Clerk at Upscale Grocery Strikes Sour Note With Singer : Anthem: He’s fired from Mrs. Gooch’s of Beverly Hills when Sinead O’Connor objects to his rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while she is shopping.

Take a controversial singing star, a trendy food store and a meat clerk trying to make a political statement. Put them together, and oh say, you can see what happened this week at Mrs. Gooch’s of Beverly Hills.

It all began when award-winning recording artist Sinead O’Connor went shopping at Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Food Market on Tuesday. The Irish-born O’Connor had created a bit of a flap recently over her refusal to allow “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or any national anthem, to be played at her concerts.

Clerk Mike Rechtien, standing behind the meat counter at Mrs. Gooch’s, apparently recognized O’Connor, whose shaved head makes her easy to spot, and got an idea.

“I have a song for you,” he says he said to O’Connor. He then offered his own rendition of the national anthem, much to O’Connor’s dismay.

It brought down the house, store officials said, which is to say it brought business to a standstill, and prompted both complaints and applause from other customers.

It also brought Rechtien a pink slip after six weeks on the job at the upscale store.

Mrs. Gooch’s, it turns out, has a strict policy that prohibits employees from harassing customers. After all, a corporate spokesman said, some pretty high-profile people shop at Mrs. Gooch’s, and you can’t have the help sounding off every time they don’t like what a customer might represent.

“The issue is not the national anthem,” the Mrs. Gooch’s spokesman said. “The issue is what a customer can expect at Mrs. Gooch’s: service, courtesy and caring.”

The company added, in a written statement released late Friday, that “no company is more patriotic than Mrs. Gooch’s.”

Furthermore, the statement said, Rechtien had violated written policies that he had agreed to follow when hired, and had also threatened to “do it again” if the opportunity presented itself.

But for Rechtien, 33, the issue is the national anthem.

“I believe she (O’Connor) practices censorship of our anthem in our country by not allowing it to be played,” said Rechtien, who himself is an aspiring musician. “I sang in protest of her censorship. Someone from another country comes and insults our heritage. She’s insulted us and I don’t think we should take it lying down.”

O’Connor, who takes off for Chile later this month on an Amnesty International concert tour, did not want the store to punish Rechtien, her publicist said.

“This guy was singing really, really loudly at her,” said the publicist, Elaine Schock. “You could hear him two, three aisles away. . . . Obviously he was harassing her.”

Rechtien disputes the notion that his performance was disruptive. The only trouble, he says, came when O’Connor complained to store management.

“I sang it very intimately, quietly. It wasn’t a big spectacle at all,” he said. “I intended this to be between her and (me). I didn’t think she would get upset about it.”

O’Connor’s star-spangled controversy began earlier this year when she refused to perform at a New Jersey concert if the anthem was played beforehand. It was not played, but she was banned from future concerts at the Garden State Arts Center.

The gesture, O’Connor has said, was intended in part to protest the arrest of rap musicians on obscenity charges, something she perceives as censorship.

It has been a rough summer for the national anthem, too. It was performed in rather unmusical fashion by comedian Roseanne Barr before a San Diego Padres baseball game, to general booing.