Nobody could break your heart like Sinéad O’Connor. There was the song, of course – Nothing Compares 2 U. And the video with the single tear falling down her cheek. There was her ethereal beauty; the angelic skinhead. But what broke your heart most of all was the troubled soul – the love, poetry, intelligence, pain and madness, all scrambled and inseparable.
Last time I interviewed her, in 2021, she told me she’d been in a psychiatric hospital for the best part of six years. But Sinéad, who died on Wednesday aged 56, would never call it that. She reclaimed the politically incorrect and unsayable, and spat out the words joyously. “I’ve spent most of the time in the nuthouse. I’ve been practically living there for six years.” She stressed that it was her privilege to call it that, not mine. “We alone get to call it the nuthouse – the patients.”
