Where is sinead oconnor

It chronicles everything from the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother to discovering God and music. My mother was saying all this scary stuff, and I was curled up so she could kick me on the bottom. Suddenly, there Jesus was in my mind, on a little stony hill, on His cross. It is a soul-bearing, brutally honest account of an extraordinary life. When she speaks to me, she's in good spirits. Bette Midler tweeted her this morning.

She's a bit of an idol so I nearly died when I saw that thing this morning. I swear I was ready to get naked and run up and down the village squealing. O'Connor is wickedly funny, a lesser-known feature of her personality that comes across in her writing too. We talk about touring "It's a young person's game" , tattoos "I have no room for any more, unless I tattoo my head or something" , driving music "Good driving music is Van Morrison Van's great for driving" and the reunification of Ireland.

She suggests that all the young people in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland should work together to create a new country and call it Daisy or Melissa or Fred. When I ask if she would vote for a united Ireland in the event of a referendum, she replies without hesitation: "Yes, of course I would. Abso-bloody-loutely, I'd be the first person tearing the door down!

As well as an Irish Republican, some of us might think of O'Connor as being a Catholic priest, a Rastafarian, a sex symbol, a musical icon or, more recently, a Muslim convert. She's also a grandmother, and now likes to sit peacefully at home, alone, smoking and knitting while watching detective shows.

She lives in a cottage on top of a mountain "in a lovely little village with no-one but eccentrics and cows on one side and ducks on the other". She often compares herself to a rescue dog. She describes the process of promoting the book as "overwhelming". In fact, I was a little unsure whether our interview would go ahead after she tweeted a few days previously that she was calling off all further promotion of the book.

The interview was back on within 48 hours, but it did make me slightly nervous about speaking to her. I was aware there were certain themes that were off limits. Also, I didn't feel them when I read the audio book, nor did I ever feel them in therapy as a matter of interest," she says.

It was quite triggering. So I guess when I describe myself as a rescue dog, I'd say right now, just in the last week or two, I'm definitely a little triggered in terms of how I survived my upbringing. It was by not engaging emotionally. But this guy managed to wake the sleeping dogs. When I ask what the biggest misconception of her has been over the years, she pauses for a moment before answering.

Because in my view, my career was derailed by having a number one hit single that turned me into a pop star, which I wasn't - I was a protest singer.

I ask about the decision to hang a Palestinian flag on her microphone stand during one of the shows on the US tour last year. How do you negotiate expressing even for example the fact that you're a Republican without implying that you think someone else is a dick? Most of what we think we know about the singer has come from her songs, the occasional controversy and tabloid headlines. Rememberings offers a new perspective.

In fact, she describes it as the most important song she's ever sung. Because it was very important that certain stories within it got told, particularly, the experience of childhood in the Republic of Ireland in the 70s", she says.

That we could have died in that house and no-one would have known that in fact, the four O'Connor children were the Children of Lir. Having read the book, it's easy to see why this is such an appropriate and powerful metaphor. In Irish myth, the Children of Lir were turned into swans but kept their voices.

This could be O'Connor's swan-song. I like the fact I'm getting older. Yes, there is a new album on the way, but just before our call, O'Connor had been reading Tarot cards and asked the question, "Should I just retire now?

O'Connor had a hysterectomy in , which can cause the body to age prematurely. I really fought a good battle there. I'm tired. A wise warrior knows when to retreat. And I've got to the age and time in life where you just want to sit and be peaceful in your garden and knit. So that's why my life is actually really boring but I love it. It's completely predictable. Completely boring, same thing every day. The family were middle-class, fairly well off, practising Catholics and dysfunctional. When her parents split up, she says, her father a structural engineer turned barrister became only the second man in Ireland awarded custody of his children and a campaigner for the right to divorce.

She is convinced her mother wanted to destroy her reproductive organs. Was she aware at the time of how alike they looked? She says it was her mother who forced her into thieving as a little girl. She would visit houses that were for sale just so she could steal shit out of them. She would take money out of the church plate.

My father was very well-off. When my mother died, we were living like she had no money, with no heat, no electricity, no hot water. My father took me on holiday with the rest of the kids when I was 13 or 14 and I stole a rug out of the hotel room. At the age of 14, she got caught stealing a pair of gold shoes for a mate and was sent to a reform school run by nuns.

In the past, she has said she loved her despite everything, and never recovered from her death. Today, she simply says she was relieved that she died. Does she think her mother was ill or just cruel? It was the devil in her. Of her odd tattoos, all but one are scriptural. She began writing her memoir in January when she was in a good place. But then she had a prolonged and catastrophic breakdown, brought on partly by one of her children becoming seriously ill; she also had a radical hysterectomy later that year.

I went through what you call surgical menopause, which is like menopause multiplied by 10, The first half I wrote on a laptop at home, the second half I dictated from the nuthouse.

After the hysterectomy, her mental health took a dive. So the children were terrified of me. I was furious. I was completely gone. I was suicidal. I was very isolated and alone.

She says she was hard work when she arrived on the locked ward. In fact they loved me very much indeed. She calls the hospital her second home. I went there all the time because I was suicidal.

I would take myself there. In the past I have made several suicide attempts. It was the times when she signed herself out of their care that the disasters happened. In , she convinced herself everybody in Ireland and Britain had given up on her, so she headed for America to see friends. In fact, she ended up living alone in a motel in not-so-quiet desperation. She managed to get back to Ireland, and readmitted herself to hospital.

Social media has often brought the worst out of her. And it was this January that she and the hospital agreed she was fit to leave.

She puts out yet another cigarette, prepares to light the next, then stops. I ask whether she learned anything about herself from writing the book. Coming from where I did, and then to walk around the world having this fantastic adventure. Towards the end of her stay in hospital, she started to appreciate her talent for the first time.

When she was planning to tour before it got cancelled by the pandemic , she worried that she may have forgotten the lyrics to her songs. I was a skinny young lady and I thought, where did that voice come from? Did she think she was beautiful? Not any more. You would never declare: I am loving and lovable!

Did she find it tough? When I read it, I was like, holy fuck, that was a really scary night. She was in America in , soon after Nothing Compares 2 U had topped the charts. A chauffeur-driven car arrived to take her to his house. From the off, she says, Prince acted strangely. Things soon got tense.

She says the evening ended up with him locking her in his house, insisting they have a pillow fight, then hitting her with a hard object hidden inside the pillowcase. Eventually she escaped. She has talked about this night before now, but previously she seemed to laugh it off. Not this time. What does she think would have happened if Prince had caught her? What was the scariest moment?

His irises dissolved and his eyes just went white. There still might be, she says. I think he was a walking devil.