Sinead might better have just kept her cool and waited them out calmly...then sung the song. Bob used to do that with hostile audiences, and it worked every time. Eventually the assholes run out of their own hot air and start wondering what might happen next onstage. That's when you steal a march on them and start singing.

Never has any artist's career been so totally destroyed by one careless act than Sinead O'Connor's was by tearing up a picture of the Pope. Really quite extraordinary. Poor girl. She should've torn up a picture of an American president instead. (Any president would have done...)