Tious Irish.' No wonder they're hiding downstairs in the kitchen. They're probably afraid the doll's going to start singing any minute.

But look at it this way: Sinead has walked into a very tough, poten­tially hostile situation and immediately gained control. She has asserted her territorial imperative as surely as if she had pissed in a circle, and she has established emotional control of the studio. I don't think that's a power game; I think it's probably necessary to enable her to forget the pressure and get straight to a mental point where she can find the inspiration to record the song without holding back.

Any argument about Sinead O'Connor motives is made moot when she opens her mouth. She wails out Bono and Gavin's death song, "You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart" as if her own father's ghost were standing in front of her:

I'll never wash these clothes, I want to keep the stain Your blood to me is precious, nor would I spill it in vain Your spirit sings though your lips never part Singing only to me, the thief of your heart

Sinead plays Hamlet! Joni Mitchell once said that it's hard to switch from the purely emotional state necessary for good singing to the purely analytical state needed to adjudicate the recording of a performance; she said the quick flipping between the two demanded by the studio can give you the bends. Sinead seems to have no problem. One minute she is pouring out Celtic soul, emoting like a banshee, and the next she happily stops to punch in a part or correct a bum note.

Gavin, exhausted and mentally submerged in the project, tells engi­neer Paul Barrett to stop turning off the tape as soon as Sinead hits a bad note—it's embarrassing for a singer who's trying to dig into her soul to suddenly have the music click off and be left howling alone. Sinead, though, doesn't seem to be bothered. She sings along power-fully, hits a flat note, and segues straight into the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies. The techs may be walking on eggshells, but in this world she's conjured Sinead is completely confident. As hours pass and Sinead sings beautifully, adding harmonies when she's finished the melody, it occurs to me that when I was a teenager listening to Blonde on Blonde or Astral Weeks on the floor in the dark with my head between the speakers, this is

[392]

How I imagined records were made—with the smell of flowers and candlelight and breezes blowing through open windows.

Gavin is crouched in the producer's chair like Rodin's "Thinker." At 2:30 in the morning he announces, "Let's knock it on the head." The session's over, the song is complete. Sinead picks up her flowers, blows out her candles, and stuffs her doll into a plastic bag. She puts on a ragged coat with a hood to disguise her famous face. When we get downstairs Gavin wants to call a cab. Sinead says no, she'll walk home. I say I'll walk her. Gavin says let's all go. So we set out across Temple Bar, Sinead clutching her bagged doll to her chest like a little kid. It's very cold out. Young couples are kissing in doorways. We cross the Half­penny Bridge under a big autumn moon and stop into a shop for a steaming bag of chips to eat (and to keep our hands warm) along the rest of the way.

The discos are letting out. We pass gangs of frustrated teenage boys kicking parked cars and pissing against walls. We turn away from the crowded areas, up cobblestone streets. I ask Sinead if she's filling up loads of cassettes with new songs and she says no, she needs to get her life together, to spend time with her little boy, and to try to figure out everything that's happened to her since she became famous.

"I love to sing," she says. "I'll always love to sing. But I'm not sure the rest of it is worth it."

"What's not worth it?" I ask. "The writing or the celebrity?"

"Everything that comes after it," she says with her eyes down, waving vaguely to indicate the whole big world beyond this little corner of Dublin. I suggest that she might well be right to not perform or make records or in any way be a public figure—but that she should not deny her gift. She should write songs even if all she does is put them in a shoe box in her closet.

We go along in silence for a while and then she says, "I never thought of that. I could do it without doing anything with it."

The rest of the walk is devoted to talk about kids, with Sinead of the opinion that all the decisions you make—about where to live, what to do—are really about deciding what's best for your children. We reach Sinead's door and say good night. Gavin and I sit down on the steps and eat our french fries and watch stray teenagers stumbling home, knocking over trash cans. Gavin says he is wasted from this soundtrack work, as Bono is.

[393]

"He sure is," I say. "Those lines in Bono's face look like they were painted on. I was down at the Factory this afternoon and U2 are working so hard these days they hardly get to play music." "Meeting after meeting." Gavin nods.

"Yeah, it must be terribly frustrating."

"Their life is insane." Gavin says that tonight while he was working on the record, waiting for Bono, the studio phone rang and it was Winona Ryder, the actress friend of U2, calling from some phone booth in the Pacific Northwest where she was trying to track down a little girl who had been kidnapped from her home. She told Gavin to give Bono that message and then hung up. Gavin shook his head in burned-out wonder, "What is that about?" he asks. "Winona Ryder's looking for a kidnapped child somewhere near Seattle and she calls Bono in Dublin for help?" (Actually Winona was returning a call from Bono asking if he could help, but Gavin doesn't know that.)

"U2 used to be able to go out into the big world, float around among the celebrities and artists, and then come back to Dublin and resume normal lives," I say. "But now . . ."

"It's followed them back home," Gavin says. "That's right." We watch two young drunks down the road trying unsuccessfully to commit some vandalism with a trash can chained to a fence. "Why don't they hurt themselves instead?" I ask.

"They will," Gavin answers. Finally they give up and stomp away. "That bit with Adam in London was wild," Gavin says. "And we had the papers to tell us all about it. You know what the next big one the papers get hold of will be? Edge and Morleigh."

"Why would that make the papers?" I ask. "They're both single. She's a dancer and choreographer, he's a musician. Why would that be news?"

Gavin shakes his head and says, "Morleigh's great, she's a wonderful girl. But the papers won't care about who she really is or what she really does. The headline will be—"

"Oh. 'Edge Runs Off with Belly Dancer.' " That's it." Gavin nods. "That's all they'll need to know and all they'll want to know."

Gavin pulls himself up to his feet, dusts himself off, and says, "I'm cornpletely knackered." He heads up the road, shooting to be home before dawn.

Rancho Mirage

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