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Actually, you'd better leave that out. That's off the record!

Shane MacGowan interviews Sinead O’Connor for hotpress, with Olaf Tyaransen acting as referee. On the day, Victoria Clark also sat in. What followed turned into a wide-ranging and often hilarious exchange of almost Beckettian dimensions.

Olaf Tyaransen, 28 Jun 2007

When you spot the big blue Virgin Mary statue by the front door, there’s no doubt that you’ve arrived at the correct address.

“Come on in!” says Sinéad O’Connor, greeting your hotpress reporter with a friendly peck on the cheek. “Shane’s running late, but he should be here in a little while.”

Well, there’s a surprise! It’s midday of the 9th of May, and Shane MacGowan is running late. Actually, given Mr. MacGowan’s notoriously decadent lifestyle, it’s far more likely that he’s staggering late.

“No, no,” Sinéad laughs. “Victoria just rang from the cab. They’re definitely on their way.”

Sinéad’s Dublin home (one of them, anyway; she’s due to move into a new place shortly) is bright, spacious and luxurious – all wooden floorboards, Moroccan rugs and high ceilings. The 40-year-old singer, still beautiful after all these years, leads us into her living room and then immediately disappears off to do a quick phone interview with an American paper. Her new double album Theology is being released in six weeks time, but promotional duties have already begun in earnest.

Which is essentially why we’re here. Today’s cunning plan is that Shane will conduct the hotpress interview with Sinéad, and I’m to be the referee between Irish rock’s most notorious son and controversial daughter. I have my doubts about how this is going to work out, but, hey, it’s so crazy it just might work.

While Sinéad does her interview, I assist photographer Mick Quinn in rearranging her furniture for the photo shoot. There are framed images and statuettes of the Blessed Virgin everywhere, and her bookshelf is stuffed full of well-thumbed religious tomes.

Her Mary fixation is nothing new. Some years back she played a chain-smoking Mother of Christ in Neil Jordan’s movie of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. When she was ordained by the breakaway Latin Tridentine Church in 1999, she took the name Mother Bernadette Mary.

The Mary thing even seems to extend to her viewing material. There’s a DVD copy of There’s Something About Mary lying in front of a massive flatscreen TV.



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