The first time I heard this song it made me cry and it still does. Especially today. Its lyric, written in the 1980s, articulates why a young woman with a young child might not wish to bring up a child Thatcher’s Britain.
She sings it in that familiar voice: simultaneously strong and vulnerable, its soothing timbre trembling with emotional intensity:
“England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds
And I love my baby and that’s why I’m leaving
I don’t want him to be aware that there’s
Any such thing as grieving.”
It was inspired by the death of Colin Roach, a black youth who walked into Stoke Newington police station one day in early 1983 and never came out again.
I was working on the Hackney Gazette that January day when a black man came in, shaking and upset, and asked to talk to a reporter.
He told me his friend Colin had asked him to drop him off at the police station and that the police said he had shot himself there, in the foyer, with a shotgun.
It seemed too incredible to believe that the police would have shot someone in their own station, and it says a great deal about the reputation of Stokey nick at the time that so many people were prepared to believe it.
It became a cause celebre and led to protests, and a police cover-up, and a breakdown of what little trust remained between police and the black community, and demands for a public inquiry.
There never was one and, despite the police surgeon finding inconsistencies with the cops’ story that Roach shot himself, the coroner’s verdict was suicide.
On the sleeve notes of her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, where the song first appeared, is a photo of Colin Roach with his parents, with the words:: “God’s place is the world, but the world isn’t God’s place.”
It sounds like a suicide note. And here we are 40 years after the death of Colin Roach, grieving once again. I do hope she’s finally at peace because so much of her life seemed to be lived in torment.
RIP Sinéad O’Connor