Sex & The Single Girl
With a date at the Olympia Theatre looming in December, and a much anticipated album on the way in the new year, these are crucial times for Sinéad O’Connor. In a remarkable interview, she also discusses her search for a man, the lovers she has known, sex, sex – and more sex. Plus: Ireland of the squinting windows and the Catholic Church...
Olaf Tyaransen, 05 Dec 2011
recent times?
“Well, I was seeking out treatment for a medical condition – quite a serious medical condition that I had, and which I no longer have. And I was seeing a particular person for treatment, quite a high-up medical person. And I found myself on almost a regular basis being subjected to lectures, when I went there, on my moral values.
“So I’d go there for my medical check-up, to find out what was going on, and this person would sit me down and start telling me what a bad person I am. You know, my morals are this, that and the other, and my children are gonna be this, that and the other, and just because I’m talking about sex, or whatever I’m doing. And I’m like, ‘Hold on, I came here for a medical examination, I didn’t come here for a fuckin’ lecture on morals, thanks!’”
I would have thought you’d just tell someone like that to fuck off?
“Well, I should have, but I didn’t. Instead I cried and got very upset. I turned it on myself. It was only afterward I was thinking, ‘Hmm…’ And the more I think about it, the more fucking outrageous it is, you know. So there may be grounds for making some kind of complaint, but I don’t know whether I can be bothered. I just think: it’s Ireland. It’s still a bit Magdalene, you know, and the kind of woman I am, it’s confusing – and I’m a threat.
“I don’t think I’m doing any harm,” she continues. “So I don’t know why I should be subjected to moral fuckin’ bullshit. It kind of amuses me, really, but then… (shrugs). The more I watched the presidential thing, the less I began to take certain things personally. Because I just realised, ‘Oh my god, tthis is really still quite a fucked-up country.
“And what’s alarming to me is how little the artists seem to give a shit, specifically the musical artists. Because if you look back at 1916, you look at Irish history and you see that artists were an enormous part of history. Even when we learnt at school about these things, it was teaching us what the artists were doing. You learnt about Pearse and you learnt about Yeats and all those people, you know. And now it’s just silence from artists, they’re doing nothing.
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Olaf Tyaransen
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A worthy buy, indeed, if only for the odd-ball reggae version on the B side.
2003-11-05 - REVIEW
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