Sinead O’Connor said her troubling encounter with Prince “spoiled” one of her most famous songs, in interviews that have been published as part of a new collection.
While the late Irish musician made headlines for her claims about the rock icon in 2019, it emerges that she was talking about her experiences with him as early as 1991.
Speaking to Rolling Stone that year, O’Connor said she had been put off performing “Nothing Compares 2 U”, her cover of Prince’s song that propelled her to international fame, due to the alleged incident.
“It spoiled the song completely for me,” she said. “I feel a connection with the song, but the experience was a very disturbing one.
“At the moment, I really don’t like the idea of singing the song. I need to get to the stage where I can separate the writer from the song—which I suppose I always did before. But I’m just very angry with him.
“Anyway, it’s not like I’m going to spend the rest of my life singing the song that I had that went to No 1. That’s not what I’m all about. I do other stuff, too. I mean, I’ve sung the song so many times that I’m bored with the song at this stage.”
O’Connor would later elaborate about the incident in a 2019 interview on ITV’s chat show Good Morning Britain, where she said she had been summoned to Prince’s mansion at night.
“I foolishly went alone,” she told hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid. “He was uncomfortable with the fact I wasn’t a protégé of his and that I’d just recorded the song.”
She continued: “He was wanting me to be a protégé of his and ordered that I don’t swear in my interviews. I told him where he could go and he went for me. He went upstairs and got a pillow and he had something hard in the pillow. I ran out of his house, hiding behind a tree.
“We met on the highway in Malibu at five in the morning – I’m spitting at him, he’s trying to punch me. I had to go ring someone’s doorbell, which my father always told me to do if I was in a situation like that.”
Two years later, O’Connor wrote about the incident in her memoir, Rememberings, as well as in accompanying interviews, as she alleged that Prince criticised her for swearing in interviews and became obsessed with the idea of her eating soup prepared by his butler.
“We had a disagreement and it got a bit physical between the two of us,” she told The View in 2021. “It was quite scary for me because I was young and I didn’t really know where I was.
“So, I think that, again, in terms of writing, or quality of writing in the book, the Prince chapter is probably the best chapter in the book because I tried to make it amusing and it is also quite frightening.”
She continued: “But yeah, we just, you know, I guess, he took me to the house, or he got me to go to his house, and he started telling me that I mustn’t swear in my interviews, and I must talk like this and talk like that, and of course, I told him, being Irish, how he could take a long walk down a short pier. And, uh, that didn’t go down very well. It all descended from there…”
Prince’s estate has not responded to media queries about O’Connor’s claims.
The Irish artist died aged 56 in July 2023; she was found unresponsive at her home in Herne Hill, south London.
Her conversations with Rolling Stone and The View are included in a new book of collected interviews, Sinead O’Connor: The Last Interview, out now via Melville House Publishing.
