Sex & The Single Girl

Jesus Christ!!! Sinéad O’Connor is well known for making bold, brave and provocative statements, but it seems she’s now taken to wearing them as well. When the 44-year-old singer cheerfully answers the front door of her seafront home in Bray, she’s vampishly dressed in a low-cut black frock which reveals a massive tattoo of the Son of God atop a heart and roses on her chest.

Bright, loud and garishly coloured, the tattoo is a seriously arresting image, like something you’d see inked on a hardcore Mexican gangbanger. Not wanting her to think I’m staring at her tits (which, admittedly, I’m also doing), I feel the need to make some kind of comment. Unfortunately, words fail...
“Eh… wow! That’s quite… em… like… em… Wow!”
She tells me she had it done in LA a few weeks ago, but doesn’t particularly want to discuss it. “There’s nothing worse than people talking about their tattoos or going on about Jesus,” she explains in her quiet and husky voice. “So I don’t do either. All I’ll say is that it took about three hours and was probably the worst fuckin’ pain I’ve ever experienced.”
Whatever about the religious skin art, Sinéad is looking better than she has done in ages. Recent photographs tended to make her look haggard and, well, a bit like she couldn’t be bothered about her appearance. Today, though, she looks more like the Sinéad of old – shaven-headed, slim and ever-so-slightly sultry.
She attributes this renewed interest in her looks to the nagging of her teenage daughter, Róisín. “I am not inclined to care, but now I have a 15 year-old daughter who cares,” she laughs. “She kicks my butt the whole the time. She doesn’t like me not caring. She’s quite into clothes and make-up, and she likes me to make an effort. She’s like a fucking Nazi! But it’s lovely having a daughter of that age. They’re all so girly – so you get to be a girl yourself.”
With two tiny Yorkshire Terriers snapping around her stiletto-heeled boots, Sinéad leads me through the house – which is spacious, high-ceilinged and feels comfortably lived-in – and out into a wooden structure in the back garden. Inside it, despite the framed pictures of the Virgin Mary on the walls, is a room built for decadence. There’s a large double bed, a couple of couches, a stereo, a small range with a roaring fire, a well-stocked fridge, and a bathroom.
She shares the house with her four children (who range in age from five to 24, and were all fathered by different men) and two male nannies, some of whom variously use the shed as a party/chill-out zone at different times.
“I always made it like I didn’t want my kids to be out in the street or round somebody else’s house, doing whatever the fuck they were doing,” she explains. “I just want to make sure they’re all here. So I always set it up that this was the party house, or this was the gathering house. So I had a good eye on everything they were doing and everyone they were doing it with.”
She’s doing this interview to promote her Olympia show on December 18. Although she played the Main Stage at this year’s Electric Picnic, it’ll be her first proper indoor show on home turf in about five years. “I’m pretty much always touring, but I haven’t played Ireland for ages,” she says. “Aside from Electric Picnic. That was a good gig. Apparently loads of things went wrong, but I didn’t notice. The band was apparently having a terrible time – but I had a great time.”
She admits to feeling nervous about the Olympia show. Recent gigs in Manchester and Iceland have garnered rave reviews, and the Evening Standard gave her London show the five-star treatment. But she’s been in the Irish headlines recently for non-music related activities. Whilst no stranger to controversy, to say the least, she’s worried that it might all have somewhat coloured people’s perception of her. So she’s doing this interview to remind everybody that, first and foremost, Sinéad O’Connor is a musical artist. And a damned fine one at that.
Her ninth studio album, What About I Be Me And You Be You, is already in the can, but won’t be released until early next year. It was originally to be called Home, but she changed the title in reaction to recent events. This latest SOC tabloid feeding-frenzy kicked-off in mid-August when she wrote an article in the Sunday Independent advertising her sexual frustration and desperate need for a decent man. Or at least a decent shag: “My situation sexually/ affectionately speaking is so dire that inanimate objects are starting to look good, as are inappropriate and/or unavailable men and/or inappropriate and/or unavailable fruits and vegetables. I tell you, yams are looking like the winners.” As it happened, your Hot Press correspondent was one of the first to offer to un-pent Sinéad’s obvious sexual frustration. The morning the article appeared, I sent her an email telling her she deserved a good OTK spanking. I was joking (kind of). She responded with “what the fuck does ‘OTK’ mean?” When I explained it meant ‘over the knee’, she shot back a “when and where?” message. I hastily backtracked, and still have no idea whether she was joking or not. Unless she mentions it, it’s not on my list of questions for today…
The public reaction to her Sindo article was absolutely predictable so the question has to be asked. As a relatively young, well-off, good-looking and internationally famous singer, could she not have gone about her search for a sexual partner in a slightly more discreet fashion?
She shakes her shaven head: “No, I don’t think I could have. I was going to join some dating agencies, and I knew if I did it was just going to end up in the newspapers anyway. So I figured I’d save myself the registration fees and just write a piece myself. Like, it was a longer ad and it was free. I wasn’t expecting to write any more than that, but then it just got to be really good fun.”
There’s a frustrated journalist in you…
“Yeah. Not terribly frustrated because I do get to write a lot. But if I hadn’t been a singer I would have been a journalist.”
Public reaction and media interest was so intense that she wound up writing another five Sindo articles about sex, not to mention countless rude and scatological tweets (mainly about her desire “to take it up the arse”).
“Yeah, Twitter rhymes with…” she says, grinning. “I had to stop tweeting because I was getting so much abuse. But I got bored as well.”
Do you get off on the haters?
“No, it’s very depressing.”
She insists that much of what she tweeted was intended as a joke.
“I get mischievous,” she explains. “You know, I think a lot of musicians have this thing, where they are basically quite immature. We’re not normal, that’s why we’re musicians. We’re not actually intelligent enough to be criminals. So we find stupid shit funny, and it’s all sexual innuendos. And like at gigs, in dressing-rooms, for ten years you’re with the same band and [we’d be] tittering behind our hands, sneaking bananas into each other’s bags at the end of the night. This kind of shit. And giggling like idiots every time we’re in Germany and somebody mentions fuckin’ sausages. We’re stupid, we’re fuckin’ maniacs, you know. So, I get mischievous.”
All joking aside, she has no real regrets about her six-week “sex period”.
“It was a very interesting experience, really,” she muses. “Obviously there was very mixed reactions, like half was, ‘Great’ and half was all, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t talk about this’ and, ‘You shouldn’t say this’ and, ‘You shouldn’t say that’ and
so on.
“And after a while I just began to feel this thing, like, well actually you know, how about I be fuckin’ me now? A bit like, how come it’s not okay to just fuckin’ be ourselves, like? We’re not doing any harm to anyone. So that’s really why I changed the album title. It was out of that whole six week experience of discussing things which are apparently not supposed to be discussed.”
What possessed you to do it in the first place?
“I wanted to find a boyfriend.”

Sinéad’s strategy worked. She actually has a new boyfriend out of all of this. He’s an addiction therapist who works with teenagers, but she doesn’t want to divulge any more than that. Somewhat inevitably, talk turns to sex and relationships. Growing up in the repressive ‘Holy Ireland’ of the ‘80s, she didn’t receive much in the way of sex education at school.
“We only had one sex education lesson ever in my school,” she recalls, with a smile. “I think I was probably about 12 or so, and this nun came into the room. And she sort of walked in almost backwards so we couldn’t see her, this old nun we’d never seen before. And she just walked up to the blackboard and she drew this, like, foot-long, huge, hard cock, with a big set of balls and everything. We just fuckin’ cried laughing – we just fell around the fuckin’ floor laughing. It was such a funny thing to see a nun do. And that was it, she ran out of the room. No more sex education!”
What age were you when you lost your virginity?
“I was 14. I had proper fuckin’ sexual crushes on grown men by the time I was eight, though.”
Are you into older men generally?
“Not really,” she says. “Although I seem to be in the habit of going out with guys older than me. Because I didn’t, sort of, intellectually identify with guys the same age as me. So it seems to be that probably the majority of guys I went out with were a good bit older than me.”
Sinéad has had a lot of boyfriends in her time – not to mention husbands. Her first marriage was to ace drummer and producer John Reynolds, who produced several of her albums, including the forthcoming one. He remains among her biggest fans and friends. In 2001 she married Daily Mirror journalist Nick Sommerlad after a whirlwind romance, but they split after less than a year.
Third time unlucky, she wed former Stockton’s Wing musician Steve Cooney last year, but their union lasted just eight months.
“That’s not something I’m gonna talk about,” she says of her marriage to Cooney. “Except to say that I think it’s too easy to get married. Like, I’ve been married three times, really I should only have been married once. And no-one should be married more than fuckin’ twice, to be honest.
“I don’t regret my first marriage, but I do regret the second. They are lovely people and I’ve no complaints about them as people, or whatever. But it was – and I’m sure they’d say the same – it was too easy to rush into something. They should make it more difficult to get married.”
Did you have pre-nups with any of your now ex-husbands?
She laughs. “No! I wouldn’t marry anyone that I felt I had to do that with! Like I say, I’ve been lucky that the people I was married to have been very good people. No-one ever asked me for a penny, they weren’t those kind of people. So, like, they were people I love and I don’t feel badly towards them or any of that kind of crap. It’s a girl thing. I think maybe I’m a bit romantic. I’m not now, though, after three fuckin’ times. But when you’re a girl you’re brought up with all this stupid fuckin’ marriage business. Some man’s gonna come and make everything grand and it’s gorgeous.”
Your wedding day will be the happiest of your life…
“Yeah, yeah. And all that kind of shit. But it’s all living, isn’t it?”
While she may not have found an ideal husband, Sinéad is no stranger to motherhood. She has four children by four different fathers – Jake, 24 (with John Reynolds), Roisin, 15 (with Irish Times columnist John Waters), Shane, seven (with musician Donal Lunny) and Yeshua, five (with surgeon Frank Bonadio, estranged husband of singer Mary Coughlan). “Two of them were designed and two of them were happy accidents,” she says of her brood. “I’m very lucky. The fathers of my children are amazing fathers, all four of them. My kids and I have been really lucky that way.”
For all the messiness of her personal life, she insists that she still sees sex and sexuality as a spiritual thing.
“Well, my thing was, look, fuck on through!” she says. “That was my motto. Because for me I believe sexuality is a godly thing. Even though I might talk bawdy or whatever, I do think – no matter how filthy, or not filthy, or sweet, or whatever it might be – it is actually a godly thing. So I’ve never bought into this teaching that somehow sex was evil, or that the desire for sex was evil, or that any of these things were wicked. But I did carry a bit of it, like when I was very young and I used to pretend I didn’t like sex.”
You pretended not to like it?
“Yeah, I thought that was what you were supposed to do,” she avers. “You know, I’d secretly like it and I’d be pretending I didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether it was sort of okay to like this, that or the other. But then I just decided, fuck on through! I wasn’t going to let either Ireland or the circumstances that I grew up in take that from me. So I just decided – not even just with sex, I suppose, but with other things in life. Anything I was scared of, I made a point of doing it. Until I wasn’t scared of it.”
You came out as a lesbian a few years back…
“Oh, well I dabbled, briefly,” she says, hiding a sly grin behind her coffee cup.
So are you actually bisexual or were you just bi-curious?
“Well, I was curious, yeah. I was an explorer.”
Are you still curious? Or are you done?
“No, I’m done there.”
Has Sinéad ever participated in an orgy? “No, I haven’t,” she admits, sorrowfully shaking her head. “I’d love to, but I can’t because I’m famous. There’s a whole lot of shit you don’t get to do because you’re famous. You can’t just walk into something like that, do you know what I mean?”
Surely you could just have an orgy with other famous people?
“Don’t want to shag any of them, though. The thing is, look, to me in my career, one of the things I learnt was that the biggest star-fuckers of all are the stars themselves. Alright? They are the biggest star-fuckers, and you just don’t wanna hang out with them. They’re assholes.”
Come on, Sinéad! You’ve had a few famous boyfriends...
She pulls a puzzled face. “Not really, no.”
Did you not go out with Anthony Keidis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
“No – never. I didn’t go out with Daniel Day-Lewis either. These things just get written as fact. The press just assume you’re shagging every bloke.”
I thought you wrote a song about Keidis?
“No, he wrote a song about me (it was ‘I Could Have Lied’ – OT). We were kind of friends. I didn’t know him very well. He was a really nice guy, but he tried it on with me one day, and I got very annoyed. I think it was because he kind of thinks he’s God’s gift to women. It must have been something about how he did it or something. I remember we were at the hospital and my son Jake was very sick, so it could have been that. Anyway, I don’t know, I lost the fuckin’ head with him.”
It might not have been the best time to try it on…
“Well, I scared the shit out of him. I can’t really think why I lost my temper that badly, but I really wasn’t into the idea… and I seemed to have upset him. So, no, I think the only famous boyfriend I ever had was probably Peter Gabriel, and he wasn’t really my boyfriend.”
How do you mean?
“I was his weekend pussy. I wasn’t a girlfriend.”
Sinéad still remains friendly with most of her exes.
“Well, so far I don’t think I’ve been too great at keeping them [as husbands/boyfriends]. I’m certainly great at keeping friends with I’d say 90% of the people that I’ve ever been out with. But relationship success doesn’t necessarily mean that you stay together. Relationships aren’t always supposed to. So I suppose success to me is, can you still be friends after whatever you go through with someone. And from that perspective, I’ve been very successful.
“Most people I went out with I went out with because I liked them. They’d usually be people who were friends, and probably I fell in love with, or whatever. So, you know, hopefully the friendship would last. I don’t like to sever things with people. And I think sometimes – Jesus, sometimes it’s not the case – but sometimes it’s healthier to have the argument and argue through until you get to the friendship, or whatever. And then obviously there are times when it’s easier that you don’t see each other for a while, or talk to each other for a while, until everything’s cool.”

Some of these life experiences have bled into the songs on her forthcoming album. Her first studio release since Theology in 2007, What About I Be Me And You Be You is as good a record as she’s ever made. In truth, Sinéad O’Connor is blessed with the kind of angelic voice that could give you goosebumps if she was singing a Jedward cover. It was produced by John Reynolds and recorded in the studio in his London home earlier this year.
“I love making records with John, because he either has the studio in his bedroom or some other part of the house that’s really casual. I actually made the whole record in my nightdress. Standing there, sort of, in my slippers and my nightdress.”
The album is dedicated to her novelist brother, Joseph, and also to her former boyfriend Frank Bonadio. It features more than a few love songs, and also some about love gone awry.
“It’s a very personal album, as most of my stuff tends to be,” she explains. “The album was written between 2007-2009, when I was going out with Frank, actually. So really any kind of love songs that are on there are about him. Probably most of the songs are inspired by him.”
Are you still friendly with Frank?
“Oh yeah, we’re like best mates. Frank asked me to mention, by the way, that he is available. And that he has a very enormous penis. He asked me to mention that whenever I possibly could, so that the girls are to call out to Bray, Number two, Martello Terrace, and he will service them all.”
Er… are you being serious?
She laughs and nods sincerely. “Yeah. He did ask me to say that. And I promised
I would.”
One of the album tracks, ‘Queen Of Denmark’, is among the angriest songs she’s ever recorded, with a screamed refrain of, “Why don’t you take it out on somebody else? Why don’t you bore the shit out of somebody else?”
“That was written by [American singer] John Grant,” she explains. “He just won the prize for ’Best Live Act in the World’, and he’s a fantastic songwriter. His album came out just this year and that’s the title track. My manager [Fachtna O’Ceallaigh] said to me, ‘You should do that song’. So I only got to know John, then, through having to email him because I couldn’t understand all the lyrics. And me and him now are like best fuckin’ mates. He’s the most amazing artist, incredible songwriter, incredible story and amazing character. You have to look him up. He wrote that song about a break-up of a relationship he was in. But I don’t see it as about a break-up – I can identify with it for all kinds of other reasons.”
Another song, ‘Old Lady’, seems to be about you pining for an unavailable man
[“When I’m an old lady/ I’m gonna be his baby… But that’s a way down the line/ I see for now he
isn’t mine”].
“Yeah, that one’s about having a crush on your boyfriend’s best friend – or rather your boyfriend’s married best friend. Which was Neil Jordan. I actually knew him before I knew Frank. They all knew I had a crush on him, so no-one will mind you writing that the song is about Neil.”
If sex is one obsession another consistent bugbear of Sinead’s is the Roman Catholic Church. The album’s caustic closing track ‘V.I.P.’ features the lines, “To whom exactly are we giving hope/ When we stand behind the velvet rope/ Or get our pictures taken with the Pope/ Like some sick April fool kinda joke.”
“It’s inspired by my trying to involve certain very, very, very internationally successful Irish artists, major artists, in the Church issue. And, being unsuccessful. And it strikes me as terribly heartbreaking that certain artists are not vocal on those subjects, or on any subjects that are actually important to Irish culture, given the role that artists have played in the past.”
You’re taking a pop at Bono, basically…
She nods. “And Geldof. And, um, things went badly there – you know, trying to kind of involve them… it’s important that we all just entertain and get the tits out and waggle our arses and sing all the gorgeous songs – that’s great. I want to do that as much as anyone. But I also think it’s important that we be conscious, because it was important in Irish history that the musicians and the artists are vocal about certain things. Because you’ve got to ask yourself, could it be that the fact that artists have stopped playing that role, does that play a part in a national stunned silence on certain issues, too?
“The Irish artists and musicians that I admire at the moment are the ones that have actually touched on the Church issue. And when we do go forward into the Second Republic, one of the structures we’re going to have to look at is our spiritual condition, as exemplified by the fuckin’ behaviour of everybody around the presidential election. Like, okay we really need help (laughs). So you know, musicians, they’re all at the Grammys, waving around their Grammys, saying ‘thanks to God’ to their fuckin’ Grammy. And then when there’s a pitch battle in the street for the honour of God, fuckin’ no one’s to be found. There’s tumbleweed. And that just pisses me off.”
Which contemporary Irish artists do you admire?
“The artist that I admire most in Ireland at the moment is Eleanor McEvoy, because she did a couple of songs about the Church on her album. She did a fantastic album, her last album, I’d Rather Go Blonde, and broached it on a song called ‘Deliver Me (From What You Do)’. And also Gavin Friday, I am in love with his album [catholic] at the moment. It’s a fantastic album, very powerful. So I admire those artists that are actually spiritually concerned. And have the balls to be concerned about that, and not concerned with fuckin’ George Bush’s dick. It’s very hard to sing when you’ve got someone’s dick in your mouth.”
She shoots a mischievous grin before adding, “I’ve tried.”
If Pope Benedict XVI walked into this room right now, what would you say to him?
“I would ask him politely to leave. Rasta don’t sit with the devil.”

As far as Sinéad O’Connor is concerned then, Ireland is still very much a miserable, Church-infested, uptight shithole. So has she ever considered leaving?
“I would not by choice live here, because it is still a bit too squinting windows. But generally, I think, that until all of us over-35s are dead, it’s still going to happen. All that old theocratic DNA, the squinting windows back in Magdalene laundry mentality. There’s still an awful lot of it. It’s everywhere. Well you look over it all during the presidential build-up, it’s just an ugly place, it’s an ugly place full of ugly shit, still. So by nature I wouldn’t like to live here, but I think it’s better for the kids – and obviously their fathers are here. So I wouldn’t take them away from their fathers.”
Where would you live?
“Probably in America actually. I wouldn’t raise children there. But if I had no children, I’d live in America. I love American people and it’s an amazing place. But, yeah, Ireland’s a bit of a weird fuckin’ place
to live.”
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve had happen to you here, in
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.
“So, I think someone like me is threatening everything. And in some ways, as well, I’m a catalyst. I’m saying and doing all the shit that Irish women – or that Irish people – are not supposed to say or do.”
That said, as a proud parent of four, she still sees great hope for the next generation of young Irish people.
“Oh, I think the younger generation are fuckin’ phenomenal!” she enthuses. “That’s why I think I can’t wait for their sake, I can’t wait ‘til we’re all dead. There’s a lot of kids hanging around this house so I get a great insight into the kind of people they are. And they’re really amazing people, and again I see with Róisín, she’s 15, and they’re just fuckin’ incredible to each other.
“They love each other and they just can’t stand any type of homophobia. They’ll walk out on their own fathers and mothers if there’s a fuckin’ negative remark made about gay people. They have an enormous sense of how they deserve to be treated like gods and goddesses, and they don’t take anything less than that. And they’ll get up and walk away from anyone who they feel disrespected by, which is amazing, without screaming or shouting. They’ll just say, ‘Actually no, I am priceless and precious and I’m not going to sit here and listen to that’. And they stand up for each other, and they’re very forward thinking and everything.
“So I’m really confident about Ireland when I hang out with teenagers. I realise it’s going to be a fuckin’ incredible place when all of us over-35s have fucked off.”
And with that, Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor puts down her coffee cup and says, “Shit! I’ve gotta go pick Shane up from school. Do you want a lift to the station?”
It would seem that a ride is still not out of the question…

Sinéad O’Connor plays the Olympia Theatre on December 18. What About I Be Me And You Be You will be released on One Little Indian in February 2012.