Re:시네이드 오코너 인터뷰 - 원문 (iZINE, 1997)

[Carly]

The history of women in music is the history of struggle - for recognition and equality. Sure, it records many as iconic singers, songwriters and sex symbols, but it deals out the plaudits most strongly on the male side of the ledger. Yet there are many women who have fought it out on the frontline and carved the women's niche deep enough that in the late '90s the new breed of female performers have taken the industry and world by the throat and shaken it.

In the post-Lilith Fair (what a triumph that was) state of 1997, women rock, folk, hip and hop, trip and shock.

The battle isn't over, but the frontline has advanced a long way into male turf. Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro will be smiling from above; Grace Slick, Joni Mitchell, Joan Jett, Emmylou Harris, L7 and Tori Amos remain proud and still defiant.

And then there's Sinead O'Connor, the mystical, outspoken, socio-cultural Irish revolutionary. Where's Sinead at? THE iZINE's JAYNE MARGETTS found out.

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THE insolent stare either defiles with its molten fury or impedes with its icy reproach, none more so than when she incurred the wrath of America and its Catholic institution after tearing up a picture of the Pope. Her refusal to coat the Star Spangled Banner anthem with her velvety chords saw an angry crowd hiss and boo her offstage and her outspoken views on child abuse, religion, AIDS and abortion - especially in her native Ireland - have possibly made her one of this century's most controversial icons.

When her name rolls of the tongue, a stream of objectives spring to mind. Sinead O'Connor. Beguiling, noble and mysterious, a modern day priestess as rugged as the hill-forts and standing stones that are scattered around the ancient Emerald Isles landscape. Poster child and lyrical activist of deep seated taboos who enchants with her Celtic tongue. A contemporary Joan Of Arc whose sword is her pen and whose army is her naked symphonies.

An angel-faced nightingale with the candour and arrogance of a new born child whose beauty is both deceiving and disarming, O'Connor poses and within each stance there's a multitude of persona's to choose from. There's the seminal album cover with her foetal form scrunched up, the snapshot of the lone rebel with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, the political and social wraith in the cosy company of Peter Gabriel and Sting, the femme fatale with the smouldering eyes and (in the early days) the maternal figure cuddling the infantile form of her son Jake.

More recently, O'Connor seemed to shy away from the condemnatory stares of her detractors and the blood-lust of the paparazzi. It was a retrospective winter of discontent, where she chartered her way through therapy, self-realisation, motherhood and the song writing process. The end result of which was the immensely personal, beautifully lush and critically acclaimed Universal Mother.

The music climate may have changed in O'connor's absence, whilst a brazen battalion of women songwriters have strutted into the forefront from the Icelandic princess of pop Bjork through to the powerful and lithe Alanis Morrissette and Sheryl Crowe, yet the Irish icon seems equally as timeless and potent as she ever was, a fact which is confirmed with the release of her haunting, wizened and silvery Gospel Oak EP.

The trademark bald pate is now covered with a busy thatch of dark hair while the voice continues to quiver with unrestrained emotion and her appearance on the David Letterman show, a couple of months back, also suggests that her private sabbatical has given her a clear perspective in which to trace the roots of her own evolvement.

The Gospel Oak EP a precursor to her forthcoming album explores her own self-worth in I'm Enough For Myself, anger and resentment towards the plight of the Rwandans in the lilting En Petit Poulet and a paganistic nod to her and her peoples past . "It was basically the idea of God being a feminine principal, God the mother, which was symbolised by the oak, because it's such an ancient, ancient tradition. Also, the worship of God the mother used to take place in what they would call the sacred oak groves," she explains.

"Songs like For My Love is a love song really. Inspired by love and then it goes on to talk about Ireland. I see this as very much an Irish record and I see it as a little album and I see this song as a kind of clarification of that. In the first place it is a love song but it is also talks about the notion of the Irish having the right to govern their own country, being valid in that, but that it's not worth necessarily killing anyone for, especially when doing so is going to stop the truth from actually being allowed to take place.

"I suppose the thing that inspires all of these songs is the need for soothing," she continues, caught up in the moment. "In the first place to soothe myself, in the second place because of my own experience and the awareness outside me that the world needs soothing and mothering as much as I do. I guess that was the inspiration - the need for mothering and soothing myself."

Heavily pregnant with her second child Bridgeteen Roisin Waters ("she's named after our goddess in Ireland who's called Bridget") during the making of the EP, O'Connor concedes that carrying her child in the still waters of her womb stirred up her own feminine wiles. "I want Bridgeteen to have pride in her self," she adds. "You should never tell a girl, for example, not to sit with her legs open you know. That's one thing I will never say to my daughter.

"I want women to have pride and a sense of not being afraid of their sexuality, of their womanhood or of their power over other people because of the fact they are a woman. Not to feel guilty about being a woman and I guess to be comfortable in our own skin. That would be the best way to put it, not to be afraid to be beautiful."

Some may continue to describe O'Connor as profoundly religious, others spiritual, while views a more fundamental and earthy connection to the powers of paganism. "I think I've always been pagan by virtue of the fact that I'm an Irish woman and it's in my blood for centuries back." She pauses and looks back at her debut album The Lion And The Cobra, "it's full of religion, so I've always been a very spiritual person in the pagan tradition. You can't grow up in Ireland and not be," she reiterates gently.

Born in 1966 in Glenageary, Ireland and raised in Dublin, O'Connor left the family fold at a very early age after being divorced by her parents and sent to a Dominican nun-run centre for girls with behavioural problems. But by 1985, after attending the Dublin College Of Music she joined local band Ton Ton Macoute, where she met boyfriend and future manager Fachtna O'Ceallaigh. A year later he arranged for O'Connor to guest on U2's The Edge's soundtrack album Captive and was discovered by Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill of Ensign Records.

Guesting on stablemates World Party album Private Revolution and giving birth to a son Jake, preceded her debut solo Troy. By November of the same year she released The Lion And The Cobra and Mandrinka/Drink Before The War. A steady string of releases continued to flow until her hit Nothing Compares 2 U in January, 1990. Three months later her album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got spawned the hit single The Emperor's New Clothes.

In 1991 O'Connor made history as the first person to ever refuse her Grammy Award for alternative 1990 album. She protested about anti-legalising Irish abortion on TV and was booed off-stage at a Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Gardens, and due to the crowd noise that interrupted her performance she gave full vent to the Bob Marley song War. her declaration of forthcoming retirement soon followed.

A particularly ugly phase in her career followed when she spoke out about religion and child abuse which resulted in her writing a heartfelt poem. Even today she is liable to smart at the memory. "A lot of people said I was in pain, and that I said that I knew what I was talking about, and that I had a right to talk about child abuse having been through it myself, and that I had the right to talk about the healing process and how important it is to talk about it and be open. Be an open wound. If that is what you are then it's a very brave thing to be.

"A lot of therapists, including priests who were therapists sent me letters too saying that they had this thing on the wall of their office now, that it encouraged other young people to come into see them to talk about what had happened to them; which is a very hard thing to do. So basically that's what they understood, that I hadn't been just some angry girl trying to get attention and stuff like that, that there was actually some substance to it.

"A lot of people wrote saying that they were grateful that someone could speak because they are not allowed to speak, that when they take a vow of being a priest they have to promise that they will never say anything that will bring the church into disrepute."

A year later O'Connor made her comeback album Am I Not Your Girl and in 1994 Universal Mother. "It's a tough thing to grow up in public," she concedes. "It's tough to grow up anywhere, even in private. It's tough but I wouldn't carry on about it because at the same time I kind of made my own bed for want of a better phrase. I wouldn't have any gripes about it because I created my own life ..."

Some call O'Connor the Mother of Ireland and she is in her own uncompromising and courageous fashion, and with the advent of age there is always the danger that youthful passion can turn (overnight) into thirty-something complacency. That doesn't seem to be the case for angel faced nightingale with a voice of spun silk and a heart full of suffering.

One radio DJ recently quipped that O'Connor's once uplifting psalms had crumbled into mundaneity. Into the space reserved for mediocrity. But to hear those sweet Celtic vocal chords reach high into the sonorous stratosphere's it was obvious that O'Connor had not lost any of her ire or empathy.

O'Connor remains an illuminous beacon in the dark night and the torchbearer for the citizens of a shaky future. She's come a long way from the unsure young girl who saw her teen years pass through the portal of a Catholic convent and that's perhaps why she remains endearing and intriguing. A true Joan Of Arc for the modern age.