A fool for Sinead

Another night on London’s South Bank, one of my favourite places on earth, where I’ve made a complete fool of myself over Sinead O’Connor, one of my favourite women on earth.

It’s not the unrequited crush I’ve had on her ever since I first heard her sing ‘I Want Your (Hands on Me)’ – to me personally, of course – around the time Neil Kinnock lost his first election in 1987. I’ve learnt to live with that. This time it was her relationship with Shane MacGowan, who happens to be one of my favourite singer-songwriters on earth.

She’d included ‘Big Bunch of Junkie Lies’ (one of my favourite songs etc etc) in her set at the Festival Hall. And as I was driving a group of friends home we ended up discussing who it was about, whether it related to the infamous incident when Sinead called the police on a drugged-up Shane and whether MacGowan could have been the musical genius that he is without also being so screwed up.

I had opinions on all three. I wasn’t convinced that ‘Junky Lies’ was about him directly; I thought Sinead called the police out of concern for him because she couldn’t think of anything else to do; and I felt that certain kinds of genius virtually require that the person concerned is a total mess in other ways.

I’d noticed that the woman in the back of the car who’d come to the concert with one of my friends wasn’t saying much, but put it down to the fact that we’d only just met. When we’d taken her home, I learnt the real reason for her silence: she was a long-term lover of MacGowan’s, who was probably wondering why this idyiot was talking such crap.