Sinéad OConnors Secret Weapon Was Her Shaved Head

Table Of Content

• Sinéad O’Connor fans gather outside late singer’s Irish home after Muslim funeral
• Sinéad O’Connor rocks long hair as she belts out Eurythmics with Kylie Minogue in resurfaced video
• Stories of murdered women are the 'most traumatic' Netflix viewers have ever seen
• George Gilbey's mum reveals heartbreaking final words he said to her before his tragic death
• Sinéad O'Connor Explains Why She Shaved Her Head: 'It Was Dangerous To Be A Female' (VIDEO)
• Sinéad O'Connor

Multiple famous women have spoken out about shaving their heads as a way to free themselves from conventional beauty standards and take control over their own image. Britney Spears was reportedly "sick of people touching my hair" when she shaved her head in 2007, while Florence Pugh recently said she "wanted to take vanity out of the picture" by shaving hers earlier this year. During an interview with Dr. Phil, she candidly discussed her mental health struggles and the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. “Nothing Compares 2 U” was originally written by Prince for his side project, The Family, and appeared on that band’s eponymous 1985 debut album. Though she’s not a professional singer, Waters appeared to be perfectly at ease as she took the stage barefoot and in a floral print dress during Wednesday’s “Sinéad & Shane at Carnegie Hall,” held in honor of O’Connor and Shane MacGowan.

Sinéad O’Connor fans gather outside late singer’s Irish home after Muslim funeral

If circumstances have changed since you last contributed, we hope you’ll consider contributing to HuffPost once more. Our journalists will continue to cover the twists and turns during this historic presidential election. With your help, we'll bring you hard-hitting investigations, well-researched analysis and timely takes you can't find elsewhere. Reporting in this current political climate is a responsibility we do not take lightly, and we thank you for your support. She added that the music industry also influenced her decision to keep her androgynous look. She first shaved her head aged 20 as a way of defying the music executives who wanted her to be more feminine.

Sinéad O’Connor rocks long hair as she belts out Eurythmics with Kylie Minogue in resurfaced video

In a 2017 interview with Dr. Phil, O’Connor revealed the heartbreaking reason she first opted for a short cut while growing up in Dublin. O’Connor added that the music industry also influenced her decision to keep her androgynous look. ‘It was dangerous to be pretty because I was getting raped and molested everywhere I went,’ she said. She chose to keep her hair short for the remainder of her life, speaking in 2017 about her reasons for doing so. O’Connor first shaved her head aged 20 as a way of defying the music executives who wanted her to be more feminine.

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Nonetheless, it was her unswerving commitment to activism and truth-telling as she saw it that kept her in the headlines. The song remained relatively obscure until O’Connor recorded her version for her second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” five years later. Propelled by the now-iconic music video, it reached the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in April 1990. The single’s video showed O’Connor – startlingly beautiful, hair cut to within half an inch of her head – crying real tears. The track was written by Prince, but O’Connor’s version, which displayed the clarity and expressiveness of her voice, became the definitive one, and was one of the biggest-selling singles of 1990. Its parent album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, sold 7m copies and was nominated for four Grammys.

Sinéad O’Connor’s shaved head became an iconic part of her image over the years. Waters, whose father is Irish journalist John Waters, lives in Dublin and works as a pastry chef. A New York concert honoring the late Sinéad O’Connor featured a rousing rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” performed by her daughter, Roisin Waters. Others were so surprised to see O’Connor without her usual cropped hair that they confused her with fellow Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries fame, who died in 2018.

Sinéad O’Connor and the bald history of the buzzcut - CNN

Sinéad O’Connor and the bald history of the buzzcut.

Posted: Fri, 28 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

“Cutting my hair turned out to serve a very useful purpose,” she told a different Spin journalist in 1988. People expect to hear one thing, and what they do hear is completely different.” In other words, it was showmanship, designed to draw people in. While many have followed suit since, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor’s shaved head was arguably the most iconic hairstyle of all time.

Sinéad O'Connor

Sinéad O'Connor's shaved head was more than a beauty choice, it was a weighted decision with multiple significant reasons behind it. "That was a huge part of it - I didn't want to be raped, I didn't want to be molested," she shared. "I did not want to dress like a girl, I did not want to be pretty. You know, other girls beat you up if you're pretty, too."

The album was scrapped altogether after her 17-year-old son Shane, from a relationship with the musician Donal Lunny, took his own life in 2022. Outraged by Catholic church corruption, she campaigned for the arrest of paedophile church officials, while also using the platform of her fame to denounce sexism in the music business and an array of other issues. During a 1992 appearance on the US variety show Saturday Night Live, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II, inciting a storm of condemnation from America’s large Catholic population. At a Bob Dylan tribute gig in New York soon after, she was booed throughout her performance – even the endorsement of the songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who told her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” failed to silence the hecklers. A passionate and highly engaged musician, she was one of her generation’s significant talents. Her bel canto-trained style and wide-ranging musical curiosity were her main assets, and she employed both prodigiously, switching from pop to Irish folk to jazz to reggae on the other nine albums she released.

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She converted to Islam in 2018, adopting the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat, which she used interchangeably with her birth name on social media. On her final concert tour, in 2019, she wore a hijab and abaya, but nothing else had changed – her voice still raised the hair on the back of the neck. After her time in the An Grianán training centre, she went to the liberal Newtown Quaker school. Marie O’Connor died in a car crash when Sinéad was 18, by which time she was singing in a band called Ton Ton Macoute and studying at the Dublin College of Music. At the time of her death, the musician, who changed her name to Shuhada' Sadaqat in 2018 when she converted to Islam, was thought to be spending her time between Co Roscommon, Ireland, and London. Sinéad died at the age of 56 after years of mental health battles, her 'devastated' family confirmed this week.

O’Connor shared the heartbreaking story of why she first shaved her head while chatting to Dr. Phil in 2017. The Nothing Compares 2 U songstress, who passed away this week at the age of 56, was celebrated for her signature androgynous look and kept with the iconic style throughout her career. She kept no-to-short hair all her life, never growing the buzzcut longer than a pixie cut. And while the look suited her down to the ground, the reason behind it is heartbreaking. As recently as 2021, O’Connor was still shaving her own head “about every 10 days,” as she told the New York Times that year, despite often wearing a hijab following her 2018 conversion to Islam.

It was the bald head that became the avatar of a million dreamy rebellions; the shaved pate that bridged the gap between the angry and the sublime. It is almost impossible to think about Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer whose death was reported on July 26, or her work, without thinking about her hair. The Irish singer’s shaved head was as much a part of her identity and allure as her sound. ‘I was asked one day would I grow my hair long and wear short skirts because they wanted to sell me on my sexuality. The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support.

Nothing Compares 2 U made her one of the highest-profile singers of the early 90s, but she was constitutionally unable to compromise her values. From the start she insisted on co-producing her records, and steered her own musical course with varying results. When seeking a new boyfriend, she invited overtures from male fans; the successful applicant, an Irish drug counsellor, Barry Herridge, became her fourth husband in 2011. If she thought it warranted, she also waded into other musicians’ business, finger-wagging. An open letter criticising Miley Cyrus for appearing naked in a 2013 video provoked a furious response from the younger singer, who said the video had been inspired by the emotional openness of Nothing Compares 2 U. It was there that she received her first guitar and a “punk-rock parka”, gifts from a sympathetic nun.

With her extreme look and controversial politics, O'Connor landed her first record contract when she was just 17. It was a time, she remembers, that was especially difficult for women in the music industry. By the late 90s, she was more frequently in the news for personal reasons, such as her ordination as a priest called Mother Bernadette Mary by a breakaway Catholic sect in 1999, and the announcement that she was a lesbian, which she soon rescinded. In 2003 she was told she had bipolar disorder, but the diagnosis was later changed to post-traumatic stress disorder.

O'Connor's family revealed yesterday (Wednesday, 26 July) the star had passed away at the age of 56. O'Connor went on that beauty also felt "dangerous" to her as she was sexually abused. She wanted to be less feminine and "pretty" in her appearance in a bid to try to protect herself. "And she started, when I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter. And that's why I chopped my hair off. I didn't want to be pretty," she explained. “I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021. A London coroner’s court confirmed in January that the Grammy winner’s death was due to natural causes.

“They looked at Sinead’s shaved head and went, ‘Now we know what we are dealing with,'” the star’s first husband and frequent collaborator, John Reynolds, recalled in an interview with the same outlet. Even in the few periods when she grew her hair back, she was often referred to as the “formerly bald” Sinead O’Connor. And as such, she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today. The Irish musician died on Wednesday, 26 July, after being found at her home in south east London, 18 months after losing her ‘soulmate’ teenage son Shane to suicide. A decades-old video featuring Sinéad O’Connor expertly belting out a cover song while rocking long hair rather than her signature buzz cut has resurfaced following her death aged 56.