Chrissie Hynde has posted a lengthy tribute to fellow singer Sinead O’Connor, revealing some little known stories about the troubled artist.
She writes, “Personally, I felt sadness for her during her life, but my immediate response upon hearing the news was a kind of relief. Every step of the way for her seemed to be a mixture of joy and torture. A true artist.
“I was talking to my mate, the singer Helen Terry, about what a laugh she was at our [1999] Linda McCartney tribute, arriving every day to rehearsals to hang out with George Michael, smoke pot and just be in the atmosphere of something going on. Helen reminded me of how she kept throwing her knickers at George. I recall she also liked to hold a microphone to her arse and fart in it, possessed as she was of a schoolboy humor.
“On the day of the show I was wearing a pair of gold stiletto heeled shoes and Sinead told me how she’d stolen some similar ones when she was a teenager to wear to a Pretenders show. I immediately took them off, gave them to her, and she wore them the rest of the night. Every time I looked over at her, she reminded me of a little kid looking down at her new shoes, moving her feet at different angles to admire them…
“I was also at the Bob Dylan [1992] tribute. I listened to her sing Dylan’s ‘I Believe In You’ at rehearsals. It was absolutely breathtaking and I couldn’t wait to hear her sing it on the night. But when she heard a few people booing in the audience (many were cheering, but I guess she only heard the detractors) she apparently just couldn’t start the song. Booker-T Jones’s hands hovered over the keyboards while everyone waited for her to start singing. Instead, she pulled out her in-ear monitors, and went into an unaccompanied version of a Bob Marley song [before tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II]. The next day the headlines were about Sinéad, not Dylan. She didn’t intend that, but again, it just seemed to happen wherever she went.
“Apart from all her other well-documented torments, I think starting out in the business at an early age, getting famous and the notoriety she attracted, must have been hard.
“People seem to think that anyone who gets on stage is a natural born show-off, but I don’t think that’s the case most of the time. I think it’s more often destiny.
“I read she reckoned the price of fame is ‘you pay with your life.’
“Now she can sing with the other angels.”
Sinead O’Connor was 56, and her cause of death has yet to be determined.
