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“Cutting my hair turned out to serve a very useful purpose,” she told a different Spin journalist in 1988. People expect to hear one thing, and what they do hear is completely different.” In other words, it was showmanship, designed to draw people in. While many have followed suit since, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor’s shaved head was arguably the most iconic hairstyle of all time.
Sinéad O’Connor dies aged 56
Sinéad O’Connor’s shaved head became an iconic part of her image over the years. Waters, whose father is Irish journalist John Waters, lives in Dublin and works as a pastry chef. A New York concert honoring the late Sinéad O’Connor featured a rousing rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” performed by her daughter, Roisin Waters. Others were so surprised to see O’Connor without her usual cropped hair that they confused her with fellow Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries fame, who died in 2018.
YouTuber breaks neck in paragliding crash and posts video of terrifying moment online
In a 2017 interview with Dr. Phil, O’Connor revealed the heartbreaking reason she first opted for a short cut while growing up in Dublin. O’Connor added that the music industry also influenced her decision to keep her androgynous look. ‘It was dangerous to be pretty because I was getting raped and molested everywhere I went,’ she said. She chose to keep her hair short for the remainder of her life, speaking in 2017 about her reasons for doing so. O’Connor first shaved her head aged 20 as a way of defying the music executives who wanted her to be more feminine.
‘No one knew what to do’: when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up the pope’s photo on TV – the inside story
With her short hair and wide eyes, the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, who has died at the age of 56, cast a powerful silhouette onstage during her music career. The height of her power came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including a divisive 1992 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in which she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. She signed to Ensign Records in 1985 and released her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, two years later. The album cover alone – a shaved-bald O’Connor grimacing, fists raised – was markedly different from the female songwriter norm, and the stark, abrasive music experimented in a way that aligned her with Kate Bush and Björk. Five months before its release, she gave birth to her first child, Jake, whose father was John Reynolds, the drummer on the album. When Irish singer/songwriter Sinéad O'Connor burst onto the music scene in the late '80s, the industry hadn't heard or seen anyone like her.
Nonetheless, it was her unswerving commitment to activism and truth-telling as she saw it that kept her in the headlines. The song remained relatively obscure until O’Connor recorded her version for her second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” five years later. Propelled by the now-iconic music video, it reached the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in April 1990. The single’s video showed O’Connor – startlingly beautiful, hair cut to within half an inch of her head – crying real tears. The track was written by Prince, but O’Connor’s version, which displayed the clarity and expressiveness of her voice, became the definitive one, and was one of the biggest-selling singles of 1990. Its parent album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, sold 7m copies and was nominated for four Grammys.
Sinéad O’Connor fans gather outside late singer’s Irish home after Muslim funeral
The album was scrapped altogether after her 17-year-old son Shane, from a relationship with the musician Donal Lunny, took his own life in 2022. Outraged by Catholic church corruption, she campaigned for the arrest of paedophile church officials, while also using the platform of her fame to denounce sexism in the music business and an array of other issues. During a 1992 appearance on the US variety show Saturday Night Live, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II, inciting a storm of condemnation from America’s large Catholic population. At a Bob Dylan tribute gig in New York soon after, she was booed throughout her performance – even the endorsement of the songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who told her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” failed to silence the hecklers. A passionate and highly engaged musician, she was one of her generation’s significant talents. Her bel canto-trained style and wide-ranging musical curiosity were her main assets, and she employed both prodigiously, switching from pop to Irish folk to jazz to reggae on the other nine albums she released.
Sinéad O'Connor: 'I don't feel like me unless I have my hair shaved' - Yahoo New Zealand News
Sinéad O'Connor: 'I don't feel like me unless I have my hair shaved'.
Posted: Tue, 01 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
‘She found peace here’: local people tell of Sinéad O’Connor’s last years in Ireland
With her extreme look and controversial politics, O'Connor landed her first record contract when she was just 17. It was a time, she remembers, that was especially difficult for women in the music industry. By the late 90s, she was more frequently in the news for personal reasons, such as her ordination as a priest called Mother Bernadette Mary by a breakaway Catholic sect in 1999, and the announcement that she was a lesbian, which she soon rescinded. In 2003 she was told she had bipolar disorder, but the diagnosis was later changed to post-traumatic stress disorder.
The late Irish artist’s baldness was inextricably linked to her identity, and she wielded it throughout her life as a weapon, a shield, and a means of amplifying her music. But O'Connor's hair also became more than just a symbol of defiance against the sexualisation of women in the industry, it eventually became a part of her. However, it wasn't just her mother, the abuse and assault she experienced which led to O'Connor deciding to shave her hair off. In an interview with TV psychologist Dr Phil, O'Connor revealed the reasons behind the look.
O’Connor shared the heartbreaking story of why she first shaved her head while chatting to Dr. Phil in 2017. The Nothing Compares 2 U songstress, who passed away this week at the age of 56, was celebrated for her signature androgynous look and kept with the iconic style throughout her career. She kept no-to-short hair all her life, never growing the buzzcut longer than a pixie cut. And while the look suited her down to the ground, the reason behind it is heartbreaking. As recently as 2021, O’Connor was still shaving her own head “about every 10 days,” as she told the New York Times that year, despite often wearing a hijab following her 2018 conversion to Islam.
O'Connor's family revealed yesterday (Wednesday, 26 July) the star had passed away at the age of 56. O'Connor went on that beauty also felt "dangerous" to her as she was sexually abused. She wanted to be less feminine and "pretty" in her appearance in a bid to try to protect herself. "And she started, when I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter. And that's why I chopped my hair off. I didn't want to be pretty," she explained. “I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021. A London coroner’s court confirmed in January that the Grammy winner’s death was due to natural causes.
Nothing Compares 2 U made her one of the highest-profile singers of the early 90s, but she was constitutionally unable to compromise her values. From the start she insisted on co-producing her records, and steered her own musical course with varying results. When seeking a new boyfriend, she invited overtures from male fans; the successful applicant, an Irish drug counsellor, Barry Herridge, became her fourth husband in 2011. If she thought it warranted, she also waded into other musicians’ business, finger-wagging. An open letter criticising Miley Cyrus for appearing naked in a 2013 video provoked a furious response from the younger singer, who said the video had been inspired by the emotional openness of Nothing Compares 2 U. It was there that she received her first guitar and a “punk-rock parka”, gifts from a sympathetic nun.
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