Sinéad O’Connor’s Music Manager Simon Napier-Bell Said She Was ‘Fire’: ‘I Love Playing with Fire’

Iconic music manager Simon Napier-Bell recalled the passion and “fire” former client, singer Sinéad O’Connor had for her art.

Napier-Bell managed O’Connor from 2014 to 2015 and he recalled the boldness O’Connor exhibited when she sought out a new music manager. O’Connor died on July 26 at age 56.

Simon Napier-Bell shares how Sinéad O’Connor hired him

“She put a thing on Facebook saying she was looking for a new manager – I thought it was a joke, to be rude to her old manager. But she was serious, and there was no one I’d rather manage,” Napier-Bell recalled via The Guardian.

“The history of pop is not great music, only – it’s great imagery, which isn’t enough either. So when those two things dovetail, you become a huge artist,” he added. “In my mind, there were two things with Sinéad – one, the incredible first hit record, and then the extraordinary thing that happened on Saturday Night Live when she tore up the picture of the pope. To me, that’s when she became a superstar; that was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.”

Sinéad O’Connor’s Music Manager recalls her performance at a Conor McGregor fight

“I love red hot people, and she was fire – I love playing with fire,” he said. Napier-Bell said being a music manager means building success for your client, which isn’t always that thrilling once it’s achieved.

“I felt she was an artist where that excitement would continue – she felt like an artist who meant something,” he said.

“There was a wonderful occasion when we went to Las Vegas, and she sang at a Conor McGregor fight. She was passionately Irish,” he recounted. “Her music was guided towards redeeming the wrongs that Ireland had suffered; she equated the wrongs she suffered as an abused child with the wrongs that Ireland had suffered.”

“And here were 20,000 Irish people at the MGM Grand, and probably a couple of hundred Americans. There were 24 flights from Ireland in the previous two days and every single one ran out of beer halfway across the Atlantic, and that continued in the MGM Grand. The cheer when she stood up on the podium was so vast that she couldn’t hear the backing track. But her voice rose above everything else – she had this unbelievable voice that could pierce anything, either with pain or love. And then McGregor won his fight.”

She was ‘never boring’

But O’Connor’s beautiful voice was sometimes mired behind a rage that seemingly came out of nowhere.

“She could be sitting with you in the most gentle, nice way, having afternoon tea, and someone could say something and she would go into a fury,” Napier-Bell said. “And you’d have no idea why. You’d think she’d never come back from it, and then she’d just return.”

“She was bipolar – she was given medication for it and sometimes didn’t take it, because she valued the artistic creativity that being bipolar gave her,” he explained. “She knew what she was doing, and gave a slightly guilty smile – which meant something was going to go pretty wrong any minute. But she also might come up with something wonderfully creative. Most artists are like that inside – but they modify themselves usually, and begin to get boring. She never got boring.”