The Archives #3: how anger burns the way
a tribute to Sinéad O' Connor
In this newsletter, I’m going to talk about anger.
I wrote this whole thing, unsure of what to do with it. It felt too personal and exposing. Then Sinéad O'Connor died, someone who lived her life openly and honestly, and I realised why writing about our favourite musicians is so cathartic. I realised I could tell the same story through her.
I’ve felt guilty for being angry in these latest Another Sky songs, this gut feeling of, “what is this even doing?”. My lyrical intention with them was total honesty. And just like writing a newsletter, now they’re going out into the world, it feels too exposing. It’s always felt too exposing to release songs, though.
Sometimes, writing feels like spitting something really uncomfortable out, or word vomit. It feels like this really compulsive, transformative process where I feel so anxious during - I don’t understand at all why I do it - and then afterwards, I transcend. I somehow reach a deeper level of understanding. And that is why I adore writing.
For a long time, I haven’t been able to write write, by which I mean anything beyond short poems or lyrics. I now realise that was because I’ve been in total denial. I used to sit down with a story idea, to then completely break down, becoming completely unable to function. I used to think that meant I shouldn’t write. Now, I can see that those breakdowns were simply the act of meeting a brick wall, one that needed to be torn down instead of avoided.
I watched Nimona last week, the cartoon Hana was watching when I rang her for the interview. It explores the idea of people turning into the very thing they’re called, people transforming into the monsters they’re accused of being. I was already thinking about isolation and how we demonise people, how we ritualistically call different demographics monsters. And after I saw Nimona, I started thinking about redemption circles/forgiveness rituals in tribes.
“In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered.
Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, each recalling the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy, is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and acts of kindness are recited carefully and at length” - The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, Jack Kornfield
Isn’t that beautiful? I thought about it a lot in lockdown, when there was a big, worldwide push to examine police forces and prison systems, as well as racial injustice.
And then I saw Hanif Abdurraqib write this about Sinéad:
“The world is not equipped to hold a person’s suffering.”
When you work as a teacher, or in any care-based role, you are forced to become a role model for people, whether you feel up to that or not. If you command a classroom, you quickly learn people will mirror your presence. You start to understand anger and acting out on a deeper level. You start to understand that the kids who are ‘difficult’ are actually communicating their frustration or despair in a way you might not be used to.
You start to realise things about yourself, too.
A friend said to me recently, “I think you’ve been through some really bad things. And you didn’t get the support you needed”. There was a point in my early twenties when I realised the system wasn’t going to protect me, and I turned to anger instead. After some serious rejection and loss, I started to feel like it didn’t matter how much I cared or what I did or how “good” I was, I would always be the monster.
I think these angry Another Sky lyrics were my attempt to say, “actually, that was wrong. And if nobody else is going to stand up for me, then I will stand up for myself”. I siphoned off my anger to create a character that was basically armour.
I think the one true curse of getting older is acquiring the self-awareness and maturity to learn that you are the same human being as the people who hurt you, and that you have the capacity to hurt others. And if you don’t deal with the wounds, you can quite easily spit that hurt out onto other people. And then the cycle of hurt continues, on and on and on.
Sinéad O'Connor always understood this. Harmed by a Christian asylum for women as a teen, a dysfunction family and abuse from her mother, she knew how it felt to live under an oppressive regime, and how governments would lie and use religion to control. And through her journey, she used that anger for change.
When we wrote these angry songs, I was all for it, encouraging the band to ‘go there’. Rock was a genre I’d always stayed far away from. I never felt ‘allowed’ to do it. And I finally wanted to explore what it meant to be angry, especially as a woman. I wanted to explore how uncomfortable that would make people feel. I’m no Sinéad O'Connor. But I do want to acknowledge that women like her paved the way for women like me to feel like I could even attempt doing that.
I have experienced massive struggles as a human being, as most of us have. I feel robbed. I feel angry. And I have spent my entire life trying to understand why these things have happened to me, why I have to go through this. I’d do anything to not live in this pain.
But the past is a bridge to nowhere. It’s happened.
Something interesting I’ve just read in ‘Healing Trauma’ by Peter A. Levine about the four Buddhist truths;
“Whatever the initial seed of trauma, the deeper truth is that our suffering is more closely a result of how we deal with the effect these past events have on us in the present”.
In the early 2000s, Sinéad revealed that she suffered from fibromyalgia. She was also diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. She was agoraphobic and addicted to cannabis for many years. She sought out psychiatrists. She publicly ‘melted down’ on the internet, revealing the depths of her suffering.
All these things, while devastating, can be triumphed over, although not necessarily completely ‘cured’. But I don’t like delineating between ‘cured’ and ‘uncured’, ‘well’ and ‘unwell’, because after all my lived experiences, I truly believe people aren’t simply ‘well’. A lot of people believe they are well, living in copious amounts of denial, keeping on keeping on for the sake of their family, or to survive, because they know, deep down, they have no other choice.
Conditions like fibromyalgia or C-PTSD don’t make anyone weak, but are rather a reaction to the world, to our environment. They are a story revealing something, if we’d only take the time to listen. It has taken a long time to arrive here, with many, many mistakes along the way, including a lot of self-blame and self-flagellation. And I think I am arriving at a special moment in my life. I think I am finally ready to drop that shame, for myself and for others.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Has anyone else noticed how disconnected and sad everyone has become lately? I think the illusion of capitalism and a bright future within it, or at least the future we’ve been sold our whole lives, is beginning to really break down.
How could we not be traumatised? We are living through the end of times. We are witnessing everything we thought was impenetrable and absolute in our youth, like living the same lives as our parents, making a stable income from a job, having a future, having real meaning and community - crumble and disintegrate.
I saw this week that in the U.K, 40% of people my age are going to live in poverty as pensioners, and in the wake of climate news, my first thought was, come on. Will there even be a world to be a pensioner in?
AI is terrifying. It’s already smashed up the industry I wanted to go into (writing), and unless we really do something to stop it, it’s going to obliterate the already smashed up industry I’m in (music). Not that I even want to define myself by a job anymore. I hate this system, I’ve seen it take too much from everyone. No country has Universal Basic Income to protect them from what’s about to happen yet, a scheme proved by research to work (as I discovered after reading Utopia For Realists). The ‘United’ Kingdom has one of the most draconian, barbaric government this country has seen in modern times, one that has pummelled us to lower and lower standards of living.
And it genuinely feels like their longterm plan is just for us to die. They continue to scapegoat minorities, off-shoring refugees to Rwanda, stripping disabled citizens from benefits and the right to live, pushing desperate doctors, nurses, teachers and railway/travel workers to strikes, claiming anti-climate change efforts will become a religious crusade while forcing teachers to out the kids they teach to their parents, all to divert our attention from everything they’re not doing in the face of catastrophic threats. It’s a very effective technique called scapegoating, in order to divert our attention.
We have just lived through a global pandemic. We are facing literal hellfire in the form of climate change, and people feel so traumatised from researching it it has a name - ‘collapse aware’ (someone wrote this great piece titled ‘The Profound Loneliness Of Being Collapse Aware’). The U.K. government have passed a bill to make our democratic right to protest illegal, so silently, so easily, most people won’t even believe it, most of us don’t even know.
Anger would be the appropriate reaction to all that, right?
In 1992, Sinéad sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s ‘War’, to then present a photo of the Pope to the screen while singing the word, ‘evil’. She then tore the photo to pieces and said, “fight the real enemy”. In shock, the audience remained completely silent.
Until the philosophy
Which holds one race superior
And another inferior
Is finally and permanently
Discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war.
Following this, she was crucified. This happened nine years before the Pope acknowledged sexual abuse within the church, although Sinéad later admitted she took the photo from her abusive mother’s wall the night she died, and did this as a personal act of revenge. To me, that’s irrelevant. Of course it’s a personal act of revenge in the face of great abuse; that’s the whole reason people hate systems…it personally affects us.
During his opening monologue the following week, Catholic-raised host Joe Pesci said he’d taped the photo back together. Pesci also said that if it had been his show, "I would have gave her such a smack". The National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations hired a steamroller to crush hundreds of copies of her albums outside of her record company’s headquarters. The Washington Times named her "the face of pure hatred", Madonna called her out and Frank Sinatra called her "a stupid broad".
And it wasn’t just the public who abused her. Behind closed doors, record labels wielded their power. Her shaved head was a statement to any man working with her after being told to be more sexy, more feminine. When she fell pregnant after her debut album, her record label’s own doctor said, "the record company has spent £100,000 making this record, you owe it to them not to have this baby."
I don’t really have words for that.
DARVO comes to mind. "Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender".
Last year, a friend who was training to become a school therapist said to me, “I was taught recently that children don’t lie. They might…lie, but in that lie lies a truth. It’s a story. And instead of punishing, you should listen to what’s inside their story”.
Abuse distorts memories. It makes people act out, and lie for self-protection because they know telling the truth gets them punished. It can make people construct false narratives in their heads. It makes people second guess their version of events or blame themselves to feel a sense of control. It plays all sorts of nasty tricks on the mind, and most importantly, it isn’t people’s fault. It’s cyclical, it passes from person to person. And it eventually trickles down to perpetuate whole systems of abuse, forcing most of us, none the wiser, to blindingly accept “the way things are.”
Some people believe mental illness means people lie, that they aren’t to be trusted and that they need to be outcast. I believe mental illness can be a profound truth. A reaction, a willingness to grieve and face the tragedy of things. She was truthful, and that is what scared everyone. Sinéad had this amazing ability to simply acknowledge her agony. She was too truthful, too unruly, and most importantly, she couldn’t be controlled.
Two weeks after her SNL appearance, Sinead performed ‘I Believe In You’ at Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary tribute concert. She was met with a mixture of cheers and boos. So she screamed over the audience with another a cappella rendition of ‘War’. She then left the stage, where behind the curtains, she burst in tears.
It was a perfect mixture of sadness and anger. She didn’t hide the vulnerability underneath her anger, either. She stared in the face of a booing crowd and saw something more important than saving face, saying what she needed to despite public hate. She defiantly sang War again, doubling down. And then she cried. Denial was long gone, even in the face of a public, emotional humiliation.
She refused to apologise, saying later: 'I wasn't sorry, I didn't regret it. It was the proudest thing I've ever done as an artist.' In her 2021 book ‘Rememberings’, Sinead said, ‘everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.’
The way trauma is thought about has transformed over the last few decades. Diagnoses previously only held for war veterans are now extended to the wider population.
“We become traumatised when our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some way overwhelmed” - ‘Healing Trauma’ by Peter A. Levine
Every lesson seems to be cyclical - I am cycling back to exactly what I wrote post my band’s first album, ‘I Slept On The Floor’ and I have arrived, once again, back at the lyrics for ‘Was I Unkind?’. Kae Tempest, thankfully, reassures us that’s completely normal with their album, ‘The Line Is a Curve.’
That’s the appeal in being a ‘music-lover’ or a ‘fan’. That’s the joy in writing about music and referencing our favourite artists so much. That’s what’s behind the outpouring of love for Sinead.
Being seen. There is so much power in having someone else say what you say. It is a collective power. It’s why we have icons, why we look up to people. People championing their favourite musicians is a way to speak, a way to align ourselves with beliefs and new ideas, a way to signal to others what we believe in when we feel we can’t speak ourselves.
And every so often, there is a break through the clouds; there is someone who will shave their head and rip up a picture of the Pope. And if we want to collectively heal, if we have any hope of battling the emergency that faces us as a species, we must find space to hold these people and listen to what they are telling us.
So. Anger. How do I feel about these songs now? A little embarrassed, although I’m trying not to feel that so I can actually continue performing them. I can see what happened there, enough time has passed. I’ve stepped out of my brain to observe myself. And I can also see how in pain younger me was.
But like Hana said so poetically in her interview, I can sense I’m getting off a train. I understand why I have been angry all these years. I have compassion for it. But when faced with the little time we really have left; oh how I do not want to stay there, on that train.
I think healing starts with admitting, “I am suffering”, like Sinéad O’ Connor always did.
How does that make me feel, to write that? Publicly, on the internet? Vulnerable. Isolated. Like I’ll be rejected again. Like I’ll be alone again. Open for attack. Unsafe. Like someone can come for me and put me down and call me weak.
What I need to realise is that despite not writing, despite shutting down, despite closing myself off from the world - they already have. I’m already alone, imprisoned in my coping mechanisms. It’s all already happened, when I was young, again and again, and even now, maybe forever. There will always be someone who will call me weak. I cannot make everyone like me. Look at Sinéad. It must have felt like the world hated her.
So these coping mechanisms don’t actually work. It all still happens anyway.
It all certainly still happened to Sinéad. I didn’t know her. Maybe one day her worst moments will resurface and I’ll regret writing about her as such a hero. But people aren’t absolute, least of all our heroes. She also did very brave things. She was a true artist. She got ill. She divorced four times, she received public hate. She needed psychiatric help. She lost custody of her son. She watched the world turn into something unrecognisable and wrote an open letter to Miley Cyrus, clearly trying to communicate her own pain over her experiences within the record industry. Her son killed himself last year, and this year, she has killed herself.
There wasn’t a happy ending.
I’ve always thought that the way things end don’t dictate the lives people lived, and certainly don’t negate their moments of joy, love and happiness. How it ends doesn’t paint the canvas of our lives, it doesn’t mean our decisions during our lives were wrong, or how we chose to live was wrong. People’s last moments of despair don’t determine what their lives really were.
I cannot control whether I get a happy ending or not. I can only control right now. And right now, I’m wondering, what does sitting in the shame of anger actually do? Does anger have to be so shameful? Can anger, instead, be a stepping stone to something deeper?
Anger is fire. It spreads, catching from person to person. Just look at how it spread from one act of protest to the bulldozing of albums. Like natural wildfires regenerating nature, it can destroy, and it can bring something new, it can bring amazing change. Just look at all the beautiful human rights progress over the past century.
This is why anger is also easily weaponised. If people catch it, they too will spit it out onto someone else, usually the wrong, the undeserving, the scapegoated, the vulnerable, the people who can’t fight back as easily. And nobody is immune. I remember writing a few years back, “our innate tendency to find an enemy is being mined” when researching the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal.
Everything is a journey. As much as I find those songs uncomfortable now, I don’t think those songs could have been different. Anger has brought some good things. Boundaries, a sense of self, the ability to say no. If anything, for me, anger has been a bridge. Anger has allowed me to understand what I didn’t before. It’s allowed me to step into the shoes of the people I never understood growing up. It’s given me a window, or even a door into why people act terribly (out of despair), and why good, lovely people lose their way, and it’s shown me that people can always, always find a path back. It’s made me understand moral ambiguity, made me question black and white thinking and understand that bad actions don’t define who someone is forever.
In my interview with Hana, we spoke about ‘denial’, and having to use it in order to carry on as normal. As I get older, my most creative, beautifully open times are also increasingly becoming my most painful, because you cannot be in denial to be creative.
You can be in denial to get by, to feed yourself, to pay the bills. But you cannot be in denial to open up your heart to art. Which tells me a lot about why people ‘settle down’, move away from creative careers and numb themselves out as they age. It takes a lot of space and emotional energy to be creative, and a lot of privilege, really. We usually have it when we’re young - we have time. I’ve been reading, ‘Prisons We Choose To Live Inside’ by Doris Lessing, where she wrote;
“People who have experienced a lot of groups, who perhaps have observed their own behaviour, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against a group of peers”
So many feel they cannot find the energy to protest. I feel a lot of compassion for that. Denial is a major, major coping mechanism, one of the only ones we have access to in the face of capitalism. And that is largely why people cannot even begin to comprehend climate change. It’s too much. It’s too out of their control, in a life where everything else has been taken. People just don’t have the capacity to engage.
People will engage, once it becomes obvious what’s about to happen, perhaps too late. And art never truly dies, even in the fact of AI, or late stage capitalism. I honestly, truly believe that. Beyond any monetary value, at its core, art is purely connection.
If I want to champion the idea that art is for everyone, then I must understand that art is for the uncomfortable, the imperfect, the journey of it all, the people struggling, the public acts that spark outrage, the ‘immoral’, the people who haven’t ‘arrived’ at healing yet, and are using writing and self expression and storytelling and releasing music to get there. And the people who may never arrive.
And the first person I need to do this with is myself.
I listened through our music coming out again and tried to understand it’s a journey. I was incredibly honest with myself, deciding to expose the worst parts; my own, very human, very bad parts. It’s so boring worrying about what everyone is going to think about you, and that is the gift being hidden away in a Crypt gave me. I didn’t think or worry about how people would react once.
And I can respond to these songs in two ways. I can either spiral into shame and guilt, never to write again, a pattern I’ve had for a long time, or I can accept that through art, I’ve unearthed something. Through music, I can work through things, examine myself and most importantly, change. That’s incredible. And that is precisely the point.
Why is art the first to go under oppressive governments?
Because art is a mass forgiveness ritual.
And the brilliant thing about being flawed is that you can finally move, you are finally able to change. I’m not preserved as some weird, perfect avatar anymore, disappointing people left right and centre when I don’t live up to their expectations of what a ‘star’ should be (i.e make them loads of money). I’m no longer an angel, shocking when flawed. I get to be a human. Sinéad once said, “I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine.”
I’m older. I’ve failed. I’m flawed. I’m free.
I've made my peace with it, and with the person I used to be, the person who wholeheartedly wrote those lyrics from a place of desperately wanting to be understood, from a place of deep pain. And I’m hoping all my mistakes will lead the way.
And when you perform, especially your older songs, you have to understand that journey is still not done, it’s never over. Every song you write you will move on from. And you’ll constantly cycle back, because the line is a curve.
I’m aiming to write from a place of total, radical empathy for our next album. That’s the goal. It might be un-achievable (or I might get really angry again), but I’m going to try. It’s the wolf you feed. And as much as I hate it now, anger will have allowed me to arrive here.
Here’s what I’ve been listening to:
Favourite Music Video: Coby Sey - Onus
I’ve been a fan of Coby Sey for a long time, after watching him perform an event I was working and hearing ‘Petals (Have Fallen), which was then put onto PJ Harvey’s playlist’. He also has a collab coming out with none other than Laurel Halo! Who is releasing another album!
Favourite album: obviously Anohni, but
also joint first is Nick Drake’s compilation cover album:
Quick plug: our biggest London show (Another Sky) to date is on sale. Lafayette. 8th November. It’ll be our only headline show this year.
I think anger is here to stay, and I think anger has a place - I’m just not sure what that place is yet. I’m still figuring that one out - how not to use it to hurt people, but instead, fuel change.
I hope you are all having a peace-filled time. And if it’s an angry time, that’s just part of the cycle. Just try and think about what it’s teaching you about yourself, the only thing you can control.
I hope that anger brings great change…
I hope it burns the way.