It must have been late 1993. She was at the height of her fame and I was in the earliest days of my journalism career. I was working for a small press agency in Clerkenwell whose stock in trade was day work for newspapers: court cases, press conferences and particularly door knocks and door steps. As a rookie, I did an awful lot of these.
With my cover story now established, I went back to bed on that sofa
Away from work I was in my twenties in London and had quite the party lifestyle – clubbing every weekend. The club of choice was Subterranea in Ladbroke Grove and I’d go most Saturday nights. But on this occasion, I was the rota reporter on the following Sunday, due in at 9 a.m., so when midnight came around I made moves to go home to bed. My companion, however, would hear nothing of this and he cooked up a slightly ridiculous and elaborate plan to keep me out all night.
He worked for a national tabloid and the plan was that he would ask my agency to do a fictitious job for him which would allow me to stay in bed all morning. It seemed like a great idea at midnight but when I came to ring my news editor at 8 a.m. and enact it, suddenly it didn’t. I had had barely two hours sleep and the hangover hadn’t even started. So to make the plan more convincing before calling my editor, I had a flip through the Sunday papers to find a story I could pretend I’d been asked to follow up. Which brings us back to Sinéad. She was a newspaper staple in those days and there was a page lead in one tabloid about something she’d supposedly said or done, a nothingy forgettable story. But it suited me perfectly as she lived just around the corner from the sofa I was lying on in Notting Hill Gate.
So I went to her flat and knocked on her door. And she answered. And we went through this contrived exchange in which I asked her if she had anything to say about this pointless story and she very politely confirmed what I’d expected, which was that she hadn’t. So, with my cover story now established, I went back to bed on that sofa. I got up again at a more civilised hour, around noon, and then we went to the pub for a hair of the dog. This led to another and then another. Then we went for a long liquid lunch – those were the days when you needed to make a Sunday lunch three or four hours until the pubs reopened in the evening.
By 7 p.m., I was bladdered. We were staggering between the Walmer Castle and the Portobello Star when, coming in the other direction, was Sinéad O’Connor. She clocked me as the person who’d bothered her hours earlier and then realised the state I was in. And she started laughing, properly laughing. And then I started laughing.
I never saw her again, but after that I always liked her.
* I should point out that I learned my lesson that day. I abandoned this kind of unprofessional behaviour and have been a model of journalistic diligence and reliability ever since, obviously.
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