Sinéad has always been this way: headstrong, defiant, unwilling or unable to conform. born in the
working-class Glenageary part of Dublin on December 8, I966. Sinead, the third of John and Marie
O'Connor's four children, grew up cautiously, anxiousty observing what was teft of a marriage that had
begun to deteriorate before she had been born. John O'Connor was an engineer, and Marie was a
dressmaker. Sinead and her two brothers and one sister spent their early years in a home full of
constant strife, all anger and precarious silences.
Sinead's interview comments frequently refer to a
childhood speckled by unspecified "abuse". In 1975, Sinéad's parents divorced. For the next five years
Sinéad lived with her mother. Sinead started doing what most thirteen-year-old kids, from happy homes
or not,start doing: she rebelled. In those five years she stayed with her mother, Sinéad was never
happy, and at thirteen she moved back in with her father Sinéad saw little of her mother over the next
few years; when Marie O'Connor was killed in a car crash in 1985, she had not seen her daughter in
more than a year.
The Lion and the Cobra is dedicated to Marie O'Connor ; perhaps to keep balance,
Sinéad dedicated I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got to her father. Sinéad's father seems to have kept his
daughter on a longer leash than his wife did. Testing her father's patience, Sinéad rebelled against him
as well. She skipped school regularly enough to be considered a truant by school officials, and she
spent much of her hooky time moping around Dublin and playing video games, most of the money spent
on playing these video games she had stolen from her father. After getting away with stealing from her
father, she moved on to shoplifting clothes and perfume, and eventually got caught trying to sneak out
of a store with a pair of unpaid-for shoes. Although there were more minor offenses against his
daughter, John was worried he decided he had to place his daughter in a situation that might teach her
some discipline.
Getting moved from school to school Sinéad finally settted in at the Newton School in
Waterford. While at Newton, Sinéad realized what she wanted to do with her life. She played guitar in her
dormitory room, began to feel comfortable singing and even writing the beginnings of songs (some of
which she still performs), and found some solace through her music. With finding solace in her music, it
was all Sinéad really had that made her feel like she belonged to the world. With knowing how to play the
guitar and sing Sinéad got her first break when one of her teachers at Mayfield asked Sinead to sing at
her wedding.
The brother of the bride was Paul Byrne, drummer for the band In Tua Nua. Sinéad and
Byrne became good friends and she even helped write the group's first singles "Take My Hand."
Although In Tua Nua released "Take My Hand in 1984, Sinéad did not remain in the band, her father
insisted that she not tour with the band and she wound up at the Waterford Boarding School, While
there she began playing in public more regularly, usually in pubs or coffeehouses (often with a
supporting guitarist). With only staying close to one year at Waterford, Sinéad urged her father to let her
attend Dublin's College of Music.
At the age of seventeen, Sinead joined a group called Ton Ton
Macoute, as its singer She was not allowed to write for the band. The band even tried to audition for
England's Ensign records, they were not taken in by their performance, however, Nigel Grainge and
Chris Hill were taken in by Sinéad's presence and intensity. Sinéad was still very shy when she
performed in front of an audience, Nigel and Chris simply told her she needed to work on her shyness.
That was a typical record company blow-off, and they returned to England. Consequently, a month later
Ton Ton Macoute broke up.
Sinéad was convinced and more confident that should we receive a record
deal. Promises made earlier by Grainge had come through when he sent her a plane ticket and promptly forgot
about her. On July 14, 1990 Rolling Stone Magazine ran a story about Sinéad which featured a
photograph which was taken at Dublin Airport before she left for Great Britain, she had her luggage and
even a full head of hair.
When Sinead showed up at Ensign' s office, a surprised Grainge sat her down
and introduced her to Karl Wallinger, formely of the Waterboys. In the studio, he guided Sinéad through
the process of recording her first professional demo tape. Grainge went into the studio and saw and
heard Sinéad perform a stunning version of "Troy". Later that day, Sinéad went on to record
"Jerusalem", "Drink Before the War", and "Just Call Me Joe". Surprised by Sinéad's performance,
Grainge immediately had Sinéad signed to Ensign Records.
Sinéad quickly moved to London (a
cold-water flat in Stoke-Newington) for good. While in London Sinéad wrote The Lion and the Cobra and
spent most of her times hanging around the Ensign Records office answering telephones, she had
nothing better to do. In the two years Sinéad had been in London, she had taken her songs and
transformed them into full-fledged musical pieces and by mid-1986 she was ready to record them.
Grainge sent Sinéad into the studio with producer Mick Glossop. Sinéad met Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, the
former manager of Boomtown Rats and Bananarama. Grainge had insisted Sinéad not hire O'Ceallaigh
as her manager, but Sinéad needed a strong mangager and she believed in and trusted him. The second
and probably most important man Sinéad would meet while in London was her future husband John
Reynolds, who was hired into the studio group as the drummer on Sinéad's debut album. Soon after
they met, Sinéad and John had begun dating.
Before recording her album though, Sinéad did a
collaboration with U2's Guitaritst (Dave Evans) known as "The Edge" was writing a soundtrack for a
filmed called "The Captive". Sinéad flew to Dublin and her and Evans started their collaboration. The
song they had written together, "Heroine" was beyond anything Sinéad had ever accomplished with In
Tua Nua and Ton Ton Macoute. With this song, Sinéad was able to share her real talent with someone
who was her equal, both in writing and performing. The collaboration with "The Edge" helped Sinéad
transform her music and from then on she experimented more and more developing her own style, she
even experimented with her hair.
She tried a mohawk, tired of that look, she sported a crew cut, and
finally went completely bald. Late night talk show host Arsenio Hall use to refer to Sinéad as "that little
bald lady." SPIN magazine published it's fifth anniversary issue in April of 1990, according to the article,
Sinéad's record company wanted her to "spice" up her image and make herself more "girlie", so she cut
off all of her hair.
She did this for a number of reasons, one being she simply did it for herself and no
one else. Sinéad once said "Hair's a fashion statement and I don't want to make one." When Sinéad
finally went into the studio to record The Lion and the Cobra, she discovered she was pregnant with her
and Reynolds' child. The record company and Reynolds wanted Sinéad to quickly have an abortion, she
got as far as the hospital, but at the last minute, she changed her mind. With her personal and
professional problems rising, Grainge suspected O'Ceallaigh was creating a gap between Sinéad and the
record company.
Under those circumstances, it was evident that the sessions Sinéad recorded under
Glossop's direction were a bust she and Glossop were at odds on how the record was suppose to
sound. Both Sinéad and O'Ceallaigh saw Glossop as a patronizing impediment to making the record
Sinéad and O'Ceallaigh wanted. Just when Glossop was ready to remix the album for release, Ensign
agreed to let Sinéad call all the shots, along with O'Ceallaigh. She would produce herself, with engineer
Kevin Moloney. Sinéad started recording the album in April of 1987, while she was seven months
pregnant. She knew she had to complete the record in 2 months time. Knowing that she could pull this
off at the age of just 20, that was far more impressive then the album itself, that June, she had
completed the record and Ensign officials were pleased with the results.
She gave birth to her son, Jake
Reynolds. Soon after he was born, she and John had a falling-out, and she grew even closer to
O'Ceallaigh. The Gaelic inside of the inner sleeve translates into: "You will tread upon the lion and the
cobra, You will trample the great lion and serpent." The fact that it was written in Gaelic also made sure
that no one was in on the plan. The photograph, in which Sinéad leans her head towards the ground
with a grimace look. This shows that the album your about to listen to will be unlike any other. If you
look real close you will see that Sinéad wrote an illegible note on the back of her left hand. The cover
image may show a tough, agresssive and serious woman, but underneath that image was a very
vulnerable woman. The image is one thing, and the art is another.
The band musicians who played on
The Lion and the Cobra were: John Reynolds on drums and drum programming, keyboardist Mike
Clowes, guitarist Rob Dean, and bassist "Spike" HollifieId. The most important addition was Marco
Pirroni, the former foit to Adam Ant, who overdubbed several guitars onto the album's only traditional
hard-rock song, "Mandinka," and supercharged it. Yet the album was based upon a solo artist and not a
band, with the addition of a couple star-spoken cameos. Many of the songs on The Lion and the Cobra
have a big sound, but they aretraceable back to a solitary woman and her guitar.
The stark opening cut
"Jackie" sets the agenda and exemplifies what is startling about The Lion and the Cobra and what
remains unfinished. "Mandinka" shows how Sinead can work with well-worn materials and come up with
something new. The electric-guitar chords of "Mandinka" are worthy of a first-rate heavy~metal group
like AC/DC; Sinead sharpens her lyrical point, but smooths her sound by grating acoustic guitars atop
"Mandinka's" snow slide of electric guitars.
The Lion and the Cobra is a debut album full of songs
written by Sinead when she was still a teenager, and as a result the young performer and writer is not
able to maintain the intensity of "Mandinka" throughout the record. " Jerusalem" offers evidence that
Sinead has not yet perfected a voice that can show agitation without sounding whiny " Jerusalem" also
loses itsetf in a cluttered sound-its adventurous middle section sounds like a collage of sound effects,
this song also shows how much anger Sinéad could put into her music as well as powerful lyrics and
music.
"Just Like U Said It Would B" marries British folk (in the tradition of the groundbreaking folk-rock
group Fairport Convention). " Never Get Old" is more problematic. Its elevated tone diffuses a good
hook, reminiscent of Aja-period Steely Dan, that appears once Reynolds's drums finally kick in hard
against Sinead's wordless moans. What diverts the listener mainly from the song is the cameo of arty
Irish singer Enya (full name: Enya Ni Bhronain). Enya's Gaelic-language spoken sections serve as
intentionally elitist devices, because they make sure that most fans will not be able to understand what
is going on.
"Troy", an outstanding dissection of the treacherous journey from love to betrayal,
embodies wide-screen sound to an expansive tale that takes in small domestic moments and grand ones
derived from Greek mythology with equal finesse (although Sinead's promise that "I'd kill a dragon for
you/And die" is a bit much). "Troy" is an ideal showcase for showing how closely Sinead can focus on
affairs of the heart. The version of "Troy" on The Lion and the Cobra has since been overtaken by the
sparse live version that Sinead performs alone with an acoustic guitar and climaxes with the spat-out
scream, "You're still , a fucking liar" this is not some demure singer-songwriter scolding an ex-lover ; its
pretensions not withstanding, it feels real.
"I Want Your (Hands on Me)," is a savvy white-girl funk
exercise. It is an urgent song that is full of demands for physical affection and promises of what will
happen if the listener takes her up on her offer. Electric guitars bounce off Reynolds's programmed drum
patterns, leaving plenty of room for Sinead to spray lust in all directions. "I Want Your (Hands on Me)"
and " Mandinka" sound much hotter than the rest of The Lion and the Cobra, probably because they
were remixed by different people after the initial mix by producer Sinead, engineer Moloney, and
manager O'Ceallaigh.
The Lion and the Cobra winds down with two of its oldest compositions. "Drink
Before the War", and "Just Call Me Joe". "Drink Before the War' features perhaps Sinead's slyest
singing on the record, all purposeful swoops and asides. "Just Call Me Joe," a feedback-heavy ballad
built around the ominous fret work of guest guitarist Kevin Mooney, who wrote the song under the
pseudonym Black Moon E. "Just Call Me Joe" is a barbed, yet ironically low-key ending to an album that
as a whole is anything but low-key.
Sinead had lived up to the liner-note boast: she had tread on the lion
and the cobra, and emerged from that experience wiser and more ferocious. However, sales of The Lion
and the Cobra were exceptionally low, selling only twenty-five thousand, and some in the company did
not even think that Sinead, a woman they perceived to be quite odd, would get even that far. Sinead's
debut album arrived in unsuspecting record stores at a time when albums by female pop performers
were considered an amusing novelty Retrogressive folk- oriented performers like Suzanne Vega and
Tracy Chapman were all the rage for young fans who had missed Joni Mitchell the first time around and
for older fans who simply missed her.
For no other reason than because she was a woman, Sinead was
lumped in with these overt folkies. In an interview with Bill Coleman that ran in Musician. " I'm not an
admirer of folk music, of Suzanne Vega and Joni Mitchell," all that stuff is wishy-washy as far as l'm
concerned." Sinead may have had a big mouth when she sang, but that was going to be nothing
compared to what she could do with it when she talked.
Before Sinead could get out the good word
about herself, she had to deal with a new record company. Ensign had hammered out a distribution deal
with Chrysalis, who would market The Lion and the Cobra internationally, but a shortage of cash at
Ensign led to a deal in which the company of Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill became a wholly owned
subsidiary of Chrysalis.
Chrysalis' projection of twenty-five thousand sales was quickly surpassed.
Even conservative commercial American radio was playing the record. Sinead's beachhead on the United
States airwaves was college radio (also known as "alternative radio") stations, which made sense.
College radio has always been extremely open to performers who do not look mainstream-especially if
that performer is mildly androgynous, and an apparentty literate manipulator of obscure, angst-filled
lyrics. Sinéad fit this category to a "T" and frequently appeared on the alternative and college radio
charts.
Sinead's face in the press, led to more interest on the part of radio programmers. Live shows
also helped sell the record. Although Sinead and her band only toured through clubs and small halls,
such intimate settings enhanced the quiet, insular songs that made up the bulk of The Lion and the
Cobra. Her hour-plus sets featured most of the songs from her debut album, as well as a harsh,
unrecorded tale called "The Value of Ignorance".
She played several of the songs accompanied only by
her guitar and in doing so did her best to minimize the inevitable distance between performer and
audience. The most riveting of these solo acoustic tunes was her recasting of "Troy." Stripped of its
ornamental orchestration, the hurt and ambivalence of the tune shone through.Sinead and a guitar, this
"Troy" nonetheless wailed. Many fans left these shows moved.
Sinead was able to get across via music
videos. Three of the songs from The Lion and the Cobra-"Troy," "I Want Your(Hands on Me)," and
"Mandinka"-were filmed by John Maybury. Listening to The Lion and the Cobra, attending the tour
supporting it, and watching the videos culled from it yield impressive evidence that anyone who
considered Sinead aggressive or pushy (or one of the sexist synonyms for such an attitude) was not
paying attention to the performer's work.
Every song Sinead performed in 1987 and 1988 was built on
the platform of the singer's vulnerability. Critics reviewed her interviews instead of her record, and they
were reviewing a totally different type of performer. However, Sinéad didn't feel she should be praised
just for writing a song. Sinead was something special, and she surely knew it. How else could she be so
confident of her own opinions and be so willing to express them?
As Sinéad turned twenty-one, she
became a "punk", In fact, there may have been some pressure on Sinead (from record-company people
as well as O'Ceallaigh) to be confrontational: it kept her unusual first name out where people saw and
heard it, and it accentuated how Sinead was different from the flock of female folk singers. Sinead
climaxed her support of The Lion and the Cobra with a lip-synching performance at the Grammy Awards,
one of the American music industry's many annual tributes to itself. Bald-headed and fierce-looking
among the wide-smiled moussed stars, Sinead was like "Twin Peaks" at television's Emmy Awards
eighteen months later: she was miles ahead of everybody else, she had upset the status quo, and
nobody knew quite what to do with her.
Although she had to contend with the stupidity that is
lip-synching before a live performance (and she has never mentioned why she did not play live, as
others did that Night), Sinead blazed through "Mandinka', as well as she possibly could. In the midst of
the polite evening, she came on like a punk. For the first time she delivered a performance that lived up
to her rhetoric. The audience (both live and in their homes) were stunned. They were not used to seeing
something that appeared real. Flagrantly sexual, built on inside jokes (most people neither knew Jake
nor Public Enemy), it was a performance that succeeded precisely because it did not belong.
"We realized
that she had turned off a lot of people that night." Quietly company officials began to discuss toning
down their unlikely star, but everyone knew that was unlikely as long as Fachtna O'Ceallaigh remained
her keeper. Sinead could not have cared less such public considerations. After her Grammy
performance, she flew back to London and married John Reynolds. Even though she had married John
Reynolds, Sinéad seemed to grow closer to O'Ceallaigh, this shocked everyone, even the tabloids were
starting to pick up on it.
The love triangle between the three may have not been sexual, but more
emotional. Moving back to London and marrying Reynolds was one way of starting to deal with the
problem. Getting married also created some necessary friction between Sinead and O'Ceallaigh.
Sinéad's work of this period is accurately documented by The Value 0f Ignorance, a short (only
thirty-five minutes long) video document of a June 1988 show at's Dominion Theater, shot by John
Maybury The song selection is pretty much what one would expect from seeing her live, since her set
lists did not vary much. The Value 0f Ignorance presents seven songs from The Lion and the Cobra and
an a cappella encore of a recontextualized Frank O'Connor (no relation) poem "I Am Stretched on Your
Grave."
Although the product takes its name from the visceral unreleased tune Sinéad was performing
at the time, that song does not appear here. Almost the entire Value 0f Ignorance tape is composed of
close-up shots of Sinéad. the shooting style is so intentionally fuzzy that the tight close-ups don't add
up to any intimacy with the singer. There is little visual evidence that a band is backing her; the camera
rarely pulls back far enough to reveal that. Also unseen and virtually unheard in the video is the
audience, they might as well not have shown up at all.
The Value 0f Ignorance is as insular as a live
recording can be. None of what is great about Sinéad works its way onto the tape. What does come
through is arty indifference. Sinead performs some wonderful songs but she does not bother to put
them across to anyone but herself. The closure of the video seems like nothing so much as a vanity
project and a souvenir for diehard fans. Both Sinéad and her loyal audience deserve better.
A new song
from that period was called "Jump in the River", which showed up on the soundtrack to Jonathan
Demme's warm comedy Married To the Mob. Cowritten with Marco Pirroni, it is an immediate leap in
songwriting quality from all but the cream of The Lion and the Cobra. Sinead plays nearly all the
instruments on the tune, and she sounds more in control than in any of her previous recordings. "Jump
in the River" charges harder than anything on The Lion and the Cobra, including "Mandinka," both
musically and lyrically. The song is about trust, about giving one's self over to another, and the peace of
such as countered by Sinéad's mammoth electric guitar chords.
The video for "Jump in the River"
undermines the song. How can Sinéad's audience get excited about a track if it looks as though she is
bored by the whole thing ? Not surprisingly, in spite of its great strengths, "Jump in the River" was not
much of a hit. In her music, espescially with "Jump in the river", Sinéad
seemed to be more assured artistically and personally when she tied the knot with Reynolds.
She had
more of a sense of herself and what she could and could not do, and the chance to be at home with
Jake for an extended period of time gave her even more strength. She kept a low profile and tried to
settle back into some sort of normal life. The year on the road had left her chronically fatigued, and she
turned to yoga as a way out.
At this time she also fired her manager, O'Ceallaigh, they say he is too
abrasive, he is too opinionated, and he is too anxious to escalate a minor disagreement into
thermonuclear war. Instead of helping an artist keep control, which is what a good rock-and-roll
manager is supposed to do, O'Ceallaigh controlled Sinéad. Granted, she was a willing subordinate in
that she was infatuated enough with O'Ceallaigh and his ideas to go along with anything he said (on the
musical side, it is not unfair to suggest that this situation helped inspire "Jump in the River").
lt has
become standard to blame everything Sinead did from 1987 to 1989 on O'Ceallaigh (Sinead herself does
it in interviews when someone brings up O'Ceallaigh), but it is worth remembering that Sinéad was no
dope during that time of her life, just a kid. by late 1989, Sinéad had outgrown O'Ceallaigh. She wanted
complete power over her life and her career, and he was living vicariously through her. Breaking away
from O'Ceallaigh, She huddled in a small studio with engineer Chris Birkett- again, Sinead intended to
produce herself-and sparingly brought other players (Reynolds, Pirroni, Rourke) into the fold, and
poured her heart into her new songs.