Joyce Fegan: It's taken 30 years to revise Sinéad O'Connor

This 1992 appearance in the iconic American venue for Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary, came just 13 days after she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live (SNL) — an act of protest that was at first condemned, and like Sinéad herself, has now been revised.

Both incidents feature, in great detail, in the new documentary about Sinéad, Nothing Compares. It’s won five-star reviews from the critics, but the public might be reluctant to go on the assumption that we already know her, and her story. We know neither.

In this documentary, we see the timely revisionism of Sinéad O’Connor, just like we have with Monica Lewinksy, Britney Spears, and Marilyn Monroe.

In this documentary, just like with the other vilified and ridiculed women, we see Sinéad’s story through the lens of media maltreatment and public panic of the madding crowd.

This isn’t just Sinéad’s story, but the public’s, how we reacted to her talent, her activism, and her use of her voice, both to music and without. And just like in those other women’s stories, years later, it’s the media and the public who are under scrutiny, in the spotlight, and who aren’t coming out the best.

While the Saturday Night Live photo-ripping event is one of the most recalled incidents in her career, she had faced public abuse before and after.

Two years before, in 1990, the 24-year-old artist met the full ire of American patriotism when she refused to go on stage if ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played before one of her concerts in New Jersey. Her policy, she said, was to never have any anthem played before her gigs, not the Irish one, not the American one. Her policy was whipped up into an international controversy. It’s clear to see this talented artist was never going to be allowed to just sing, she had to be a media plaything, a commodity.

The new documentary features vox pops from the public condemning her, mocking her, expressing words of violence against her, and there’s the media commentary too, bans and boycotts, not to mention the aired reaction of huge stars, who should have known better.

Singer Frank Sinatra was reported to have told his audience, at the same venue where the incident occured, he wished he could meet her so he “could kick her in the ass.”

He is also reported as having advised her to leave American soil because her action was “unforgivable.” Met with rapturous applause, he added: “For her sake, we’d better never meet.”

Threats of physical violence, encouraging the baying mob? Totally fine. Refusing to have another country’s anthem played on your stage? Unforgivable.

A year before, in 1989, a 23-year-old fresh-faced shave-headed female solo artist from little old Ireland took to an American stage with not a backing singer, nor a sole guitarist in sight, in a pair of jeans with her infant son’s babygrow attached. She wooed the industry and an entire nation. It was the Grammys and Sinéad danced around alone as she sang her hit song ‘Mandinka’. The American establishment could not get enough of this ripped-jean wearing Irish singer whose tenderness was matched only by her fierceness of presence.

Two years later, in 1991, the singer they welcomed with open arms would be boycotting their awards show.

And a year later, in 1992, she was booed in Madison Square Garden having ripped up that photo two weeks before. In Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary she lets the record play, the viewer has to sit and watch and squirm, having no choice but to imagine what that might feel like — to stand alone on a stage in front of thousands of people, some cheering, but many booing. Sinéad doesn’t budge. Her jaw tightens. Her gaze averts and you wonder what she’s going to do.

We’ve all seen the photo-ripping tape play time and time again, but this one, not at all.

And Sinéad keeps on standing there amid the mob’s booing. She calls out to her musicians that there’s been a change of plan and in her Mary Robinson-esque blue suit jacket and shaved head, she squares up to the Madison Square Garden mic and sings Bob Marley’s ‘War’ — the same song she sang on Saturday Night Live.

This 13-day period is what many say ended her career. But that, like everything else, is only for one person to say.

In her own book, Rememberings, published last year, she corrected the public’s misinterpretation of events.

“A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career. That’s not how I feel about it.

“I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track

"I had to make my living performing live again. And that’s what I was born for. I wasn’t born to be a pop star. You have to be a good girl for that,” she wrote.

Anyone who knew her from the early days would have known she was not born to conform, success was not her goal.

When a record company wanted her to fit into the narrow confines of femininity — short skirts, long flowing hair — she went and shaved her head. They weren’t best pleased.

When executives wanted her to end a pregnancy that could get in the way of her fledgling career, she did a photoshoot with a shaved head, blooming bump, and a belly top that read: “wear a condom”.

The industry was a long time learning they had gotten into bed with an activist and an artist, not someone seeking fame and fortune.

A young Irish woman, not a bandmate in sight, taking on the Church, the institution that was the shame-o-tainment of Gay Byrne, as Anne Enright recently described him, and a misogynistic media and music industry in the late Eighties and early Nineties is the story we are now seeing.

How many would have had the same courage? And how many felt the same?