternalised and excluded. Also at multiple points in her career she's engaged in acts of protest. So at multiple points in her career, she's engaged in acts of protest. Protest around things that she believes in.

And not performative protest, but actual acts of protest that truly upset the structures that are being protested against, which is rare and risky. So this chat that I have with Sinead, I want to chat with Sinead the artist about art. So we speak about art. We speak about the creative process. Religion. That's what this conversation is.

When I speak to an artist that I respect. I want to hear about how they make art. And what art means to them. So I'm going to do a really quick ocarina pause now. So that I don't interrupt the chat with Sinead. For anyone who doesn't know what an ocarina pause is there might be a digitally inserted advert might come in

right now. So I play a Spanish clay whistle in order to fucking give you a little warning so you don't get surprised by some advert. surprised by some advert. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl.

Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. no don't the first omen i believe the girl is to be the mother mother of what is the most terrifying six six six it's the mark of the devil hey movie of the year it's not real it's not real who said that the first omen only theaters april 5th Who said that? The first O-Men. Only in theaters April 5th.

Okay, that was the Ocarina Pause. You would have heard a digitally inserted advert. I don't know what it was. It was algorithmically generated based on your search preferences. This podcast is supported by you, the listener, Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast alright this podcast is my full time job it's how I earn a living

I adore this work that I do I'm so happy to be doing it and my patrons make it possible for me to have the time to make this podcast so if you're enjoying this podcast if you're listening to it regularly please consider paying me for the work that i'm doing all i'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month being a patron as well means that i'm not beholden to any advertisers on this podcast no advertiser can tell me what to speak about or should i adjust

my content either way or don't talk about this do talk about that they can't do that because it's a fucking patreon so if someone wants to advertise on this podcast they have to do it on my terms and I can turn down quite a lot of advertisers too if I'm not into whatever they're doing okay but if you can't afford to be a patron that's fine don't worry about it you don't have to be a patron, that's fine. Don't worry about it. You don't have to be a patron. This podcast is free. It's free to everybody. And the model that I have, it's kind of based on kindness and soundness. So if you can afford to become a patron, then you're not only paying for your podcast,

you're paying for someone who can't afford the podcast. Everyone gets a podcast. I earn a living. What more do you want? All right. It's a lovely model keeps me happy and I have a sense of fucking security

and I'm getting paid for my work perfect catch me on twitch once a week Thursday nights half 8 twitch.tv

forward slash the blind buy podcast I'm making a a live a never ending live musical to the events of a video game

and it's good crack leave a review of the podcast share it with a friend that's really important especially if you're live, a never-ending live musical to the events of a video game. And it's good crack. Leave a review of the podcast. Share it with a friend. That's really important. Especially if you're not from Ireland. If you're from America or Canada or whatever. Tell a friend about this podcast.

And do the same for whatever independent podcast that you like. Podcasts are... Podcasts are nice because they're made by a small team of people who are genuinely passionate about what they're doing. a small team of people who are genuinely passionate about what they're doing okay and when you find one of these podcasts it's always important to support it and share it because the podcast space is starting to become flooded by a lot of new podcasts that have a lot of big money behind them and they're not necessarily being made from a place of passion and care so it's

important to support small independent podcasts because they're being pushed out of the space at the moment without further ado here is the conversation that i had with the absolutely fantastic and brilliant shenate o'connor it's gonna light a tag as well i've been dying to meet for years i've been tech or what do you call it tweeting you for years I've been tweeting you for years to say can I do the podcast I literally I thought that was someone pretending to be you I was like there's no fucking way

this is actually someone who wants to be on my podcast yeah man I've been secretly in love with you for years I've been dying to get on your fucking podcast no stop yeah totally thank you Sinead like that's mortifyingly humbling for me and I've been an admirer of your work for for years and the first thing I want to know about the first thing I want

to ask you is about your creative process about how you make your art and and what the creative process means for you like for me i i i achieve personal meaning through creativity if when i create something it can be a short story a song doing my podcast when i'm creating i have a sense of meaning and purpose and then i can achieve something close to happiness yeah how do you feel about creativity and your well-being? Well, I think I have the opposite perhaps to other people. I'm not inclined to be creative if I'm not well. I'm inclined to be creative when I am well. In terms of my process,

what I do is I don't sit down and try to write songs what happens is i'd be washing the dishes or doing some normal thing and a bit of a tune will start playing itself inside me so sometimes with words sometimes just melody sometimes just words and i'll leave it alone because i know that the following week when i'm pushing the pram around or doing the shopping another little bit do you ever hear the way whales sing their history yeah you know the way um the researchers believe that they're singing their history because every time a baby is born there seems to be another verse in the song you know well i there's a they did a study recently on whales that when uh humans started

to hunt whales in the north atlantic the amount of whales that started to get caught over time disappeared it wasn't because there was less whales it because the whales were able to establish a language and culture that could tell other whales about the danger of humans so they went somewhere else exactly well the thing what i that's what happens in me is basically the song will create itself over the course of a few months by sending me little bits inside myself at a time like and i won't sit down to work out the chords until the thing is already written inside me and i won't sing it until i get to the studio i've only sang it in my head but so that's my process

that is almost like my subconscious is creating the songs and all i have to do is let it do it in its own time if i get in the way of that it all goes pear-shaped do you do anything to like do you ever freak out that you might forget it if a good melody or a good lyric or a theme comes in do you trust the process of yeah i can hold on to this in my body yeah absolutely it is always it will come back it's not that i have to even hold on to it it will keep nagging at me do you know the way i don't know if this same for every person but like i wake up every morning with a song in my head from somewhere some some record that i've heard in the past. Yeah. It's a bit like that. You know, the thing will just keep singing itself to you,

you know, until it's complete. And then, no, I don't worry about forgetting it because it's a bit like ordinary memory. Like, I don't take pictures, which is a bit weird. Like, I've never took photos in my life because I figure my brain will remember what I want to remember. Yeah. So it's the same way with songs.

I don't worry that I'll forget them, because you don't forget the good ones that keep playing themselves back to you because they want to get heard. Subconscious is a terribly powerful thing, you know? Oh, yeah, I know. Yeah, so it won't shut the hell up until it gets expressed, you know? With your new book, Rememberings, like, I've read excerpts of it,

and the prose is fucking gorgeous. Like, the prose is just lovely. I mean, one of the lines where you say, you went to Randy Newman, because it reminded me of Randy Newman. Well, actually, do you know, I'm not mainly into him, but if you held a gun to my head and said,

what is your favourite song that was ever written? It is Randy Newman's Wedding in Cherokee County. Ah, yeah. Lovely, lovely. Isn't it? Yes. And he has a song. He's got a song called Germany Before the War. And the lyric in it that stuck out to me was

a little girl has lost her way with hair of gold and eyes of grey reflected in his glasses as he watches her and the prose in your book reminded me of that that detail, your line was I'm staring at the reflection of my eyes in the window of the back seat of my

father's car yeah which is just fucking gorgeous because you've painted a picture with a sentence i can't i can't read that sentence without a very rich visual image in my head good well then that's my job done i suppose that's the same with songs you know when you've got three minutes you've got to make it rhyme and you have to stop people in their tracks and bring them into another world so i tried to write the lot certainly the first half the book i tried to write the pieces as if they were songs you know i can see it because like the sentences are so short yeah each sentence you could very easily put it into a song and you chose to write it as well like you're speaking about the past but you're writing it in the first

person here and now yeah what's that choice about well the reason the book came about in the first place was about in 2014 i used to do uh i had two funny sections on my website. One was letters to Bob Dylan where I'd write random letters about cabbages and the price of eggs and stupid shit. But the other was a tour blog. So because I'm a

weedhead and not a drinker, I would leave the venue straight after a gig, go back to the hotel and have a spliff while the others were getting drunk. While I'm waiting for them to come back to the hotel, I would spend about an hour writing a tour blog, which is just a diary of the day and the funny shit that happened in the day. So somebody who knows the publisher had seen this and called him and said, you know, you should call Sinead and see about a book. and called him and said, you know, you should call Sinead and see about a book.

So the publisher said to me that he would like me to write the pieces in the present tense, similar to the blogs. You know, and then occasionally he switched things around to the past when he went to edit, but generally left it in the present. But it was his idea, and it was a great fucking idea because it made me be able to create a sense of, you know, what's in the room, what color are the handkerchiefs you know what does it smell like what color is the carpet you know what i mean so you you feel that by what writing in the first person was a better way for you to directly access memories yeah writing in the present tense is allowed present yeah

allowed me to access certain types of memories, sensory memories. What did it smell like? What did it look like? What color was it? What did it sound like? Do you know? Yeah, it allowed me to just put myself back there in a way that wasn't at all traumatizing or anything. And it also allowed me to see the funny side, you know?

It was kind of a weird mixture in your head of past and present because you look back and find things amusing that perhaps weren't amusing at the time you know is there any is like did you find yourself writing about things from your past maybe that you just don't think about a lot that you don't think about them and then they come up during the process of writing i i didn't write about anything that I didn't feel like writing about, again I just trusted the subconscious the same as I do with songs

as I was saying in some other interview recently, you know the thing is the subconscious will block things for a very good reason and block things for a very good reason so you know, same as my songwriting process, I trusted in that which I did not remember, do you know same as my songwriting process i trusted in that which i did not remember do you know what i'm saying so i didn't try to remember anything i didn't google

anything or anything like that you know so i just let the subconscious do the talking you know and how long did it take you to write this book what was the whole process uh it took about six months to write it wow i wrote the first half in 2015 and then i didn't write anything for four years and then i wrote the second half in uh 2019 and then it took it took a year and a half or so to do the editing and get all that right and was the process like was it feverish or you're just typing and typing or was it slower and a bit more considered with some breaks you know i think the first half was was feverish up until the night before saturday night live ah yeah okay and then i didn't write anything for four years. And I started again then with The Night Before Saturday Night Live.

And it wasn't so feverish. The first half I wrote on a laptop. The second half I dictated. So it was a complete different process. That's why there's kind of two different voices in the book. Also because of the four-year gap. I think the first half was perhaps a bit feverish, only because I love writing.

So I'm really enjoying the process of writing and I loved my publisher was almost like an English teacher he was so encouraging all the time and I loved impressing him you know so you know I really I only wrote feverishly because I love writing you know so mentioning their Saturday Night Live Saturday Night Live is where you ripped up the photograph of the Pope on live TV and you were very heavily chastised for it at the time there was a lot of anger towards you how does it feel now for like young people in Ireland look at that moment and they really really respect what you did in the context of what we've learned since about the catholic church there's people who really see you as a person who spoke truth to power and put integrity and protest ahead of your career essentially well

see the thing for me was you know a i didn't notice that i was getting killed for it because i was too busy getting on with my own life fair play b you know as it says in the was you know a i didn't notice that i was getting killed for it because i was too busy getting on with my own life b you know as it says in the book you know a lot of people say that that's derailed my career but i actually feel like what derailed my career was having a number one record i wasn't a pop star and wasn't a pop star by nature and it was extremely uncomfortable in that arena as were the media and everybody else around me who expected me to act like a pop star sure i may as well have been speaking zulu having a clue what they were talking about i came wow i came from a tradition of punk and protest music you know so and very spiritualized artists throughout the 70s you know and um so I was just really being myself and it's

all about how you define success I don't define success by how much money you make I define success personally by you know did I keep the contract I made when I made my holy communion and my confirmation which was to you know what's the best way to put it to stay true to you know the very Christian beliefs that were drilled into me by the Catholic Church in fact which were you know the rejection of the material world you know in favor of the truth you know so I was just being me I was just being a punk that's what that's what punks do it was Geldof's fault to some extent because that awful song from Greece had been number one for fucking months in England.

And when the rap song Rat Trap went to number one, Geldof goes on top of the pops and rips up a picture of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, you know? Yeah. And also I had been godfathered musically by Bob Dylan all my life, who was, of course, a protest singer. And in particular an album of his called slow train coming was oh that's gorgeous that's one of his first christian albums isn't it it's the very first christian album but that that album to me was like a father it was literally a male role model and particularly the opening song got to serve somebody yeah it talks about you know what kind of artist you want to be you know maybe a rock and roll

addict prancing on a stage money and drugs at your command women in a cage it goes on like that it teaches you well taught me anyway what type of artist i wanted to be and all of these artists throughout the 70s that i was listening to you know the impressions and all these people it was nothing but politicized and spiritualized music the day john lennon dies everything changes music becomes fake for a decade synthesizers fake guitars electric drums everybody talking about nothing but love or abandonment fucking uh all about how you look the big hairdos everything the way you the way senses work if you're looking you're you can't listen properly. You need to close your eyes to really hear, you know? And were you enjoying Slow Train Coming?

Like, you were already a Dylan fan before Slow Train, surely? Well, the first Dylan song I ever heard was Baby Please Stop Crying when I'm about 11. And then I think I'm only about 13 when Slow Train Coming comes out. And then I think I'm only about 13 when Slow Train Coming comes out. And at the time, as was the case with many families in Ireland, my parents had broken up and my mother, as was the case with many mothers, wasn't allowing my father to come near us. And the law in Ireland didn't protect fathers at all in that regard. So in many ways, in my childish, magical way of all in that regard so in many ways in my childish magical way

of thinking that record became my father Slow Train Coming became my father figure you know so I was lucky from that point of view you know and one thing you said there which I find really interesting sorry also the terribly important thing about slow train coming was if you grew up in the theocracy you would know i mean my god the religious music you were here was so uncool and unsexy yeah i mean to make god cry to be fair but but slow train the interesting thing that slow train wasn't cool when it came out was didn't wasn't was he in that uncool period where they're like oh he's just an old man doing christian songs now fuck him? No, he wasn't old and it wasn't uncool. I mean, of course people slagged Dylan off because they're jealous.

It was unusual and brave. But it's a great motherfucking record, no matter what the lyrics are about. But the thing was, he was the first person to make religious music sexy and cool. And in fact, nobody else has ever done it since. You know, got the Cirque, but he's a sexy track fact, nobody else has ever done it since. You know, got to search. But he's a sexy track.

He's got Sly. Sly. He's got Mark Knopfler. Yeah. All the songs on there. Precious Angel is one of the most sensual tracks you could ever hear. You know, so I will certainly I was never exposed to anybody who thought the record was uncool. And if they did, well, they were fucking boring twats anyway.

And how do you react to critique of your own work? like bad reviews of your work you know what i don't read good reviews or bad reviews because i think they're both equally dangerous yeah you know i don't think it's none of my business what anybody thinks you know is that a difficult thing for you to do or does that come naturally no it just comes naturally because you know in my case also no matter whether it's a good it could be the greatest review on earth but they'll always drag up my fucking past crimes and misdemeanors you know it's not about the music no you have to wade through all the shit about mental health blah blah to get to the reviews there's always something that makes me depressed or fucking cry or not so i don't bother reading them either way and also because as i say you can't you shouldn't

be buying into good or bad it's it's it's none of your business what anyone thinks of it only reason you should be making a record is you're going to go mental if you don't once you've made it put it out and enjoy screaming it or microphones around the world. It doesn't matter what anybody thinks. If you get too caught up, good or bad, you're fucked, you know? You're very fluid with mixing genres. Like, you released a Shannos album in the 90s. Yeah. And, like, a song like Oroche de Baja Walia, and you mix, like, that's a traditional Irish song,

and then you put a reggae groove on it yeah totally like what's what's your thinking behind doing things like that i just wanted to you know lift these songs are quite beautiful you know it's a bit like the the hail mary and irish like do you remember the way they made us drill it out you know yeah we're a doll on the garage and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was the same with those songs, Baudi and Ilami and Oroch the Vahawalia. They never told you what it meant. No.

They never told you the emotions of what it meant. Like, Oroch the Vahawalia is a war song, you know. It's a real passionate kind of Rastafari element in it. And the same with Báidh an Áilomí in many ways. I just wanted to lift it off the pages, as it were, and put some life into it and maybe introduce it to a new generation of kids. And was Irish traditional music,

how much did that play in your music growing up? Oh God, it didn't at all. It was the uncoolest thing on earth when I was growing up. It was only squares that made Shanno's music their Irish music. Until Donald Lunny came along, obviously, and created Moving Hearts. And they were like the peoples in terms of Irish music. So now, God almighty, we all tried to get as far away from you know traditional Irish

music as we could the same as the charismatic and religious music And what was the lightbulb moment where you're like this is actually really fucking cool and I don't need to be embarrassed of this stuff and this is mine? Well you know the first musician outside of Sian Nose

who sings in an Irish accent is Bob Geldof. Up until that point, it was really uncool for Irish rockers to sing in an Irish accent. We were all singing in American accents. I did the same in my first two albums. I think I got to the point as an Irish singer where know, it would be a sin not to record these songs. They're beautiful ghosts. My particular talent is for interpreting songs. I'm a Stanislavski method singer.

These are gorgeous. What does that mean, though? I don't know if you've ever heard of Stanislavski acting, where you feel the feelings and you are the character. It's very hard to explain. You'd nearly need to Google it. Is this when you're performing a song, it's an otherworldly type of feeling that you have? It's that you become the song.

I studied what's called bel canto singing. It's the same as Maria Callas. When you watch Mariaia callas singing there's no difference between her and the song she suddenly is the song she's feeling the feelings and feeling the emotions and telling the story it's not about notes and scales and your brain does that as well yeah and you're riveted so i wanted to do the same thing with the chan no songs because again often they can be sung with zero emotion you know a lot of people sing it with emotion obviously but quite often they get sang with no emotion

you know just belted out like and I guess I wanted to put some emotion but the way I see those songs they're like ghosts no one knows who wrote them they're part of Irish history and it's important to put them down keep singing them but the ghosts kind of got into and it's important to put them down and keep singing them but the ghosts kind of got into me and wanted me to sing them it was as if the ghost just climbed inside me and wanted me to sing them. Interestingly, Seán Nóis is very like blues. When you look at the blues tradition they're all singing the same songs over and over just like we are with Seán Nóis. It's almost like the history books the singers come along and they keep singing it and it's important

that they keep getting sung again back to the Wales song business you know so the ghosts of the songs came into me and said to me

here bitch you're supposed to be singing us if you're any way good a singer and to be honest with you I think it's the best singing I ever did

in my life was on Chanos wow yeah and did you get any flack at the time from irish traditional purists because that's pretty radical thing to be doing in the 90s no mixing genres like that no none whatsoever the thing is like people who sing you know they're not envious people they are doing the same as i did they're expressing these

ghosts that have moved into their bodies as singers and asked to be expressed and sung, you know. So there's no sense of, you know, I'm not sharing my recipe. It's not like that, you know. Okay, because this is a communal thing. This is mehal. This is Irish.

Yeah, it's soul singing. So there's no jealousy. There's no isms or ists about it. No, quite the opposite. You said something earlier there when you were speaking about your definition of success and you think back to the contract you made when you made your

communion which I found really beautiful which was you said you made a contract to reject materialism and things like that yeah and which is interesting because I don't look back fondly on my communion my communion i just go they were trying to get me to think about sin as a child and i'm like i'm a fucking child a child

can't sin but you have a different view well i was talking more about my confirmation but i see the two as similar contracts the communion and the confirmation and my attitude has always been that i signed those contracts before i ever signed one in the music business and success to me is keeping to those contracts and fuck the ones i signed in the music business you know um so no i don't know now i i'm lucky kind of sponge is what i call myself that i only sucked up the good of catholicism and i i was able to throw out the bad water and keep the baby you know yeah no i never even cogged on that they were trying to drill into us that we were sinners and everything that never even fucking struck me i was just in love with the beauty of the beauty

that was within it you know and particularly in the songs you know i used to get freaked out man i used to get scared of statues and shit you know i really didn't like it oh yeah no but i was just in love with this idea of the holy spirit and you know lee perry says the holy spirit is music and i really had that feeling from a very young age like i just was born knowing that there is a holy spirit whatever you want to call it i don't think it cares to call it god or fred or daisy was just born knowing that it was in my body and there wasn't anything the Catholic Church could do to remove it. So I was lucky I didn't take on board any of the darkness. I was able to see through it. Did you become a priest for a while?

I did. How did you go about that? It was a Rastafari act. Well, there are approximately 650, if not 700, priests and bishops around the world, females. And the thing was, you know, there were bishops who were prepared to ordain women. Once you ordain a rabbit, it's a priest, it's a magical ceremony. I was of the mind of, you know, why are the women waiting for yes as an answer from the men? What are we all sitting around waiting for them to get permission for, you know? So as soon

as I found out that there were bishops willing to ordain women, and in Ireland, I was the second one knocking at the door. The first one in Ireland, I can't remember her name now, she's still around, door the first one in Ireland I can't remember her name now she's still around she's a hermit and I was next to knock at the door partly a Rastafari act as well you know because Rastafari is all about telling the Catholic church to go fuck themselves calling them blood drinkers and vampires and all of that stuff so but also when I was a kid I wanted to be a priest but of course I couldn't because I was a girl I didn't want to be a nun because I didn't fancy washing shirts for the rest of my life. But I used to pretend to be saying masses and all kinds of things. I was a very religious, not religious, I had a heart for God is the best way I could put it.

So, you know, and I was a theologist. So as far as I was concerned, I had every right to be a priest. And I wasn't going to wait for a bunch of men to tell me when I could or couldn't do it, you know. And when you explore different religions as you've done, do you feel that, like, all the religions, they're all just talking about the same God? Yes, it's like coming to, you know, the town square by many different roads.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and also... Lovely's my motto, and I drill this into it. I have a particularly religious son, my 17-year-old. I always say to him, you know, it's important to believe everything and nothing. Yeah, I get you. You know, everything and nothing. But yes, there is only one, whatever you want to call it. I think God is a very off-putting word.

There is something out there that responds to the human voice, yeah, and that gave us free will, which means, unfortunately, it cannot intervene on our behalf unless we ask it. Religion is like a devil. Religion is like a devil's smoke screen. It has literally, in Israel, talking to the fucking wall. All over the world, religion has people talking to the wall. So the science isn't working. Religion is built by the devil as a smoke screen to make you talk to the wall literally or metaphorically so that

God doesn't intervene on behalf of the human race. That's how the science works. When you study any theology of any religion, they'll always tell you that in the beginning, it starts with either speaking or singing, that the God character brought things into existence by the power of the human voice. That's what Jesus is talking about. A militantly anti-religious character is Jesus because he's God.

And when he teaches the Our Father, and he also says in another section don't go to church go in your room and talk to your father but when he teaches the Our Father he's actually he's a scientist he's teaching you the power of the spoken word that's interesting yeah so this universe operates on the power of the spoken word there is something out there which people see when they have near-death experiences they all come back having seen the same thing, even though they've experienced other things. There is a massive wide being, which is neither male nor female, that just exudes love. Now, that thing responds to the human voice.

You could be an atheist, a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu. It doesn't bloody matter. If you talk to the universe, you will get responded to. But if you're talking via religion, you're getting nowhere because you're literally talking to the wall and God can't intervene. Hence, God is miserable. And what do you consider religion to be then? What is religion?

It's the devil in disguise, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a distraction invented by devilish people in order to turn us away from our direct relationship with God, which would have allowed God to intervene on behalf of the human race. If we got rid of religion, which will happen eventually, and we started instead talking to God like Jesus instructed us to the world would be fixed in two seconds flat if the entire human race could only realize that they're talking to the wall and instead start talking directly to God God could intervene then

on our behalf it gave us free will that was the stupidest mistake it ever made because it means it can't interfere. Religion gave us free will or God gave us free will? No, God gave us free will, which was a really stupid idea because it meant that, you know, it can't intervene on our behalf unless we ask it. Religion was designed by devilish people to distract you from that knowledge and the knowledge of the science of the power of the spoken word. from that knowledge and the knowledge of the science of the power of the spoken word, and to distract you from the fact that Jesus is actually a militantly anti-religious character. Have you had, many would say, religious experiences, not religious experiences, sorry, deeply spiritual experiences? I would say being a musician, you can't avoid it.

I believe very much what Lee Perry said, music is the Holy Spirit. So every time I've ever done a gig, it's a spiritual experience, absolutely. Because I call that flow. I chase flow. That's what I do as an artist. When I am involved in my art, I simply leave this world. I'm on a different fucking planet and it is nothing but eg-less pleasure i don't know it's pleasure the word it's just i i just you know what i'm talking about but i call that flow so do you consider flow to be spiritual well i guess what

i consider is you know i always say a particular prayer before i go on stage and well two prayer when i ask please don't let me make a bloody fool of myself. And two, you know, I want to be a priest. Now, what I mean by that is a priest is someone by whom you know there's a God. They're very flawed people, extremely flawed people by

necessity. Otherwise, they'd be fucking arrogant assholes, you know. But Rastafari introduced to me the idea of music as a priesthood if you look at bob dylan for example you know by him there's a god whether you believe in god or not you just know by him there fucking must be one same with muhammad although i think he was an archangel rather than a priest but my thing is i want people when they've been at my show to feel like they've been to church, you know?

And that's the only time that I get to, that I engage with. It's not the only time I engage with God, but it's certainly the only time I feel, you know, that there's any chance of me being a priest, i.e. displaying the existence of God, you know? displaying the existence of god you know and you speak about like so when you are not in the best mental health you don't create no i wouldn't be writing songs when i'm in that state of mind no but luckily i'm not in that state of mind too often but no i'm inclined to i create when i'm feeling good and can you enjoy other people's art when you're in a shit space? Oh, yeah, but I don't listen to sad music when I'm in a shit space. That's just filling your cup full of misery.

So I would listen to it. What do you listen to? Stupid Happy Meal. Well, actually, I've got to a certain age now. I only want to listen to peaceful music. I'm addicted to Hindu mantras. Wow, okay. That's pretty much all I listen to is Hindu mantras. Again, like the Jewish Psalms, the mantras wow okay pretty much all i listen to is hindu mantras again like the jewish psalms

the mantras have magical uses there's one for everything you can think of you know so i listen to them that's really all i listen to and i play them all night while i'm sleeping and stuff like that you know so i can't stop that age where all you want to listen to is really peaceful music everything else is like turn that noise off how do you feel about um like the modern fucking business with spotify and streaming services and things like that for artists well it's killed a lot of us to be fair because we're all forced on the road to go touring to make a living it's killed a lot of families we're leaving our kids more than we should. There are elderly artists out on the road who should be enjoying their environment.

You know, in one way, though, the audience are getting better served because the record companies were ripping off the audience. It cost the record company 20 cents to make a CD and they're charging the audience $20, you know? So in a way, it's better because the audience 20 dollars you know so in a way it's better because the audience are getting what they paid for now when they go to a gig you know but in another way to be honest it's had disastrous consequences particularly for the families

of musicians particularly female musicians those mothers that are leaving their children to go on tour yeah i know it had certainly a disastrous effect on my children, my needing to leave home in order to pay the bills, you know. Because you'd be doing serious tours. You're talking six months, wouldn't you? Oh, no, God, no. That only happened once when I was young, and after that, no way. I used to go every six weeks in the summer when my kids were on holidays.

But then it became that, you know, I had to go a bit more than that, but I would never be gone on the road for more than 10 days at a time and out of every month that's my rule we call it the 10-day rule it infuriates everybody that works for me but I have the 10-day rule so that includes my flight out and my flight back that I'm not gone for more than 10 days but even that is hard on young children you know and hard on mothers and you know I love gigging but I hate touring very hard on anybody with a mental health condition yes as as you may know the number one requirement for those of us with mental health conditions is

extreme stability you know and of course touring is terribly destabilizing you know so you know i i i'm i really don't like being dependent on touring to make a living it's it's quite depressing to be honest you know i mean you're only spending an hour and a half the day making music which is great the rest of the time you're fucking weeping you're missing your kids you feel like shit you're completely destabilized you know in this yeah in the fucking hotels yeah it's really not nice no to be honest i really fucking hate it i'm not so again i wish mariah carey would cover some of my motherfucking songs you know yeah so your most commercially big song is nothing compares to you yeah but you don't get the royalties from that then do you you just get mechanicals i don't even know if i get mechanicals i don't to be fair to you you don't get the royalties from that then, do you? You just get mechanicals. I don't even know if I get mechanicals.

To be fair to you, I don't know how the bloody contracts work or who gets the mechanicals. I couldn't tell you. I never gave a shit. But I'm assuming you're not getting... Do you get royalty checks for that song? No, no. Prince would have got them.

So Prince's estate would continue to get them. Wow. Okay. So then you got to gig that and that's...'s oh yeah but do you ever feel no i don't mind gigging at all i love it and to be fair it'd be terribly cruel to the audience if you didn't gig oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i figure people go to gigs for two reasons one they want to sing along and two they want distortion you know guitar distortion so you gotta give them what they came for if they don't get to sing along with their've got to give them what they came for if

they don't get to sing along with their favorite songs well i mean what the hell did they spend their money for um the other thing with streaming services is like when you're you're talking about listening to an album like slow train when you're a kid and listening to it so much that it becomes like a parental figure yeah like i i remember when i used to have to spend 20 quid on a cd right i fucking lived with that fucking cd yeah do you know what i mean i i didn't pick up that cd and go i'm not sure about this it's like hold on a second buddy you're spending two months listening to this fucking thing until you understand it and you listen to it all the way through in sequence, right?

You didn't just listen to the odd track. Like, that's the worst thing about Spotify and stuff like that is, well, apart from the fucking fact we're all getting ripped off. But, like, you know, people only listen to maybe one or track or two tracks. It used to be you bought an album because you knew the artist was telling a story via the sequencing of the songs. Sequencing is terribly important to me as well do you know so that's one of the things that got lost with all the spotify thing was the idea of an album

actually i i discovered uh like bob dylan would have been a huge hugely important to me for my mental health for finding out who i am as a person i would have grown up with bob dylan in the house when i was a kid because of my older brothers but i only would have made a choice to get into dylan when i was maybe 15 yeah and thank fuck yes i had a limited amount of money and i literally i'd go to hmv and i'd take it album by album and they were 15 20 quid yeah i got to take a journey that took maybe three years yeah to truly like i it took a year to get the slow train because i'd done all the stuff before it yeah yeah and it was this magnificent fucking journey of learning and experience absolutely and now today like what was the

most recent one graham parsons i was like fuck it i'm gonna get into graham parsons and then i go to spotify and i'm just harshing through all his albums in a half an hour yeah there's i'm not paying any respect to the art there you know yeah no absolutely absolutely it's a whole different yeah a different ball game yeah totally different but i guess as i say you know the one good thing about it all is the fact that we have to perform live means for once in their lives, the audience are getting what they paid for. I'm going to ask you one or two questions that I got asked by people on my Instagram when I said I was going to chat to you. Sure. Someone said, did you punch Prince into the jaw?

No, I didn't. Where the fuck did they hear that? I kind of wish I had. No, I didn't get that far. had no i didn't get that far unfortunately i didn't get that close was there a pillow fight or something uh well you can read about it in the book in fact it's the best chapter in the book if i say so myself so i won't bother trying to tell it here because it's told in a kind of funny and scary way in the book. But what was... Did you have a pleasant experience with Prince or an unpleasant experience?

An extremely frightening experience. Oh, fuck. Incredibly frightening experience for any woman to go through. Oh, bollocks. That's disappointing. I'm very sorry to hear that, Sinead. Who have you met that left a lasting positive impact like who was

incredibly sound that you can think of uh Lou Reed oh really Lou Reed uh Willie Nelson Muhammad Ali I was lucky to meet um got loads of people you know Damian Dempsey, obviously, Sharon Shannon, Donald Lunny, loads of people, Bob Dylan even. But the person that really stands out for me in terms of soundness is Lou Reed. He was really, really nice to me at a time when everybody else was being an asshole. We did a TV show once, and i've written about this in the book not long after the pope thing there was a show called a white room in england and the idea was it was a bit like jules holland everybody bands kind of in a circle and each band would play one song in row and then another and when i walked into the rehearsal everybody turned their backs

on me the musicians and everybody because of course, oh she's a crazy bitch for ripping off the Pope Oh for fuck's sake because he must be crazy to not want fame and fortune, you know So what you'd done, it wasn't you'd insulted the Pope, it's like how dare she insult the religion of celebrity, how dare

she not play the fucking rules and money and pop stardom, exactly I had met Lou a couple of times well one time previously at a at a there was the who had a 50th birthday for roger daltrey gig in in new york somewhere and i sang back in vocals with lou reed and oh god he nearly died i had like a panic attack when he was telling me i could do it. It was like his mouth was moving. It was like, and were you a Lou Reed fan? Oh yeah.

Well, I have one particular record of his, which is called New York. Fucking New York. Oh my God. What a fucking album. That's my favorite Lou Reed album. Yeah.

But I kind of didn't know how much I loved him until I met him. It was weird. He's the only person I ever met that I had a panic attack over meeting you know but then what happened was that years later then we're doing the white the white room and Lou is on it and he clocks that everybody's treating me like shit and of course everyone thinks he's the coolest dude on the show and even though he didn't know me at all apart from I sang back and vocals for him once he fucking made a point of walking over to me across the whole room and hugging me for like five minutes like we were best mates and you know kind of showing everybody up by pretending we were great mates and you know just gave me the most loving hugs you know because he knew a lot

of empathy there difficult for me going through that stuff but it was also it wasn't it wasn't only empathy for me it was his way of just showing these people they were dicks, you know, that he just pretended that we were like best mates on earth. Do you know what I mean? So he was a lovely fucking man, lovely man. But, you know, I've been lucky and met many, many people. Like my favorite, one of my biggest influences is a Rastafari band called Israel Vibration.

And I've got a friend called Benjamin Zephaniah. And he took me to see Israel Vibration at the Brixton Academy. And bloody, I ended up on stage singing all my songs that had kept me alive. Like holding hands with the lead singer, singing these bloody songs. How did that happen did they see you in the audience did they know you were coming well benjamin is a is a rastafari and he's a college lecturer on all kind of history he was offered a uh member of the british empire award at the time he had turned it down and written a brilliant article um for one of the

english newspapers and he's sort of academic but also a poet you know but very heavily and written a brilliant article for one of the English newspapers. He's sort of academic, but also a poet, you know, but very heavily Rastafari. So he was friends with them and he knew I was a big fan. So he took me backstage just to say hello. And of course, when he let them know what a fan I was, the bloody singer says here, come on and sing the stuff with us. Oh my God, I nearly died.

So that's my favorite live performance that I ever remember holding that guy's hand singing the song i was like oh my god i died i went to heaven like you know that's fucking phenomenal yeah did you you were knocking about when there was serious anti-irishness over in britain and you would have been one of our major exports yeah whenever a bomb went off in in London, they used to chuck all the Kerrygold butter out of the supermarkets. Yeah. But I was pissed about it, to be fair, because, you know, the buses, they were full of Jamaicans. They're

getting driven by Hindus and Rastas and Jamaicans, the very people who were in support of Irish freedom, you know. So I didn't like the whole... like, I'm totally there when it comes to self-defence. I'd be the first right there at the wall, you know what I mean? But terrorism is a whole other matter and, you know,

not that it's right to be killing anyone, but, like, the fucking people that were dying were Jamaicans and Indians and, you know, it was kind of awful, to be fair. But, yeah, it was a very racist country at the time england altogether so they would chuck the kerry gold or irish products the tato and barry's tea out of the supermarkets when a bomb went off yeah because the actions of the ira like isn't all irish people and you know if a burglar was black and it was written about in the newspaper they'd say in big black letters to say black john smith

burglars yeah you know yeah there were black guys getting beat to death in police stations and then their families would come looking for them the cops would be saying no we'd never heard of them you know it was very i arrived there pretty much a day before the brixton riots so yeah it was uh i remember getting hassled and i've written about this in the book by a skinhead when i was trying to use a phone box so i queued up to use a phone box in um london there was an indian lady in there and this fucking skinhead was giving her a hard time you know and then he started giving me a hard time but then i like pointed out to him that you know since they colonized all our countries and fucked them up we had to come to fucking london this dude was like landing phone boxes for landing people and i was like fuck you man we wouldn't be here if you

hadn't fucked up our countries you think we want to be here like you know yeah but it was yeah it was heavy it was a heavy country it was a horrible time for ireland and england you know as i say look you know i consider myself a republican but i don't believe in terrorism or that it achieved anything in fact it was devilish and you know it's a terribly terribly sad period in english and irish history you know you you've always had a bit of a kind of an intersection solidarity in your career like i think it was the mtv awards um did you shave the public enemy symbol into the side of your head to show support for how rap artists were being treated in the music industry in the late 80s or 90s well what it was was that it was a very interesting grammys the first record

that i put out at the grammys okay it was a grammys i got nominated for an award and they didn't know what category to put me in they couldn't figure out what the fuck I was so they invented a category for you didn't they call you post-modern or some shit like that they invented a category and then at the time what happened was it was the first year that there was going to be a rap award at the Grammys but the Grammys were refusing to televise the rap award right so public enemy whose records kept getting banned and then entering the chart at number one uh decided to boycott the awards and they asked me instead to collect their award for them wow so i had their emblem um painted into the side of my head as a kind of a homage and what was i'd say chuck d's good crack

he seems like a decent fella no i've never actually met him i've spoken to him on the phone years ago but i've never actually met him okay yeah um so i think i think we wrap it up now shanee that was thank you so much for this great pleasure I've been dying to do this podcast for years thank you so much thanks for the chat I'd love to chat to you again and best of luck with the book so that was my conversation with

Sinead O'Connor which was an absolute pleasure her memoir is called Rememberings and it's in shops in June 1st if you want to go and grab a copy of that

I'll be back next week don't know what about in the meantime enjoy the weather rub a dog rub a cat smell a leaf smell a flower

do you know what I mean yart dog bless Do you know what I mean? Yart. God bless. now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game

and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you.