Sinead O’Connor Chased Down People Who Egged Her After Her Controversial ‘SNL’ Performance
In 1992, Sinead O’Connor appeared on SNL and sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War” as her closing performance. As she sang, she showed the camera a photo of Pope John Paul II before tearing it up, telling the audience to “fight the real enemy.” The backlash was swift and vicious. People smashed her CDs in the street, NBC banned her for life, and half the audience at a Bob Dylan concert booed her when she took the stage. Before all of this, though, two men threw eggs at her when she left 30 Rock. O’Connor didn’t hesitate to run after them.
Two people egged Sinead O’Connor after her ‘SNL’ performance
After ripping up the photo of Pope John Paul II and blowing out a candle, O’Connor ended her rendition of “War” to complete silence.
“Total stunned silence in the audience,” she wrote in her book Rememberings. “And when I walk backstage, literally not a human being is in sight. All doors have closed. Everyone has vanished. Including my own manager, who locks himself in his room for three days and unplugs his phone.”
O’Connor and her personal assistant, Ciara, packed up her belongings and left 30 Rock after the performance. Outside to greet them were two men armed with eggs.
“Outside 30 Rock, two young men are waiting for me and they throw a load of eggs at us both,” she wrote. “But what they don’t know is myself and Ciara are able to run a hundred meters in 11.3 seconds. So we run after them when they flee.”
They quickly caught up with the pair but only offered joking admonishment.
“We catch up with them in some alley,” she wrote. “They are leaning, gasping for breath, against a black fence they didn’t have the strength to climb. All we say, laughing at them, is ‘Hey, don’t be throwing eggs at women.'”
O’Connor said the confrontation ended on good terms.
“The two of them are so shocked at being chased and caught that they start laughing too, and it all ends very friendly,” she wrote. “They straighten up and help us find a cab back to the hotel.”
Sinead O’Connor shared why she ripped up a photo of the pope on ‘SNL’
The photo O’Connor ripped up came from her abusive mother’s home.
“I took down from her bedroom wall the only photo she ever had up there, which was of Pope John Paul II,” she wrote. “It was taken when he visited Ireland in 1979. ‘Young people of Ireland,’ he had said after making a show of kissing the ground at the Dublin airport like the flight had been overly frightening, ‘I love you.’ What a load of claptrap. Nobody loved us. Not even God. Sure, even our mothers and fathers couldn’t stand us.”
To her, the photo represented “lies and liars and abuse. The type of people who kept these things were devils like my mother. I never knew when or where or how I would destroy it, but destroy it I would when the right moment came. And with that in mind, I carefully brought it everywhere I lived from that day forward.”
She had also been reading a book about the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. Enraged, she decided to rip up the picture on live television.
She said the moment on ‘SNL’ ‘re-railed’ her career
O’Connor was politically outspoken before her SNL performance, but the demonstration on the program brought unprecedented controversy. People were furious with her and declared her career over. She didn’t look at it this way.
“A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career,” she wrote. “That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track. I had to make my living performing live again. And that’s what I was born for. I wasn’t born to be a pop star. You have to be a good girl for that. Not be too troubled.”
She had never wanted to be a pop star, and she felt that her SNL performance set her on a path she found more comfortable.
“It wasn’t derailed. It was re-railed,” she wrote. “And I feel I’ve been extremely successful as a single mother providing for her children.”
