SPIRITUAL SANCTUARY

SINEAD O’CONNOR HAS MADE THE SPIRITUAL RECORD SHE’S ALWAYS WANTED TO MAKE

BY MARTIN JONES

Sinead O’Connor affirms that she has made the album she’s always wanted to make. Justifying the strength of her belief in her new two-part release Theology, O’Connor concludes that the album “represents me becoming me.”

Considering everything that O’Connor has been and done since her music career began at the age of 14, that’s quite some statement. The world has seen many sides to O’Connor, many of them infamously controversial and rebellious. God only knows how many more sides of herself only O’Connor has experienced. “You have to be an angry teenager,” O’Connor acknowledges, “you have to do your rock and roll years and you have to do your crazy years, you know. And then you come to a certain age and you go ‘okay, I’m grounded now’ or ‘I know what I want now’.”

As a passionate, intelligent and outspoken pop star, O’Connor’s political, religious and even sexual views have become public domain. Throughout her 25-year career and the myriad musical forms with which she has engaged, O’Connor’s personal spirituality has burned strongly behind everything she’s done. It is this personal spirituality – one free from allegiance to any specific religion, politics or musical genre – on which O’Connor has focussed in Theology.

Though motivated by O’Connor’s desire to produce an inspirational work of gentle beauty in a time of ugly political actions, Theology is not a political album. It is a spiritual one, rich in dialects of Christianity, Catholicism and Rastafarian teachings, though entirely personal in stance. Recorded in two versions – electric and acoustic – Theology is clearly the most comprehensive amalgamation of all O’Connor’s spiritual, religious and musical experiences to date.

Obviously there’s a lot of religious dialect and reference in Theology and that seems to have become almost taboo in popular music hasn’t it?

Well yeah there’s a very fine line between corny and cool when it comes to religious stuff and far too much of it is corny. So that puts people off obviously. And the other thing that puts people off is the people who do the really corny lyrics appear really goody-goody, you know? Sometimes. Men in polo necks, that kind of thing. And people can’t identify with that. I think people can identify easier with some of these complete maniacs (laughs). For example I’d much rather hear Shane McGowan doing a religious song.

For people to cringe at religion being a part of popular music is ridiculous seeing almost all popular music was born in the church.

Exactly! Exactly! And anyway, the desire to sing anything is actually a spiritual desire. I mean wop-bop-a-loo-mop alop bam boom is a spiritual statement (laughs). That’s a person’s spirit that is singing it.

Read the full feature in July Rhythms.
 

Theology is available through Shock Records.