The Scotsman Publications Ltd. The Scotsman March 20, 1999, Saturday THE SATURDAY PROFILE SINEAD O'CONNOR MOTHER INFERIOR THIS time, Sinead O'Connor has surpassed even her own track record for outrage and shock. Compared with this, shredding the Pope's picture on American live TV, risking the ire of the American nation by refusing to allow their anthem to be played before one of her New Jersey concerts, rejecting Brit awards and announcing she would have liked to but sadly, could not have sex with her boyfriend while dressed as the Virgin Mary, are as nothing. This week, the skin-headed shocker has outshocked herself. In newspapers up and down the country, a fax from O'Connor herself slid onto the newsdesk, its black print starkly announcing that she has relinquished the custody battle against Irish journalist John Waters, for their two-year-old daughter Roisin. In the past she has declared she would rather die than part with her beloved daughter, that John Waters would gain custody "over her dead body". That snarling declaration of intent seemed perfectly in keeping with the character of the woman who wrote the keening lines of To Mother You. "I will do what your own mother didn't do, which is to mother you." She, above all, seemed to understand the importance of mother love to a child's emotional well-being, yet here she is apparently of her own free will agreeing to hand over her small daughter. Why, suddenly, has all the fight gone out of this feisty singer with a personality angry enough to take on the world, never mind square up to a journalist across a courtroom table? Most disturbing of all, how could she do this to her daughter when she understands all too well the pain and desperate longing created in a child inadequately nourished by mother love? Of all the crazy things the singer songwriter has ever done, this seems the craziest. Indeed, this latest episode strays from textbook Sinead behaviour in every way. The superstar has forever fallen victim to the one-dimensional Jerry Springer existence that she has created for herself. O'Connor has become a household name not for her breathy soprano, or for her skull's five o' clock shadow, but for her forked tongue and loud mouth which has set sail to a thousand controversies. The singer songwriter has always thrived on conflict, on the unkind scrutiny of the media circus and she has always kept the bellies of her critics well-fed through her brazen and shameful antics. So why change that now? Of course the real answer to her psychotic change of heart perhaps lies buried deep in O'Connor's past, the past she claims to have overcome through intensive therapy. By any standards, she had one hell of a childhood. Brought up on a suburban estate outside Dublin, her father John and mother Marie had a stormy relationship before they parted when O'Connor was eight years old. Even before then, her mother Marie, fuelled by post-natal depression, alcohol and tranquillisers would systematically abuse her four children. They were beaten with hockey sticks, locked naked in cupboards, neglected and sexually abused. Her older brother Joseph is an award winning writer, her sister Eimear, a painter. When asked recently in a radio interview what made them all so creative, Eimear answered, "Pain." But just as John Waters has fought for and won custody of his daughter, O'Connor's father John fought for and won custody of his four children. For nine months, O'Connor lived with him but eventually pleaded to go back to her mother because she and her little brother missed her too much. Five more years of torture at the hands of her mother followed, until her father remarried and O'Connor went to live with him and her stepmother at the age of 13. By 15, the rebellious teenager had had run-ins with the law, including shoplifting, which resulted in her being sent to a reform school where a perceptive nun saw to it she had a guitar to keep her happy. A spell at a Quaker boarding school followed but she never settled and soon took off for Dublin where she lived in a bedsit, followed her dream to become a musician and worked as a strippogram to pay the rent. While lead singer for a band called Ton Ton Macoute, a record producer spotted her potential. By the age of 17 she was in London recording her first album, The Lion and The Cobra. The cover of that first album shows O'Connor screaming her head off, exorcising the demons of her tormented childhood. This set the scene for the rest of her musical career, during which she has foamed at the mouth and risen a clenched fist, using her childhood pain and anger to musically propel her. She has publicly acknowledged an abortion. "I can't talk about the music without talking about my upbringing. My records were the musical diaries of someone in recovery," she has said. The spiky personality and raw tone of the shaven-headed Irish pop singer repelled many. But some were drawn to her brutal honesty and truthfulness about her past which she so often spoon fed to them like bedtime stories. Enduring much pillorying, she refused to be silenced, vociferous about her obsessions with mothering, child welfare, the Catholic Church and Irish history. As the years passed, so the murky waters began to clear, producing albums where the anger has muted to sadness. By the time she released Gospel Oak, her music was beginning to sound the notes of happiness. Abandoning her classically bitter line, it seemed that recovery had taken place. Yet controversy was never far away. Almost from the second her daughter was conceived, it was said that O'Connor had ruthlessly selected a mate on the basis of his looks and intelligence. By the time her relationship with Waters, an Irish Times columnist, was beginning to quiver, O'Connor was responding angrily in kind, accusing Waters in turn of selecting her as a baby-making machine. He'd used her, she claimed, to carry his child. Whatever the truth, the relationship was on the skids. It hit rock bottom in February this year, when Waters went to the police accusing O'Connor of being a bad mother to his daughter. O'Connor, who was cleared, claimed they were vicious rumours, part of a smear campaign to take her child from her after she had barred Waters from her London home. "If they want to take my child away, they will have to kill me," said O'Connor, who already has an 11-year-old son Jake by a previous relationship to drummer John Reynolds. All well and good. Just what you'd expect from someone who has survived a prison of the soul, and kicked her way out with bovver boots. The legal battle began. Expectations were that she would prove herself a good mother and keep her daughter. Yet now, barely a month later, she has apparently caved in. She will content herself, according to the fax, with having her daughter at weekends and during school holidays and will buy a house in Dublin to be near her. What on earth is going on? Is this the first sign that she is retiring from her soapbox at long last, we ask with crossed fingers? Could her desire to push the envelope be dwindling like that of another former Catholic singer mum Madonna? Certainly in years past, death threats and anti-Sinead protests did not elicit a blink from her doe eyes. But now in her 32nd year, we can only hope this is a sign that she is leaving her usual place in the eye of the storm. Without a hotline to O'Connor's peculiar inner workings, it's only possible to speculate the triggers for this week's events lie in the singer's past. Any therapist would look beyond her tough girl exterior and see the signs that she may be finding it more difficult to expunge the past than she ever imagined, especially as Roisin is said to look like O'Connor's mother. "One of the things I get from Buddhism is that somehow your mother can be born in your own daughter. The Catholic idea is that my mother will be punished and burn in Hell. I prefer the idea that through Roisin, I will be able to teach her something about loving and being mothered. My daughter is the first girl in our family who's going to be loved for being a girl," she said in an interview soon after the child's birth. Not yet three years old, already the course of Roisin's mothering does not run smooth. Like O'Connor herself, the child is torn between warring parents. John Water's fight for his daughter parallels that of the earlier John's fight for his children. O'Connor, now the mother, is relinquishing her child. In O'Connor's case, she missed her mother too badly to settle and begged to return to her. Perhaps she is secretly hoping that history will repeat itself. 5 things you might not know about Siead O'Connor 1 Her first guitar was bought for her by a nun. 2 Sinead O'Connor has called President Clinton the "sexiest man in the Universe". 3 The late great Frank Sinatra said Sinead deserved "a kick in the ass" for refusing to perform after the national anthem. 4 She is doing a degree course in Irish & Caribbean Studies in London. 5 Astrud Gilberto, of The Girl from Ipanema fame, is one of her musical influences.