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
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.
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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.
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In one of the most dramatic developments in Irish music in decades, Sinead O'Connor has said that she will retire from the music business in three months time
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At the tender age of seventeen, Dubliner Sinéad O'Connor packed up Ton Ton Macoute, packed her bags and headed for London. Two years on she's had a few close shaves, recorded with the Edge and is on the verge of seriously launching her career with an album in January. Interview: Molly McAnailly Burke.
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