‘She straddled love and illusion, a hell of a sacrifice’: Kristin Hersh on meeting Sinéad O’Connor

In this extract from her foreword to O’Connor’s collected interviews, the Throwing Muses musician recalls their backstage interaction about God, rage and acceptability

In 2005, Sinéad O’Connor and I sat in a dressing room in London together, people-watching and listening, eyeing the music biz swirl around us suspiciously. Neither of us was familiar with the other’s work, which helped us to speak freely, unattached to anything but a shared impression of humanity we both needed to help us with our stage fright.

It was an uncomfortable night, not our show – the Meltdown festival in London, not an event with which we were familiar – so we were jittery, hoping to be allowed to leave soon. In that moment, we were two people, though – not two performers – and we chatted like women on a bus. I didn’t know her music because pop stars weren’t interesting to me, so I didn’t pay attention to them, and she didn’t know my music because nobody but pop stars are interesting to normal people. And she was a pretty normal person, I think, though she’d been accused of strangeness, of craziness, as had I. It’s like somebody somewhere had decided that, having broken too many rules, we fit in no category, and so we were not invited to the party. Having been invited once and met with anger, she felt alienated. Having never cared about the party, so did I, when I learned that it was the only game in town. Alienation helps with clarity, though, as it adds the objectivity of no longer swimming in those waters.

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‘She straddled love and illusion, a hell of a sacrifice’: Kristin Hersh on meeting Sinéad O’Connor

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