She’s Ireland’s favorite wild child, with a voice like an angel and an independent streak as wide as the Celtic Sea. The firebrand singer has been on a rampage this year — even by her standards.
Since August, the songbird has advertised for a husband online (saying that she’d otherwise resort to having sex with fruit), found one, married him in Las Vegas, tried to score pot on her wedding night and ended up in a crack den, broke up with her man then reunited with him (a few times), was hospitalized and allegedly attempted suicide; she then got her meds adjusted and reclaimed her sanity.
Oh, and she also released her best album in years.
“The last thing anyone thought of when they thought of Sinéad O’Connor was music, and now the focus is back on that,” the refreshingly candid O’Connor, 45, tells The Post. “I’m being appreciated as a musician again, and I really appreciate having my dignity back.”
Released last month, “How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?” met acclaim, the likes of which the singer hasn’t seen since 1990’s album “I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got,” which scored a hit with the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
“On form, focused and fervent again” writes the Guardian of the new album. “Her best album in years,” says the New Yorker. “Proof that good things can happen when we just let O’Connor be O’Connor,” says Entertainment Weekly.
But sometimes letting O’Connor be O’Connor is risky. Infamous for ripping up a picture of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992, the singer has always been controversial. She has four children by four different men, is an outspoken critic of the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandals, and a self-proclaimed “dangerous woman” in her native Ireland, where she’s become a whipping post for the local press.
Last August, O’Connor penned the following online dating ad in the Irish Independent:
“My situation sexually/affectionately speaking is so dire that inanimate objects are starting to look good, as are inappropriate and/or unavailable men and/or inappropriate and/or unavailable fruits and vegetables. I tell you, yams are looking like the winners.”
It worked. The ad attracted youth drug counselor Barry Herridge, 38, of Dublin, whom she married three months after they met, on Dec. 8, 2011, in Las Vegas. It was her fourth marriage.
She wore a pink strapless dress, pink satin high heels, her signature shaved head and a giant tattoo of Jesus across her chest. The couple left the Little White Wedding Chapel in a convertible pink Cadillac, Then things got weird.
O’Connor, who doesn’t drink, wanted to smoke some pot to celebrate her happy day. She and her husband — the drug counselor — went on a wild ride through Vegas looking for marijuana, but ended up “in a cab in some place that was quite dangerous,” she told The Irish Sun newspaper. “I wasn’t scared — but he’s a drug counselor. What was I thinking? Then I was handed a load of crack. Barry was very frightened — that kind of messed everything up a bit really.”
The marriage broke up 16 days later, only to be patched up again. Only to fall apart again. Only to be patched up again.
In the meantime, she took to Twitter to talk about her pain — including what seemed like a suicidal plea.
In January, she wrote “Does anyone know a psychiatrist in Dublin or Wicklow? I’m really unwell — and in danger,” she tweeted. “I’m so tired. 24 yrs of being treated like a crazy person. Can’t manage any more.”
O’Connor blames her recent spate of erratic behavior on an abrupt withdrawal from pills she’d been taking to treat bipolar disorder for nearly a decade. A new team of doctors determined that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of a “barbaric” childhood, but not bipolar disorder. (She claims she was abused by her mother, who died in a car crash in 1985.) Going off the pills triggered a destructive episode.
“It was like being on a ship in the middle of a storm, and it lasted for six f – – cking months and you’re as mad as a basket of crows and it’s quite painful,” O’Connor says. “But f – – k, you get through it.”
These days, she’s not taking meds and feels back to her old self. But she doesn’t want to talk about the state of her marriage — or even say if she and Herridge are still together.
“God gave me a right foot up the arse in the past six months, so . . . I’ve learned an awful lot of very painful and difficult lessons and one is that I no longer discuss my private life.”
But that’s a promise that the irrepressible O’Connor can only keep for so long. When asked how she writes her songs, she reveals that she hears music in her head in the same way she is able to channel the spirits of those who have died, and that in addition to being a musician, she’s a highly trained medium.
“Mostly what I write is subconscious. I’ll be bustling around the house or wandering around the street and I hear rhythms everywhere: the sound of my feet or buses or cars, and then I just start to hear tunes,” she says. “But my subconscious is the one that does most of the work, so I just try to get out of my own way. After a few days, the tune will come back and build itself up.”
Her training as a medium — at the College of Psychic Studies in London — helped her to listen to the songs in her head. She occasionally does readings and is “actually quite good at it,” she says. O’Connor says she first realized she could hear dead people when she was 18.
“It started happening to me against my will, and I wasn’t very happy about it. I was quite frightened. I went to college so I could learn to close it down.”
But now that she’s learned to master it, she says, she likes it better than singing: “It’s the most joyous work I’ve ever done,” she says.
scohen@nypost.com