Remembering the incomparable Sinead O’Connor

It would be so easy to go with my tabloid mates and write a short eulogy to Sinead O’Connor headlined Nothing Compared to Her …

And it would be true.

I met her once, on a dark rainy night in a dingy back-street pub in Birmingham.

And nothing did compare to her, way back when, towards the turn of the last century. Sinead was beautiful in every way, diminutive, elfin, dark, stylish, gypsy and smiley.

But it was her eyes.

All I can say is that, as she sipped her small beer – and, I think, smoked one cigarette after the other – it was her eyes, deep as black pools. She watched everything like survival.

It was impossible though to avoid seeing fear in there too.

And yet heroism burned in the background, always her mind was ready to fight for what she saw as true and right.

Sinead O’Connor was beautiful in every way. I was a bit jealous of the man with her, a fellow journalist I knew vaguely who was holding her tattooed hand protectively under the table.

But she wasn’t just a dark child from Dublin, not just a serial wife, not just a mother or a singer, or an activist, or a victim of life’s fickle horrors. Sinead was an artist, a woman who sang her life away for us.

Sinead never hid her pain, and the late 90s was a rough period within her life. She was derided, became a figure of ridicule and responded by exposing herself even more – anger, challenges, attacks – running through the darkness in America.

Then her beautiful son Shane, aged 17, died. And so did she.

It took her a year to go though.

 Sinead was shaved bald, waif-like, vulnerable and yet she was ferocious too and beautiful and honest. And a fighter.