April 29, 2003

Sinead O'Connor to Retire, but for How Long?

UBLIN, April 28 — When Sinead O'Connor announced her retirement from the music business last week, the press here dutifully took note, with small newspaper articles tucked in the back pages. But the public seemingly failed to notice the departure of a singer who was once Ireland's biggest, and at times most notorious, international star.

The reaction may have been muted because Ms. O'Connor has done this before: in 1992, after a crowd at Madison Square Garden booed her off the stage during a Bob Dylan tribute concert, and in 1999, when she was ordained a priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, a fringe splinter group of Roman Catholicism. (She gave up the priesthood after only three months.)

While friends and associates urge respect for Ms. O'Connor's announcement that she would leave the spotlight at the age of 36, many also do not believe that she will stay in retirement, citing what they say is her intense personal and emotional need to keep singing.

The news came in a message on her Web site (www.sineadoconnor .com) and was confirmed by a spokeswoman from her American distributor, Vanguard Records. Ms. O'Connor wrote that she would retire in July — after recording tracks for a Dolly Parton tribute album and an album by the Irish musician Sharon Shannon, and after completing a DVD of her live performances — "in order to pursue a different career," without saying what that might be.

In the late 1980's she followed U2 to become one of Ireland's first rock stars since Van Morrison. She remains best known for her 1990 hit, a remake of the Prince song "Nothing Compares 2 U," which went to No. 1 in 17 countries. Her work provoked debate even then, as details emerged about a dispute with Prince, who she said physically threatened her.

To avoid becoming a sex symbol, Ms. O'Connor shaved her head and wore baggy clothes, a fashion move credited with paving the way for brashly protofeminist performers like Liz Phair, Courtney Love and Alanis Morissette.

In 1992 she alienated American audiences by refusing to appear on "Saturday Night Live" when the host was Andrew Dice Clay, who she said was a misogynist. When she later appeared on the show with a different host, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on camera, which led to her negative reception at the Dylan tribute. She threatened to refuse to sing in New Jersey if the "Star Spangled Banner" were played before her concert.

Over the course of the 1990's such acts led to relentless scrutiny by the press of her personal life and her failed marriages. Many people here came to dismiss her statements as publicity stunts or simply eccentric behavior, which eventually came to eclipse her singing career.

"No sooner was she this major pop star than she was out of that arena," said John Kelly, a disc jockey and music journalist who has interviewed Ms. O'Connor many times. (She would not be interviewed for this article.) "She dipped her toe in superstardom American style."

Still, when she tore up the photograph of the pope (which had belonged to the singer's mother and was taken during Pope John Paul II's visit to Ireland in 1979), it was viewed, if grudgingly, as a courageous move, since scandals were just beginning to shake the Roman Catholic Church's dominant role in Irish society.

"People respected that to a far greater extent here" than in the United States, said Niall Stokes, the editor of the Irish music magazine Hot Press.

Because no female Irish performers had ever achieved such levels of success and international recognition, "every woman performer in Ireland now has to have Sinead as a kind of touchstone," Mr. Stokes said. Musicians like Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of the band the Cranberries, have been strongly influenced by Ms. O'Connor's singing style, he said.

In recent years Ms. O'Connor has collaborated with bands like Asian Dub Foundation and Massive Attack. In 2002 she released an album of traditional Irish songs called "Sean-Nos Nua" — Gaelic for "new old-style," a reference to the traditional sean-nos style of singing, on which she was backed by some of Ireland's foremost traditional musicians.

Recently Ms. O'Connor has tempered her public profile and now fiercely guards her privacy. In 1999, after an Irish newspaper reported her romance with a British journalist she later married, she wrote a furious, expletive-laden missive to the media, and male reporters in particular.

In her message to her fans last week she wrote: "I want to be like any other person in the street and not have people say, `There is Sinead O'Connor.' As I am a very shy person, believe it or not." She added: "I am glad that ye are helped by my songs. So help me too, by giving me what is best for me, a private life."

She urged people to let her and other celebrities alone, pleading with fans not to bang on restaurant windows when they see a celebrity inside or to ask for autographs or pictures.

"That's pieces of them," she wrote. "And one day they wake up with nothing left of themselves to give."