Most people remember Sinéad O’Connor for her shocking Saturday Night Live performance and her cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 You. In his revealing SPIN piece from 1990, Legs McNeil falls in love with Sinéad and shows a softer side of the shaved-headed songstress.
by Legs McNeil
Art by Claire Kimock
Originally published in Spin Magazine
April 1990
For 21 years, she fought to do it her way. But when she won and her dream came true, the torment continued.
The phone would ring.
“Hello?”
“You’re a slag and a weasel.”
“SINÉAD! You sex goddess, what’s going on?”
“Where’s my Elvis lamp?”
I had promised her this great Elvis lamp for her birthday… But when she didn’t get it on her 23rd birthday last December, she was beginning to doubt the Elvis lamp’s existence. It was taking on mythical proportions just like the King himself. But it did exist. It was the tackiest thing imaginable – a great grotesque bust of the king in all his sequined splendor, and right out of the top of his overgrown ducktail spurted a brass rod holding the most tasteful little suburban lamp. The only problem was that it was made out of Plaster of Paris and weighed a few hundred pounds. And I couldn’t find any way to ship it to London.
“I got the lamp. I do! You’re going to get it… I’m sending it over…”
“Yeah, sure, you lying slag. Well, you can bring it over when you come to interview me.”
“Okay, okay, that’s when I’ll bring it.”
But the thought of lugging Elvis through the airport sent shivers down my spine. Everyone standing around pointing and laughing. I hate to fly as it is, so I didn’t need Elvis adding to the drama.
“When are you coming?”
“On Friday. I’ll be there on Friday.” And, as I was running out the door to catch my flight Saturday morning, Sinéad caught me.
“Hello?”
“What are you still doing there, Legs?”
“Ah…uh…ah…”
She had on her best nun’s voice. A bald little nun, but a nun nonetheless.
“I’m leaving right now, I’m going. I’m outta here…”
“You were probably up all night shagging.”
“Why do you always expect the worst from me?”
“Because you’re a slag and a weasel…”
I wasn’t the only one to fall in love with her. It seemed like everyone, all 500,000 who bought her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra were completely blown away by this mysterious Irish soul with a bald head, combat boots, brilliant piercing eyes and a voice that could trigger the most passionate, anguished emotions – and the most joyous. Sinéad was Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Joan of Arc, St. Bernadette, tortured pal to the Virgin Mary or anyone else we could imagine, because the persona she unleashed was a study in contradiction – the ultimate victim-savior, child-woman, Madonna and whore, rock star and school girl.
The trouble was that Sinéad was just a 21-year-old Irish Catholic kid from the suburbs of Dublin, and she was just making it up as she went along. But Sinéad did have a bit more experience to draw from. She was born December 8, 1966, to parents whose marriage was rocky at best, but because Ireland doesn’t allow for divorce, Sinéad responded to her mother’s misery by shoplifting and collecting money “for charity.”
“I was trying to make my mother happy by getting money for her. Between the ages of 9 and 13 I must have been dragged to police stations about eight or nine times, but I never got charged with anything because I used to put on the waterworks and give them, like, ‘Oh, my mother’ll kill me’-all that stuff-which I used to believe myself. So I never actually got charged with anything.
“It was over a pair of shoes that finally put me away. I used to steal stupid things like toy makeup sets, just for the sake of doing it. I’d go into a shop and steal a magazine and sweets and things, and then I got into the habit of it. And then, because I was the best at it, I was the one who got sent to get serious things for other people. Like if my friends wanted to go out with their boyfriends and they wanted a pair of shoes, I was the one who went and got the shoes. Which is how I got caught, stealing a pair of gold shoes for my friend Theona.
“Then I began to steal money off my parents – which everybody did – but they couldn’t really handle it.”
After bailing her out of Theona’s gold shoes fiasco, Sinéad’s future step-mom sat her down and asked, “How would you like to go to a new school, with lots of new friends?” It wasn’t long before Sinéad, at 14, found herself in an Irish snakepit of rehabilitation. Its official title was that of a residential center for girls with behavioral problems, but that didn’t make it any less of a hell-hole.
“I will never experience such panic and terror and agony over anything like I did at that place. It wasn’t a government-run institution – it was a Catholic one, which is worse, believe me. If you were bad, they sent you upstairs to sleep in the old folks’ home. You’re in there in the pitch black, you can smell the shit and the puke and everything, and these old women are moaning in their sleep.”
The room upstairs was actually a hospice for the dying. That’s where they sent bad little 14-year-old girls – to sleep surrounded by all that death. For 18 months, Sinéad endured the horror of the “home,” but in the process developed a hysterical fear of dying and more fuel for an already fantastic fantasy life.
“I was one of the lucky ones; I was allowed to go outside to school, which the others weren’t. I started reading things like Wuthering Heights and stuff like that, which I really, really loved. I loved all that really, really romantic stuff, like WB Yeats. I was WB Yeats as far as I was concerned and I was Tess.”
It was a teacher at the school for wayward girls who provided Sinéad with her first big break by asking the 14-year-old to sing at a wedding. It was there that the teacher’s brother, a drummer for the Irish rock group In Tua Nua, heard Sinéad and asked her to write some lyrics for some music he had written. The result was “Take My Hand,” which was recorded by In Tua Nua and soared up the Irish charts.
“That was my first ever experience, and I loved it. It really got me going. Reverb. I discovered reverb, and that was it.”
When she was released from the school for wayward girls, Sinéad was sent to boarding school in Waterford, 150 miles south of Dublin.
She tried to get thrown out of school, and when she couldn’t even do that right, Sinéad packed up and ran away to Dublin. There she worked as a Kiss-o-gram girl in a French maid’s outfit and playing her guitar in the pubs at night.
“I’m a very impulsive person. I just get this feeling in my stomach, and I know I’ve got to do it. I don’t think about it; I just do it. I have always been like that, and when I left school it was like that: I will be a singer, I will succeed, because…I just knew…
“The loudness of my vocals was a complete accident. It started because I used to sing Bob Dylan covers in the pubs, and I used to get really annoyed when people would talk while I was singing, so I just shouted. Then one day, I thought ‘This sounds quite good.’ But it really frightened people, because I was quite small and had nice long hair. When I came onstage, they thought I’d be really sweet and demure. So it used to frighten them, which I enjoyed.
“But I was more frightened, actually. Still, in my heart I knew it would be alright. It was what I had to do, and that’s the way I live my life. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
In February 1985 it was starting to work out. Ensign Record partners Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill were in Dublin checking out the talent. They thought that Ton Ton Macoute, the band Sinéad was fronting, were dreadful. But Grainge was taken with the female singer’s voice. Several weeks later, she quit the band and sent Grainge a demo of her own songs. But while Ensign was deciding what to do with Sinéad, her mother was killed in an automobile accident.
It really frightened people, because I was quite small and had nice long hair. When I came onstage, they thought I’d be really sweet and demure. So it used to frighten them, which I enjoyed.
“I was in a flat in Dublin where I was living. I was there with this boyfriend of mine, and all of a sudden we started to talk for no reason about what we would do if our parents died. I got very upset for some reason, like really upset. We just had this discussion, and the next morning I was going to my dad, and I was walking up to the home that Sunday, and I just knew it, and I was destroyed.
“There’s no way of saying things like this without it sounding like I’m fucking kooky. But it’s true. I just felt like I knew the night before she died that she was going to die. I just knew.
“When she died was when it began to happen. Things really began to happen. Then I just knew that she was around. I could smell her. I knew she was sitting there. I just knew there was something in it and I always felt her telling me almost to do something. I know it sounds mad…
“Up until that point, it had been a sad relationship. I hadn’t seen her very much ‘cause I had left and gone away when I was 13. I had always gone back to see her and always felt a great love from the relationship. See, she wasn’t a very happy person. She wasn’t happy with her life. I always felt some understanding for her. I could never feel hatred or bitterness towards her. I just knew from a small age that she didn’t know what she was doing, and she didn’t mean it. I always felt a great love and great bond.
“But I think now I can understand her because I am a woman and I am a mother and the frustration that she must have gone through being in Ireland and the age, the generation that she was. There’s no divorce, and there’s no abortion – no contraception – and now I can look and say, poor woman. What a shitty life she must have had. What a shitty life my father had.”
When Ensign sent Sinéad a plane ticket, she was glad to be getting out of Ireland and making a clean start. But London offered no refuge, living in a cold-water flat in Stoke-Newington, with no friends around to keep her company, waiting for an album to happen. Sinéad was desperately lonely. It was through her aunt that she met an older man and fell in love.
“He was the fulfillment of all my fantasies because he was black. But he was married. His wife was a homemaker, with kids, and this guy in fact was a minister at this church in London. It lasted about a year and a half. And it was horrible and painful. I was madly in love, basically, and he wasn’t. But as time went on, he told me he wasn’t leaving his wife or anything, so I finally told him to get lost. And the next day, he came around to my flat with a present. It was a Hoover – a vacuum cleaner – so I thought if this is what it’s going to be like, then no way. So I told him to fuck off. I’ve never figured out why he came with a Hoover.
“He came around the next day to convince me to fuck him again. The fucking bastard had nerve. I don’t know why guys always think, ‘One last time.’ I cried for a while.”
As the affair was going from bad to worse, her professional life began to pick up. Sinéad met Fachtna O’Kelly – fellow Irish malcontent and ex-Boomtown Rats and Bananarama manager – and signed him as her manager. With Fachtna, it didn’t take long before she was recording the song “Heroin,” with U2’s guitarist The Edge for the soundtrack to the film Captive.
“I met Bono about six months after I moved to London. He heard some tapes I did with In Tua Nua years and years ago, and we just became friendly, and then he rang up and said The Edge was doing this thing, and would I like to do it? So I did it.”
After The Edge, Sinéad finished putting her band together and headed into the studio to record her first album. But once she was there, producer Mick Glossop had his own ideas about what Sinéad should sound like.
“He was a fuckin ol’ hippie. He was into 70s music and people like Grace Slick and Joan Baez and he thought I should make a record like that, a kind of Grace Slick sort of album. He had very romanticized ideas of how an Irish woman singer should sound. It was all heavy arrangements and nice little Celtic melodies.
“I didn’t want the album to sound the way it sounded, but I didn’t say anything for weeks and weeks because I thought, ‘Well, if the record company is happy with it, they know more about this than I do, so I shouldn’t say anything.’ Then they said they didn’t like it. It was just shit, it was all fucking Irish, ethereal and mystical. It never occurred to me that I actually had the right to question. I deferred to him because I was stupid. I was ignorant, and they played on my ignorance.”
And there was another problem. Sinéad was pregnant by drummer John Reynolds.
“It’s a worrying thing for a man to have some girl come up and say, ‘I’m having your baby,’ but I remember taking him to this dingy, depressing café where we drank some horribly greasy tea and I was crying and said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ I was terrified. I mean, I was glad. I was really glad I was pregnant, but I knew that I’d get a lot of trouble about it. I knew that there’d be trouble.”
The record company was not amused and tried to talk her out of having the baby.
Ensign scrapped the sessions Sinéad did with Mick Glossop. Six months pregnant, she found herself back in the studio beginning all over again, but this time producing herself.
“Being pregnant made me feel strong, because having a baby is such a big deal- it’s like the biggest thing that ever has, or will happen to me. It makes everything else seem trivial. After fighting to keep the baby and going through the pregnancy and labor, I felt like, hell, I can do anything I want. But it was very, very difficult recording while I was pregnant, because I was so moody. I got very exhausted and anemic. The band thought I was being vociferous because I was pregnant, not because I wanted them to do it a certain way. We finished the album, and four weeks later the baby was born.”
By the time The Lion and the Cobra was finally finished, Ensign Records was suffering cash-flow problems, and Grainge sold the label to Chrysalis Records. Though Chrysalis kept Sinéad on, the company didn’t have a clue as to what she was all about. They wanted her to “tart” herself up a bit and act “girlie.” Sinéad’s response was to go to the barber and get her hair cut off.
When The Lion and the Cobra was released, the record company only expected US sales of 25,000. Instead, the album went gold, Sinéad toured to sold-out venues and became a star at 21.
Like I said, I fell for her too, or rather I fell in love with a great idealized fantasy of her.
We first met in November 1988, in the London offices of Chrysalis Records. Sinéad sat in the corner of the room looking like some post-modernist, Dickensian street waif in her overcoat and furry Russian cap. She was leaning against the wall reading the trades.
Sinéad was the sexiest woman I’d met in a long while. Dazzling and captivating eyes, the most beautiful Irish brogue and skin that look like it would melt butter. I wanted to stare at her but I was trying to be cool, you know, just catching glimpse of her when she wasn’t looking my way. The other women, though supportive and friendly, were a bit tense in Sinéad’s presence. Because Sinéad’s presence doesn’t lend itself to making one feel particularly comfortable. At a time when everyone is trying to conform for fear of rejection, Sinéad has wiped away all the normal reference points from her body.
I was amazed she was such a tiny thing. She came up to about my armpits. And I kept thinking, geez, how does such a little thing take up so much space? There wasn’t an inch of the room she didn’t control. And I kept thinking, how does such a huge voice come out of such a little person? I couldn’t figure how the voice managed to fit inside her. Then her manager led us into a humongous board of directors’ office with lush wood paneling, mile-high ceilings and the longest table in Christendom. Sinéad sat down across from me and finally removed her hat. God is she gorgeous. …
Sinéad was the sexiest woman I’d met in a long while. Dazzling and captivating eyes, the most beautiful Irish brogue and skin that look like it would melt butter.
“Aren’t you going to press the record button?”
A couple of months later, after I got back from El Salvador, the phone rang.
“I’m coming to New York.”
“Great, great…”
But it wasn’t great: I’d forgotten that I was having a reading – some friends over to read aloud what they’d been writing – the same night we agreed to get together.
“I’m sorry, I forgot that I had it planned…” I told her when she called from her hotel.
“Well, aren’t you going to invite me?”
“Oh yeah, sure, but, but…”
“I’ll see you then.”
The problem was women. I’d been in a magnanimous mood when I’d invited friends over, and I’d forgotten that some of the women didn’t know about the others, or pretended like they didn’t know about the others. But now they were arriving at my door for the most uncomfortable evening of my life. Lots of ex-girlfriends in the same room at the same time. Yeah, a real brilliant idea. And just to add to the drama, in came the Bald Headed Wonder to enjoy every minute of watching me squirm.
“It serves you right for being such a slag and a weasel, lying to all those nice girls so you can get in their knickers, womanizing scum, you’re going to burn in hell…”
“It’s not like that…I…uh…ummmm…Well, you know, Sinéad, I am single. I’d been with someone seven years and…”
“And broke the poor girl’s heart with your filthy, dirty ways. It’s no wonder she left you for someone else…”
“Geez, Sinéad, you’re a real pal…”
She liked ripping into me. No, she loved it. By keeping the focus on me, we didn’t have to concentrate what was going on with her. The fact was that after all the success and acclaim Sinéad was experiencing, she was still a desperately unhappy little girl.
The next afternoon she was sitting on the brown couch, looking like a waif who’d just come in off the street to get out of the cold.
“Do you want to read the intro?” I asked, junking any sort of professional ethics in favor of getting a reaction. She was still working on the LP, so the story I had interviewed her for in London got pushed back. But I had finished the introduction and was curious to see if she’d like it.
I immediately regretted the decision and hid in the kitchen making a pot of tea, but then finally got the nerve to peek in. The smile was now stuck in a laugh, and her cheeks were blushing the color of tomatoes as she read: “Sinéad O’Connor is a beautiful 22-year-old woman from Dublin, Ireland, and the most original singer to appear in a long while. No one really knows just what the hell the lyrics or intentions of her songs are, but the emotional reality is immediate.”
“Fair enough,” she said when she was done. It was a phrase she used constantly. It was what she said instead of arguing. Only this time, she said it with a smile, still blushing. With Sinéad, it’s the smile that makes all the difference.
The introduction claimed that she was the most intimidating person I’d met in a long time. Sinéad didn’t agree.
“I don’t think I threaten anyone.”
“Sinéad, you threaten everyone.”
“Oh, and what makes you such an authority on Sinéad O’Connor?”
“I’m not; it’s just interesting watching you.”
“Do you think there’s a place around I can get tram lines for my head?”
“What?”
“Tram lines.”
“You mean like railroad tracks? For your head?”
She explained that what she wanted were racing stripes cut into the hair on the side of her head. “Tram lines” is what she called them. It was a year before every homeboy in America had a design cut into the back of his head, and the concept was still new.
“You know, the lines a lot of black people wear to show a part. I think they look brilliant.”
“Well, I guess you could go up to Harlem and get them. I’ll take you if you want.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Now?
“Yes, please.”
We got a cab and rode up to 125th Street and Lenox.
“Excuse me, you know where there’s a barber shop?”
A passerby pointed to around the corner, ignoring me, but watching Sinéad all the way down the street. She was dressed in a denim jacket, T-shirt, jeans and Doc Martens, and had her 18-month-old son Jake’s ink pajamas hanging off the back of her jeans the way some people tie a sweater around their waist. She looked different, but cute as hell. And oblivious to the stares her appearance invited.
A group of black men sat playing rummy at a card table off to the side of the barber shop. In one of the two chairs, a barber was reading a newspaper. The other chair was empty, and a young, skinny barber with a pencil moustache beckoned Sinéad to sit, even though, by the look on his face, he didn’t have a clue as to what to cut. There wasn’t any hair except for two millimeters of stubble.
“Can you put tram lines on the side?”
The barber looked over at his friends and rolled his eyes wide. To Sinéad he just kind of nodded and she climbed into the big barber’s chair, her Doc Martens not even coming close to the footrest. The barber looked at his pals playing cards, and they all broke into wide grins that threatened to break into hysterical laughter. But the barber cut it off before they exploded and started talking in whispers with Sinéad to try to figure out just what the hell she meant by “tram lines.” After a couple of minutes in conference, he turned on the electric clippers, and she sat back in the chair, chewing her gum and swinging her feet back and forth. She looked about five years old.
The tram lines took a minute and forty seconds to clip. We paid the guy and thanked him, smiled at the card players and left as the nervous laughter was coming.
Sinéad checked herself out in a store window.
“Brilliant,” she said of his work, then forgot about it.
Sinéad had told me that Barbra Streisand was her biggest influence, and I didn’t really believe her until I popped a New York Dolls tape in the boom box and she asked who it was. I played her Patti Smith’s Piss Factory and Richard Hell’s Blank Generation and a few others, and they all got the same reaction. She said she liked them, but she was being nice. Humoring me until she could go back to listening to rap.
But watching her up there in Harlem reminded me of why rock & roll used to be dangerous and Sinéad still is. It’s not only that she is different, but she celebrates the joy of being different. Of being herself. Like Carl Perkins digging his blue suede shoes. And in an age of “Conform or die,” Sinéad is a revolutionary. But rock & rollers were all once revolutionaries, by the fact that they said it was okay to be weird. To be different, and celebrate it.
I was doing a lousy job, but trying to explain it to her anyway.
“Once upon a time, rock & roll used to be dangerous, you know, about Jim Morrison singing about killing his father and fucking his mother instead of…”
“While I can understand that, I can’t possibly relate to it because I’m 22 and that all happened when I was, you know, in nappies.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“I can’t help it, there’s a certain perverse pleasure…”
“Yeah, someday you’ll be a dinosaur, too.”
“We’ll see…”
When she had to catch a plane back to London I rode out with her to the airport. It was one of those real gray New York winter mornings when the world looks its bleakest. One of those mornings when you stare out at the row houses in Queens and wonder what’s the use of going on. And to top it off, the car radio was carrying a live broadcast outside the prison in Stark, Florida, where any minute, mass murderer Ted Bundy was about to fry in the electric chair
“It’s quite frightening. America always makes me feel like I’m a million miles away from everywhere. I mean, I come from a very small town, so America, especially New York, is too impersonal, too cold – physically and mentally. It’s quite frightening for somebody who knows nothing about it and who doesn’t live here. It’s the one place I’ve ever been where I have actually been afraid walking down the road. And fucking stupid bastards drive up to me in their car and go ‘Scum!’ because of the way I look. And I could just fucking kill them.”
“You don’t get that in England?”
“No.”
“You don’t get that in Ireland?”
“No, you get stupid people staring at you as if you have five heads or something, but I never get that treatment in England or Ireland.”
The cab pulled into Pan Am, I paid the driver and we stood on line at the ticket counter.
“I’m really going to miss you.”
Sinéad blushed.
“See ya.”
She walked down the hallway and boarded the plane, and I felt like someone had stabbed my stomach with a pitchfork and started turning it round, twisting up my guts. I knew that no matter how close I got, I would still be a million miles away.
And as far as she was concerned, I was still in the enemy camp, for she knew that as a writer I would someday have to write it all down.
I went to the newsstand and picked up a copy of SPIN with the 25 best albums of all time, grabbed a cab back to Manhattan and read Christian Logan Wright’s assessment of Sinéad: “…Sinéad’s wailing, serenading, bellowing and swooning arrives like two dozen roses in the dead of winter. She’s at once tentative and cocksure, glamorous and severe, a kid and a mother. If Collette had recorded pop songs, she might have sounded like Sinéad…”
“Ya hear, they just fried Bundy!” The cab driver growled over his shoulder.
“Jesus, I was trying to have an intimate fucking moment here… Yeah, it’s no wonder she didn’t stay…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
The cabby was silent for the rest of the way in.
It wasn’t the same Sinéad I’d seen a year before who met me out in front of her modest two-story suburban home in Golders Green, on the outskirts of London, in January. She still looked great, stubble and all, but there was something else going on. I didn’t notice it at first, but as she gave me the nickel tour of the house and tucked her son Jake into bed underneath his gold record for helping to make The Lion and the Cobra a hit, it finally dawned on me that Sinéad was happy.
Her best friend from Dublin, Kera, was on the couch watching TV. Sinéad sat on the floor bent over her portable CD player alternating between rap, Sex Pistols and Van Morrison, looking like a little girl relishing her 45 collection. The scene was more reminiscent of a lazy weekday night in the girls’ dorm than the home of the woman with the number-one single in Britain. “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a Prince cover from her new LP, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got had just hit number three, on the way to number one. Beside her, lying on the floor to remind her that she wasn’t just another young mother and newlywed, was a copy of the New Musical Express with Sinéad’s picture on the front and back covers.
“I was 20 when I put my first album out, and 15 when I wrote a lot of the songs that are on it, and I was very, very fucked-up and very, very unhappy. And I remained so until about six months ago, when I started to write again.
“I worked really hard on the new album. I didn’t particularly work hard on the last one, and I didn’t really give a shit about it.”
Kera made a round of Irish coffee, and as they were drained, she and Sinéad started laughing at all they’ve been through together. Kera was remembering the time in grammar school with Sinéad when she was writing her name on a new book bag, but only got as far as S-I-N, when the bell rang. Kera grabbed the book bag and filled in the rest so it read, “I LOVE SIN!” The next day, Sinéad’s mother (whom Kera had never met) arrived at school and bawled Kera out in front of the world.
The two of them were in hysterics, remembering the war of adolescence, when Sinéad’s husband, John Reynolds, arrived home from a hard day at the studio. A tall, good-looking, friendly guy, it wasn’t hard to see why Sinéad married him. He looks like the kind of guy you want to go knock back a few with at the pub.
Sinéad grabbed the tape John had spent the day mixing, popped it into the box and fiddled with the equalizer. She sat staring into her knees, listening to the music.
“I can never understand why people thought I was aggressive. I never realized that if I shave my head people would think it’s aggressive. Because I know myself inside me, I know I’m not aggressive. The main thing for me is to take responsibility for myself and that’s the lesson I need to learn in my life.
“I think if you are prepared to go around and express an opinion very vociferously about something, you should also be prepared to say that you were wrong and you should always be prepared to apologize if you were wrong.
“John made me much more settled, where before I felt very isolated and very lonesome. I’d always felt very insecure and was always running around, going out with this, that and the other bloke, because I was always looking for something and I didn’t know what it was I was looking for. And then when I got married, my whole life became very settled with Jake and John. I had never been particularly happy.”
It was nice to see her find some peace, but as I was saying goodbye, the old Sinéad resurfaced. The sore throat that she was suffering had grown from an inconvenience to an obsession.
“You don’t think it’s throat cancer?”
“No, Sinéad. It’s not throat cancer. Your voice is going to be fine. You’re going to sell a million records and everything is going to be okay for a while, okay?”
“Okay.”
Only this time, she looked like she actually believed that she might be entitled to some serenity, too. Well, only half believed it, but that was a lot more than I’d ever seen from her.
And it left me feeling there was a chance for everyone else. I mean, if Sinéad could get there, then…
The phone would ring.
“Hello?”
“Where’s my Elvis Lamp.”
“This time I really have it, I’m gonna send it tomorrow, I swear…”
“You lying bastard. So are you going to read me the rubbish you’ve been writing about me?”
“Of course I am, but it’s a bit long. You know what I should do: I should fax it to you, now doesn’t that sound like a better idea?”
“So when are you going to fax it to me?”
“Tomorrow, that’s good for me. Yeah, tomorrow…”
“Just like you’re sending me my Elvis lamp. God you’re such a sl…”
“You call me that once more and I won’t tell everyone how great your new album is!”
“Do you really like it?”
“It’s really wonderful, you should be very happy.”
“I am, it’s just that I haven’t had anything out for such a long time. And I’ve been running around doing all this press and I can’t quit smoking…”
“Sinéad, it’s a great album.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow?”
“Okay, tomorrow.”
“See you later?”
“Bye.”
© 1990 + 2017 by Legs McNeil