Sinead O’Connor forever had an uncomfortable relationship with fame. “I’m a punk, not a pop star,” she once proclaimed, maintaining that she was an artist who valued her truth and authentic expression over meeting the establishment’s expectations of her when she became a global superstar.
Sinead at least put her money where her mouth was, all but consigning her mainstream career to the doldrums after her anarchic stunt on Saturday Night Live in 1992. Doesn’t come more punk than that, surely.
But O’Connor also had an uncomfortable relationship with the star who penned ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, the song that transformed a budding Irish firebrand with a shaved head into a household name. That star was, of course, Prince.
Never one to hold her tongue, Sinead even referred to Prince as a “devil” in her 2021 memoir Rememberings.
She only met her hit-maker on two occasions – the first they’d bumped into each other at a party after the release of her debut album, The Lion And The Cobra, though they barely talked. The second was after ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ topped the pop charts in a multitude of countries.
Prince invited Sinead to his Hollywood mansion whilst she was in Los Angeles attending the MTV Awards in 1990. Their evening together was anything but a meet-cute, however – she left in the middle of the night having endured his verbal abuse, which verged on becoming physical aggression, according to her memoir.
After calling her home to inform Sinead that he’d arranged a limousine to transport her to his residence – a brief phone exchange in which she’d corrected his pronunciation of her name – ‘The Purple One’ frostily greeted Sinead in his kitchen. Having asked if she wanted a drink, Prince switched his mood at the click of his fingers by then demanding she should get it herself.
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“I realise I don’t know where I am,” Sinead wrote in Rememberings. “I never asked for an address. I don’t know how to find the front door. It’s dark. I don’t know how to find a cab. I’m away off in some hills, very far away from the highway is all I know. And it doesn’t look like he’s got me here for cake.”
Prince had a reputation for being a perfectionist, one who would craft (or control) personas for artists associated with him. Despite his song creating serious success for Sinead, she wasn’t one to bow down. To anybody.
Sinead recounts that Prince didn’t appreciate her foul-mouthed nature in interviews, so openly lambasted her for it. There was no room for reconciliation after she swiftly replied: “I don’t work for you. If you don’t like it you can fuck yourself.” Irked by Sinead’s refusal to listen to his commands – much like his subservient brother/assistant Duane does, according to O’Connor’s account – Prince headed upstairs, only to return minutes later asking: “Why don’t we have a pillow fight?”
Thinking it’d all be fun and games, Sinead accepted the challenge, only to realise Prince was eager to dish out some physical punishment under the guise of being playful. Sinead wouldn’t suffer fools, so she legged it out of the front door and down his long, low-lit driveway, only for Prince to chase her in a bizarre game of cat-and-mouse.
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“He drives alongside me, rolls down the passenger window, and orders me to get in, his left hand limp across his pimp rest,” she recalled. “I tell him he can suck my dick. Or some such.” Prince got out of her car and proceeded to chase Sinead around the vehicle back and forth as she dodged him before making a break for it, in which the ‘Kiss’ singer got bored and gave up.
Sinead O’Connor hated the music industry that rinsed her for millions, which chewed her up and spat her out, instead vehemently championing less visible hip-hop and reggae artists throughout the remainder of the nineties. Obviously, she didn’t have a particularly fruitful relationship with Prince either, as she wrote, “I never wanted to see that devil again.”
Despite the tension between her and her hit-maker, their somewhat hostile encounter didn’t change how she felt towards ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. In a 2021 interview with the New York Times to promote Rememberings, Sinead insisted: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s my song.”
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