How Sinéad O’Connor Defied Expectations and Took Ownership of Her Identity With a Haircut

This article was originally published on Far Out

No amount of hair dye, safety pins or leather will ever make you anywhere near as punk as Sinéad O’Connor.

While others adorned themselves to look the part, she stripped away all pretence to ensure that nothing stood in the way of her art — not even her. Her zero-compromise approach to protecting herself and the music attached to her name ended up rubbing a lot of the right people the wrong way, and so she also endured a great deal of adversity throughout her life, right up until her untimely passing in 2023.

Long before she was blackballed for bringing attention to the rampant paedophilia within the folds of the Catholic Church, the singer-songwriter was negotiating the unceasing challenges of being a young woman in a notoriously predatory business. A humanitarian in the truest sense of the word, she arguably has the most consistent track record of being on the right side of history among public figures of her stature; simultaneously, the courage that her decency demanded made her highly susceptible to humiliation and abuse.

In her 2021 memoir, she detailed the expectations that were imposed on her upon signing a deal with Ensign Records at the age of 18, revealing that label executive Nigel Grainge and producer Chris Birkett kept trying to push her into playing a character she had no interest in whatsoever. Displeased with the Mohawk she had been sporting, both men kept insisting on an aesthetic rebrand that would make her easier to market; on the bright side, this expedited her transformation into the unyielding and resilient artivist she is best remembered as today.

“He said himself and Chris would like me to wear short skirts with boots and perhaps some feminine accessories such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other noisy items one couldn’t possibly wear close to a microphone,” O’Connor recalled. Offended by the patronising implications of their plan, she turned to Birkett and cuttingly retorted, “So, lemme get this straight. He wants me to look like your mistress and the bride he left his wife for?”

Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who was O’Connor’s manager at the time, didn’t take kindly to these suggestions either and encouraged her client to go bald instead. The very next day, the soon-to-be rockstar went to a barbershop right next to the Ensign Records office and declared, “I want to look like a boy”. She remembered how the Greek hairdresser was deeply uncomfortable with the demand (and apparently even moved to tears in the heat of his theatrics), though she ultimately won him over by asserting that she was “the sole author of [her] own destiny”.

“I loved it. I looked like an alien. Looked like Star Trek. Didn’t matter what I wore now,” she wrote about the results, which even earned her an approving smile and thumbs-up from the lady secretary at the label’s office when she triumphantly walked in. Sure enough, her target audience was deeply upset at how proud she was of the decision. While Grainge was left speechless, Birkett asked why she couldn’t just be herself with long hair, to which she politely replied with all her Irish charm, “It’s you who needs hair, you baldy oul fecker, not me.”

During an interview in 2017, O’Connor noted how opposed she was to sexualising herself to advance her career since she came from “an age of protest singers” who inspired her to succeed based on her merits as a good musician: “The artists I was influenced by, they weren’t the type who were selling themselves on how they looked.”

Over that same chat, she also shared how a disturbing memory from her upbringing that involved her sibling contributed to the buzzcut: “My mother took it into her head that my sister’s hair was ugly and horrible and disgusting. When I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter, and that’s why I chopped my hair off. I didn’t want to be pretty. It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested everywhere I went.”

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