Sinead O’Connor touring the US under new name Magda Davitt

Sinead O’Connor is returning to the stage in the United States, sporting her new name Magda Davitt.

These are her first official shows since 2015, the year where she also did national dates through Australia as part of a world tour.

In January 2018 she made an appearance at Pogues singer Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday concert in Dublin, alongside Bono, Nick Cave, Glen Hansard and Johnny Depp.

She’s set to do two theatre shows in the US in April and follow up with a tour in the northern summer.

Last year, the Irish singer-songwriter appeared on US talkshow Dr. Phil discussing her struggles with depression and suicide attempts as a survivor of child abuse.

On that episode she announced to Dr. Phil McGraw that she was changing her name to Magda Davitt to be “free of parental curses,” saying that “Sinead O’Connor is gone. That person is gone.”   

O’Connor/Davitt’s habit of speaking her mind (and acting impulsively) has landed her in controversy.

The most famous was the 1992 incident when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on the set of Saturday Night Live as a protest against clerical child abuse, and paid the price when she was booed off the stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

In 2015, she applied to join the Irish political party Sinn Fein, and then called for its leaders to resign.

Her fourth marriage lasted all of ten days.

She rebuked U2’s marketing tactic of loading their album, Songs of Innocence, automatically on to iTunes accounts, as “almost terrorist … invading people’s lives like that’.’

Just before her last Australian tour, she was asked if she planned to rein in her out-spokeness.

She’d chuckled and replied, “They say you can always tell an Irishman, but you can’t tell him much. I think I probably will remain Irish.”