The New York Times
September 11, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Sinead O'Connor, Unbound

By PAUL WATKINS



   AS SINEAD O'CONNOR PREPARES to talk about her new album, "Universal Mother,"
to be released on Thursday, she nervously rolls herself a cigarette. Within
weeks, she will check herself in for a brief stay at a London drug and alcohol
rehabilitation clinic.

   Ms. O'Connor seems to know instinctively that she is in the lull before the
storm.  Everything about her suggests fragility: from her huge and dark blue
eyes to the suit of such drapey fabric that at times she seems to melt into the
couch. Even her short hair, growing back now after several years she has spent
bald, gives her the impression of someone just released from prison.

    The baldness had become her trademark during the 1990 tour for her second
album, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got," which lunged into the No. 1 spot on
the British charts and topped the Billboard album chart within a month. Ms.
O'Connor shaved her head after finding out, while recording that album, that her
good looks were to be used as a marketing tool. The effect was achieved anyway
in the video that accompanied her brilliant rendition of Prince's song "Nothing
Compares 2 U." The camera never left her face during the song.

   "I wasn't comfortable with being a woman," Ms. O'Connor, 27, says of those
days, "and with everything it meant to be a woman."

   Baldness isn't her only trademark. Ms. O'Connor's singing voice is legendary
for its hypnotic quality. It has that rare capacity to make the listener want to
hear each song twice, once to digest the lyrics and once simply to float on the
range of her singing, from velvety soft to banshee squall. But Ms. O'Connor is
almost as well known for her provocative actions before audiences as for this
voice. In 1990, she refused to go on stage at a concert at the Garden State Arts
Center in New Jersey if the American national anthem was played. A few weeks
later, she tore up a picture of the Pope on "Saturday Night Live," announcing to
the millions of viewers that he was the "real enemy."

   Looking back on these events today, Ms. O'Connor says: "I was showing that I
don't want to play the celebrity. I wanted to kill the rock-star image. I don't
regret what happened. I just had something to say. I wasn't given the space to
speak." At this point, she lights her cigarette, sighs and settles back into the
couch in the home of her London publicist, apparently trying hard not to relive
the anger that this period caused her. "If the press had calmed down and
listened to me, they'd have seen I wasn't as offensive as people made out."

   Nevertheless, public reaction was swift and vicious. Some radio stations
refused to play her music. At a Bob Dylan tribute concert in Madison Square
Garden, members of the audience tried to boo her off the stage. The actor Joe
Pesci said he wanted to slap her. The rapper Hammer sent her a one-way ticket
home to Dublin.

   For someone who feels so caught up in Ireland's many struggles, it is
paradoxical that Ms. O'Connor has chosen to live in London. In this
self-enforced exile, she has selected the path of her countryman James Joyce,
choosing expatriatism as the most extreme form of patriotism. "I am Ireland,"
she says. "Everything that has happened to Ireland has happened to me. That's
the key issue for me being an artist. . . . But it's a difficult place to be in
because of the attitudes there. There's a cloud of pain which seeps into you
when you get off the plane."

   This conviction is the thematic thrust of "Universal Mother," her third full
album. It is about pain and recovery from pain. Divorced and the mother of a
7-year-old son, Jake, she has endured a life of extreme hardship -- beaten by
her mother, beaten by the nuns at the Catholic schools from which she was later
expelled, sent to a detention center after being convicted of shoplifting. Her
music career began, at 14, when she wrote a hit song for the Irish band In Tua
Nua. By the age of 20, she had produced her first album, "The Lion and the
Cobra," but it was not until 1990 with the release of "I Do Not Want What I
Haven't Got," which she also produced, that she achieved the international fame
for which she feels ultimately blessed and damned.

   With this conflict in mind, it is important to see "Universal Mother" as not
only a progression of her music career but also a coming to terms with
everything she has experienced so far. The idea of motherhood is never far away,
either as she sings or as she speaks, and Ms. O'Connor often trades this
maternal viewpoint for the immature perspective of a child. "I'm a child of
violence, like millions of others," she says. "I remember lying naked on the
floor while my mother jumped up and down on my womb. She said, 'I'm going to
burst you.' With this album, I'm trying to retrieve myself from the ruins of my
childhood."

   Ms. O'Connor leaves no ambiguity about who is to blame. Christianity,
specifically the Roman Catholic Church (she has been known to wear a T-shirt
emblazoned with the slogan "Recovering Cathaholic"), and the male-dominated
domain of politics are targeted for indictment. The first words of "Universal
Mother" are a brief clip from a 1970 speech by Germaine Greer in which she
exhorts the world to put women in charge. "I think we lost something enormous
when we started to call God a man," says Ms. O'Connor. "It meant that God became
like a mother who can't protect her children." The album's first track, "Fire on
Babylon," is a teeth-gritting attack on the church in which she sings, "All
along she gave me lies, just to make me think I loved her."

   But the tone suddenly changes, which comes as a considerable surprise. The
next track, "John, I Love You," is a gentle love song, and "My Darling Child" is
a charming and original lullaby. There is even a short piece titled "Am I
Human?," written and performed by Jake.

   "Universal Mother" will be released on Yom Kippur -- the Day of Atonement.
This is unusual because Yom Kippur does not fall on a Tuesday, the usual release
day for records. Linking the Jewish holiday and "Universal Mother," Ms. O'Connor
says, "The album is a prayer from Ireland for forgiveness and understanding and
atonement."

   But there is very little in the album that speaks of Ireland's atonement for
its sins.  The songs that do touch on this subject are more concerned with the
various sins against Ireland, by the church and England specifically, rather
than any actions for which Ireland itself must atone. Added to this is the
incongruity of thinking about a Jewish holiday in a mostly Catholic and
Protestant country and the fact that Ms. O'Connor attacks all religion, and the
result is only confusion.

   WITH "UNIVERSAL Mother," Ms. O'Connor speaks out for such a variety of causes
that the beauty-in-simplicity of her less message-bound songs risks being lost
in the shuffle. She also risks the same kind of mauling she received from
critics on her last tour. "It's them that made me controversial," she says. At
one point, Ms. O'Connor even called a conference to try to persuade the press to
stop laying into her so hard. The reply at the time was unsympathetic. In
response to a poem she wrote ("Stop hurting me, please. Saying mean things about
me"), Time magazine fired back: "Fine. Write better."

   "Fame has been a nightmare," says Ms. O'Connor. A couple of tracks on "
Universal Mother" deal directly with this less glamorous side of her popularity.
One song, "Red Football," describes the feeling of being kicked around by the
media and the gawking of the crowds ("I'm not a crocodile like the one in the
Dublin zoo. I'm not a whipping boy for you. I'm not an animal in the zoo.").
"All Apologies," written by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, is anything but its title.
The softly sung anthem of defiance seems to take on everyone, scattering insult
like grapeshot among critics and fans alike ("I wish I was like you, easily
amused") and changing Ms. O'Connor from victim to aggressor.

   Ms. O'Connor sets a tone that sometimes appears self-sacrificial. By taking
on the Catholic Church, she shows a willingness, perhaps even a desire to be
sacrificed. The affinity she feels with Joan of Arc ("She is a symbol and
inspiration to me") reveals a need to be loved and accepted by the same powers
she is simultaneously condemning and revering. It may appear that in the past,
by so adeptly courting controversy, Ms. O'Connor gladly laid the sticks of her
own funeral pyre.

   But Ms. O'Connor sees "Universal Mother" as a personal tool of her own
self-recovery, with the inevitable and happy paradox that she achieves the
universality she has been seeking all along. "This is the album I have wanted to
make since I was a child," she says, a curious note of satisfaction in her
voice, as if the revelation is as new to her as to the listener. "Up to this
point, my other work has been like target practice." Making this album, she
says, "is the reason I picked up a guitar in the first place."