Sinead O’Connor has retracted her retirement statement just days after making the original announcement.
Over the weekend, O’Connor took to Twitter to declare that her upcoming eleventh album No Veteran Dies Alone would be her last, saying: “This is to announce my retirement from touring and from working in the record business… I’ve gotten older and I’m tired.”
She continued: “It’s not sad news. It’s staggeringly beautiful news. A wise warrior knows when he or she should retreat: #MeTime. It’s been a forty year journey. Time to put the feet up and make other dreams come true.”
However, O’Connor has now backtracked on retiring by revealing that her initial decision was a “knee jerk reaction” to some insensitive interviews with media broadcasters who she described as “pigs in lipstick.”
On top of that, she also confirmed that she will still be performing all shows that are currently scheduled for 2022, apologising for “the fright” she gave fans and industry workers.
“All interviewers were asked to please be sensitive and not ask about child abuse or dig deep into painful shit about mental health which would be traumatising for me to have to think about. Every fuggin time I go to sell a record for 30 years, it’s ‘aren’t you mental? aren’t you an asshole? aren’t you invalid?’” she said.
She continued: “I said I was retiring. As I have said many times before in knee jerk reactions when I was young and made the butt of media abuse on the grounds I’m legally vulnerable. The hugest misconception (I’m always asked this but never answer) of ‘Sinead O’Connor’ is that she is Amazonian. I’m not. I’m a five-foot, four-inch soft-hearted female who is actually very fragile.”
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“But I love my job. Making music that is. I don’t like the consequences of being a talented (and outspoken woman) being that I have to wade through walls of prejudice every day to make a living. But I am born for live performance and with the astonishing love and support I have received in the last few days and will continue to receive from [talent agent] Rob Prinz and all at ICM, as well as many managers and buyers and fans, I feel safe in retracting my expressed wish to retire.”
O’Connor continued on to take aim at BBC Woman’s Hour which aired an interview with her last week. During the interview, host Emma Barnett mentioned that The Telegraph‘s music critic Neil McCormick had once described O’Connor as “the crazy lady in pop’s attic”.
“Last Tuesday it was unnecessary and hurtful for Woman’s Hour of all people, to remind me of the awfully abusive statement written about me by an Irish man for a UK paper,” she said.
“When people wonder what derailed my career? The UK and Irish UK papers’ constant abuse and invalidation of me on the grounds I may or may not have been diagnosed by them as ‘mad’. As if mad makes you invalid.”
O’Connor concluded her statement by reiterating that she does not plan to hang up her boots, saying: I’m not gonna retire… I’m gonna keep on being fabulous.”
“I’m not gonna be made [to] feel any shame associated with my exhibiting the symptoms of my trauma… and I’m gonna have no more truck with Pigs in Lipstick.”
For more on this topic, head over to the Classic Rock Observer.
Check out the full statement from Sinead O’Connor about her premature retirement announcement:
Good news. Fuck retiring. I retract. Am not retiring. I was temporarily allowing pigs in lipstick to fuck my head up… here’s my statement….. in the form of these three photos. It’s ‘colourful’ but that’s me : ) #LetOConnorBeOConnor pic.twitter.com/wKoEKFANPk
— Sinead O’Connor (Shuhada Sadaqat) (@MagdaDavitt77) June 7, 2021
