The first time I heard of Sinead O’Connor, I was twelve years old and in a psychiatric hospital. One of the nurses said she loved The Lion and the Cobra so I said I did, too. The truth is, I hadn’t heard it — I only listened to the Pet Shop Boys, but wanted to win some approval. 

Perhaps I should now say “and then I discovered O’Connor’s music and finally felt understood”. That wouldn’t be true either. After the Pet Shop Boys I moved on, somewhat embarrassingly, to The Smiths and Joy Division. I could appreciate O’Connor was talented without ever feeling particularly moved by her songs. Her politics only interested me when I was older, which conveniently coincided with it being safer and more fashionable to agree with 1990s Sinead. 

All of this means I am not sure whether I am allowed to be sad about the singer’s death. As with the death of anyone famous, there’s always that fear that you’re being appropriative and insincere. Even if it is someone whose career you have followed for years — and O’Connor wasn’t that for me — it’s not as if you really knew them. 

It starts to feel rather like being that child who, when a classmate goes missing, starts telling the press that this was your best friend, even if the two of you barely spoke. You’ve become an emotional glory hunter, placing yourself at the centre of something that has nothing to do with you. Yet I did and do feel genuinely sad about O’Connor. I hate to use the words “pure” or “authentic” — they sound like marketing-speak, the opposite of what they say — but the very things I recall making her disconcerting to me in the past now feel a rare quality, a particular loss. 

There is, I have noticed, a drive to police who is and is not worthy of such emotions. Shortly after O’Connor’s death, Morrissey wrote a post in which he complained about the way in which the music industry treats certain singers “who don’t ‘fit in’”. “They are never praised until death — when, finally, they can’t answer back,” he wrote:

The cruel playpen of fame gushes with praise for Sinead today … with the usual moronic labels of ‘icon’ and ‘legend’. You praise her now ONLY because it is too late. You hadn’t the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you.

While I get the general spirit, I always find this kind of criticism unfair. We don’t eulogise people before they’re dead because, well, they’re not dead. It would be weird and unnatural to be doing it every day. It downplays the real difficulty of sustaining human relationships if we do not acknowledge that it is easier to idealise those no longer living. A greater hypocrisy would lie in pretending otherwise. 

And while O’Connor was hounded and misrepresented by certain sectors of the press, she was and is not the only one to suffer this. There are plenty of famous women still living who are treated as car crashes and lunatics, plenty of famous women whose politics place them beyond the pale in the eyes of people who half-suspect these women are right. Few of us are falling over ourselves to defend them. There’s always a reason why they aren’t the right kind of madwoman or political outcast. You’d be on the side of someone like them, just not them in particular. 

Over the years I’ve developed a slight obsession with how the press treats “car crash” women — Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, Daniela Westbrook, Kerry Katona — and the way in which, for all our talk of “ending stigma” with regard to mental illness, there are so many fading stars whose behaviour is treated as mockable. I know one could argue that these particular women lack O’Connor’s genius qualities — that one shouldn’t even compare her to them — but I have a reaction to anyone described as “troubled”, with its vague insinuations that past abuse may have made it acceptable to no longer treat a woman as credible. If you want to characterise yourself as someone who stands with the outcasts, these probably aren’t the ones you’d want to stand beside (and they probably wouldn’t want you there, either). But if we have some responsibility towards those dismissed as oddities, shouldn’t it extend beyond those who will be remembered in the way we’d like to be remembered, too? 

Shortly after Morrissey, Lily Allen chipped in with a tweet professing to find it “hard not to feel incensed when there are so many people posting about Sinead and how fearless she was, people who would never in a million years align themselves with anybody who stood for something or had anything remotely controversial to say”. “It’s so spineless,” she wrote, “if you can’t stand up for people in life don’t do it in death.”

To be fair, I think most people manage to do something that someone, somewhere will find controversial at some point in their lives. I suspect what Allen really means is “things that are controversial that I agree with” (on the basis that things that are controversial with which you disagree are just wrong-side-of-history hate speech). Allen seems to be assuming the right to police other people’s admiration of fearlessness on the basis that she, like O’Connor, speaks truth to power. Yet it seems to me that what was so attractive now, and so disturbing then, about O’Connor’s approach was that it felt so totally off-script. 

You could, for instance, be “controversial” and troll the religious establishment in the way Madonna did, but O’Connor’s actions fell outside of that established framework. Partly I think this is to do with the very specific problem she highlighted in such a dramatic way. The sexual abuse of children somehow manages to be the very worst thing of which you can accuse a person or organisation about which very few people are motivated to do anything at all. Its very badness reflects back on the accuser, facilitating accusations of craziness or malicious intent, even when there is a general feeling that what is being said is not necessarily untrue. 

It’s striking to me how hard it remains to raise the alarm on this specific issue. Unless it is after the fact — ideally several years after the fact — the average pop star is not going to risk being accused of stoking moral panic or spreading conspiracy theories. 

By this, I don’t mean that someone such as Allen is also insufficiently “fearless” compared to O’Connor. As with the missing child analogy, it all starts to feel a bit “she’d have been my best friend, not yours. She wouldn’t have even liked you”. What concerns me is that memory becomes a badge to be worn by those who wish to distinguish themselves from the plebs who go along with the mob (any mob). None of us like to think of ourselves as the type who would have been cheering on witch-burnings, or furiously distancing ourselves from O’Connor following the Saturday Night Live debacle. It’s still important that we’re able to do so. 

In death, she has become the perfect “troublesome” woman

Obviously I, too, would like to imagine myself facing a hostile crowd, as O’Connor did in Madison Square Gardens, and then, years later, having everyone realise I was right all along. The personal vindication element is a big draw for me. What’s noticeable in O’Connor’s interviews is that it wasn’t for her. For someone who could express such fury, she seems to have possessed an extraordinary amount of grace. To be precious about who is “allowed” to mourn her seems an odd tribute to this. 

In death, she has become the perfect “troublesome” woman — a beautiful genius, politically pure, just edgy and insane enough. The danger is that this lets us believe we would stand up for another woman like her if she came along, as though somehow, the walking, talking reality of her wouldn’t get in the way.