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Sinéad O'Connor's decision to rip up a picture of the pope live on US television in 1992 was inspired by Top of the Pops, she has revealed.

"When the Boomtown Rats went to No 1 in England with Rat Trap," she told the Irish magazine Hot Press, "[Bob] Geldof went on Top of the Pops and ripped up a photo of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, who had been No 1 for weeks and weeks before. And I thought, 'Yeah, fuck! What if someone ripped up a picture of the pope?' Half of me was just like: 'Jesus, I'd love to just see what'd happen.'"

O'Connor was appearing as the musical guest on the US comedy show Saturday Night Live on 3 October 1992, performing an a cappella version of Bob Marley's War. She had changed the lyrics to draw attention to child abuse within the Roman Catholic church, and at the song's end ripped a photo of Pope John Paul II in half. The show's producers had no idea what she was planning – in rehearsals she had held up a picture of a refugee child.

Nor, it transpires, was it just a random photo of the pope that O'Connor tore up. "The photo itself had been on my mother's bedroom wall since the day the fucker was enthroned in 1978," she told Hot Press.

O'Connor's antipathy to the Roman Catholic church remains. "What I think is wrong is that the people running the show are misrepresenting what Catholicism actually is," she told the Guardian last year.

"What I'm talking about is the highest echelons of the Vatican't as I call it." She sees no purpose in the papacy, she added: "Do we need a fucking pope? Why do we need a pope? Christ doesn't need a representative. Ten years from now the church will be nothing resembling what it has been."