“I was going to get a housekeeper job”: the moment Sinéad O’Connor considered quitting music
It may be a phrase that loses meaning given that it’s thrown around so much, but in many ways, there was perhaps never an artist more essential to her times than Sinéad O’Connor. Yet it was more than O’Connor’s sheer musicality that made her a beacon – it was the fact that she did it with the ultimate motive of enacting change in corners of the world both near and far to her own.
In this respect, it’s almost inconceivable that, at one point, the Irish singer was ready to give up on her mission altogether as the pressures of the industry became too much to bear. But indeed, this is what O’Connor was resolute in doing after the release of her 2003 album, She Who Dwells in the Secret Place of the Most High Shall Abide Under the Shadow of the Almighty. It was a turning point in her life, both personally and professionally, but also represented a moment in which she threatened to leave music behind.
Ultimately, O’Connor’s supposed retirement from the business was thankfully short-lived, as she returned with the reggae album Throw Down Your Arms not two years later, in 2005. However, her hiatus gave her a perspective on the business that she wouldn’t have realised if she hadn’t stopped to breathe for a while.
She recalled in an interview in 2009: “I really needed to get rid of ‘Sinéad O’Connor’ for a few years, to let that die. Spend some time forging my identity as an ordinary person, dealing with ordinary things like an ordinary mum. I didn’t miss music at all. Then, after a few years, I did miss it, but I wasn’t sure how to get back into it in a way that wasn’t going to be hurtful.”
Revealing that she had been “very damaged” by previous abuse hurled at her throughout her career, O’Connor had to come to terms with a way of managing her musical success while maintaining a sense of private identity – however, it turns out that her threats to permanently leave the industry had somewhat fallen on deaf ears as far as her family were concerned.
She continued: “My family never took me seriously when I said I wasn’t going to do music. I got annoyed and told them I wanted to get a 9-to-5 job. Which I still quite fancy. But they’d just laugh at me. I was going to get a housekeeper job for a while. They’d say, ‘You’re fucking mental. You need to be doing music.’”
With that ultimatum ringing in her ears, O’Connor got back on the musical horse – and the world was all the better for it. Releasing four subsequent albums after her ‘retirement’, she proved in everything she did that the last word was always hers, even if she sometimes was a little contradictory in the process. As we now look to the memories of O’Connor to guide us as a lasting beacon of Irish music, it’s worth remembering all she went through to keep her status – and just how close she came to throwing it all away.
