Auden wrote of Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Cruel Ireland hurt O’Connor into song.
One night, late, during the last years of the Troubles, I was driving from the North into the Republic, along country roads and through dark villages, with “The Lion and the Cobra,” Sinead O’Connor’s debut album, blasting on the car stereo. I was singing, fired up by the thrilling energy of “Mandinka,” when I became aware of flashing blue lights.
I stopped, turned the music off, wound down the window and began to say that I knew I had been speeding and I was sorry. The policeman interrupted. It was not that; I had sped through a checkpoint on the border. Had I not seen the soldiers?
On Wednesday, Ms. O’Connor’s body was found in a London apartment. She was 56. Impossible and yet so terribly believable. She had danced on the edge of the dark all her life.
Auden wrote of Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Cruel Ireland hurt Ms. O’Connor into song. She called Ireland a theocracy. She was furious that in a country that had supposedly fought for and won its freedom, women and children were so silenced and disempowered. She understood and had experienced pain, neglect and injustice and sang for those who also knew these things.
How glorious it was in the grim 1980s to see Ms. O’Connor onstage, bald, wearing a tutu and Doc Martens, flaunting her pregnant belly. How liberating to hear that unearthly voice of a punk angel, swooping and soaring, ferocious one moment, sweetly tender the next.
