JACKIE by SINEAD O’CONNOR. Story by Rijn Collins.

Croydon, Victoria, Australia. 1988

The waterbed rippled as we lay listening to music. Fun late at night, not so fun with a morning hangover. We’d arrive back from clubbing at 3am, fall into bed, and select a record to lull us to sleep. I remember the Stone Roses and the Betty Blue soundtrack, but what I recall most vividly is Sinéad O’Connor’s incendiary debut album, The Lion and the Cobra.

It was not your usual lullaby. The passion of her lyrics and the sheer power of her voice were mesmerizing. Any other record, and the low music and gentle rocking would coax me into sleep quickly. But Sinéad … there was such intensity behind that album that falling asleep felt almost disrespectful. Once, when I did fall asleep to her voice, I dreamed of huge goddesses made of pale wax, all slowly moving towards me as melted rivulets ran over their clasped hands, held out, palms up.

Jackie is the first song on her first album. It’s short, sparse, but to me, unforgettable. It’s a story of loss and longing, as many good songs are, and it cuts to the bone.

Jackie left on a cold, dark night
Telling me he’d be home
Sailed the seas for a hundred years
Leaving me all alone

Belgium, 1990

Two years later I stood in a Flemish cornfield for Belgium’s biggest music festival. It was an odd line-up: Lenny Kravitz, Midnight Oil, Bob Dylan, headlined by The Cure. With my black lipstick and wild tangled mane, my allegiance was clear. But then a slight figure strode on; shaved head, big boots, shoulder blades jutting out like wing bones.

And she began to sing.

I remember the day the young man came
He said, “Your Jackie’s gone
He got lost in the rain”

That voice, that lone figure on a huge stage. It was a world away from the intimacy of her serenades in a darkened bedroom. Thousands of people standing in a European field in summer, eyes on her. To say she held her ground would be an understatement: she was a force. She crooned and bellowed, was cheeky, charming and intense, and stomp-danced on the spot with her big boots.

I was only a fortnight past my 18th birthday. Already I was learning what it meant to be a woman in a world that would make that a dangerous and difficult process. I wrote lists of the women I admired and the traits in them I craved, as though I could assemble my identity by sheer force of will. A few days after the festival I was set to finish my year-long language exchange in Belgium and return to Australia, to a future that held … I didn’t know. No job, no studies, no idea. I’m relieved that girl in a Flemish field with black lipstick and a big heart couldn’t see the future, because within the year she’d be hospitalised for the depression* that she hadn’t managed to outrun, no matter how far she travelled.

“You’re all wrong”, I said
And they stared at the sand
“That man knows that sea
Like the back of his hand”

But I remember watching Sinéad on stage. I remember trying to absorb some of her strength, to physically inhale it across the crowd. That’s how you construct identity, surely? People were waiting for Nothing Compares 2 U, the hit song released only a few months beforehand, but I wanted to hear Jackie. I recall her dignity; the way she sang and the way she stood, and the way she looked out at the crowd. It was the same dignity she’d call on when she ripped up a photo of the Pope on American television, and the world turned against her.

26 July 2023

When I heard she’d died, I felt physically sick; nausea in my belly, my throat. And then my phone began to beep. Friends from the waterbed days, friends from Ireland, women from decades ago and days ago all reaching out to each other. We needed to give comfort and we needed to get it, messages of loss and love and rage. “I know”, the messages read. “Me, too.”

Jackie is my favourite Sinéad O’Connor song. She wrote it when she was 15. I’m in awe of her talent, but it’s her grace I often think of. Sinéad taught so many of us well; how to walk with straight spines yet stomping steps, how to negotiate being heard and being hurt. Friends still message about her; we’re still grieving. And we still share stories, of waterbeds and cornfields, and what she means to each of us. Thirty-six years after first hearing her voice, letting it serenade me into sleep as a teenager, I want more than anything for this story, my story, to help keep her flame alive.

Sinéad O’Connor 8.12.66 – 26.7.23

Stereo Story #781

*See Rijn’s 2018 story about The Clash song Should I Stay Or Should I Go.