Hello, is anybody there?
Blind psychic Sharon Neill claims she has a hotline to beyond the grave. She's already famous in Ireland where her fans include Coldplay and Ash, and her offbeat show looks set to be a hit at Edinburgh's Fringe
Stephanie Merritt
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer
According to Sharon Neill, the first time someone asked her how long she had been a medium, she replied naively that she'd always been a size 10. It's a line that smacks of having been brought out regularly to put people at ease, and is the closest Neill comes to performance patter; at the same time it is characteristic of her debunking approach to what she describes almost dismissively as her 'job', and she insists that her ignorance was genuine. As a 17-year-old student who had just moved from her native Belfast to a college for the blind in Surrey, she had never before heard the word applied to someone who experienced the voices that had been part of her life since she was a child.
Twenty years on, Neill is a celebrity psychic in Ireland, with the ability to draw audiences of 2,000 to her live shows, numerous radio and television appearances on her CV and a list of private clients that includes Van Morrison, Ash and Coldplay. In Belfast, people stop her in the street - 'It's like being a doctor, everyone wants to tell you about their problems,' she says, laughing - and this summer she will become the first spiritualist in 12 years to perform to audiences at the Edinburgh Festival.
Her show, Second Sight, in which she picks out members of the audience at random and delivers messages to them from beyond the grave, will be staged at a new venue, The Pod. She plays up the fact that she has been blind from birth as a unique selling point, and spends a couple of minutes alone on stage 'tuning in', before identifying members of the audience from the information given her by her 'team'. Sometimes she does this by name but often, more startlingly, by describing physical characteristics that, as a blind person, she could not possibly know - glasses, for example, or the colour of a shirt. Cynics might say that such descriptions could easily be learned, but Neill's accuracy in so many cases has unravelled the arguments of many a sceptic.
Her blindness (caused by being deprived of oxygen when she was born three months premature), combined with a natural candour, warmth and humour, gives Neill little use for the theatrical trappings often associated with variety-show spiritualists of the kind characterised by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. There are no velvet drapes, lowered lights or candles; neither does she deck herself out in flowing robes or tinkling garlands of crystals. She is a robust woman with cropped hair, refreshingly free of New Age jargon and cheerfully liberal with what the BBC calls 'strong language'. The concession to a professional costume is that her shirt, jeans and trainers are all white. 'They told me I should wear white,' she explains. Who - the dead people? I ask, and she gives me what would have been a sideways glance. 'My manager,' she says, in a don't-be-thick tone. She's so matter-of-fact about the voices that it's easy to get confused, though; later, when she tells me she has 'a team of eight people that I work with regularly', I assume she means publicists and agents and the like, but it turns out that this time she does mean the voices. She describes their messages as 'receiving information', as if they're merely sending her emails.
Neill grew up with her three siblings in a working-class Methodist family in Belfast. Her great-grandmother was said to have read the tea-leaves with some degree of success, but with this exception, Neill's 'gift' ('I wouldn't call it a gift, you don't have to be special,' she says, democratically) is without precedent in her family. 'When I was a child, I would wake up hearing voices,' she says. 'I thought it happened to everybody. I found it very frightening at first but I thought it was just nightmares.' At college she studied sociology and trained as a counsellor with the intention of going into social work when, while researching a thesis on religious beliefs, she attended a spiritualist meeting.
'I couldn't make sense of it,' she says, 'because I found that every time I knew what the woman leading the meeting was going to say before she said it. I now realise that I was hearing the people communicate before she did, but at the time I didn't want to believe in it. I thought it could be explained by Jung's collective unconscious or something.' The process of accepting and using her ability, which began with giving readings for friends and graduated via local radio shows to television and live venues, led her to the conclusion that she could bring an extra dimension to the counselling work for which she had trained. 'I realised I could use it to help people,' she says. When I ask if this emphasis on altruism isn't at odds with the business of using a spiritual gift to make money, she immediately points out that priests and ministers are paid for using spiritual gifts to comfort and help people................
