The Boston Globe
April 24, 1990, Tuesday, City Edition

Sinead O'Connor beams up

By Steve Morse, Globe Staff


    The pop world loves an overnight sensation - and it's hard to find a more
spectacular current example than Sinead O'Connor. The Irish prodigy, who only a
few years ago worked as a Kiss-o-gram girl in Dublin after running away from
boarding school, has become the talk of the music biz.

   Now 23, O'Connor has racked up stratospheric numbers. Her single, "Nothing
Compares 2U," a remake of a Prince song, has shot to No. 1 on the charts. And
her new album, a haunting manifesto called "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got,"
recently sold 500,000 copies in a single day. It's No. 1 on the Billboard charts
(following Bonnie Raitt's "Nick of Time") after just four weeks in the stores.

   O'Connor, who plays sold-out shows at the Orpheum on May 3 and 4, is the
first new '90s superstar, though her agonizingly personal, starkly romantic
music has been boffo in Boston since her debut album, "The Lion and the Cobra,"
two years ago.

   "Boston has been a fantastic market for her from the beginning," a spokesman
said last week. "Maybe it's because of the Irish community. Maybe it's because
of the radio support."

   Or maybe (and excuse the regional chauvinism), it's because of the city's
renowned taste in embracing quality new talent. Dire Straits and U2 are just two
of the overseas acts that got their first stateside foothold in Boston before
breaking nationally.

   But why is Sinead (pronounced Shin-aid) O'Connor now catching on so widely?
And who is this mysterious, tortured woman-child whom Spin magazine termed "one
of those people you expect to see popping up in the transporter room of the
Starship Enterprise"?

   Indeed, the nation's first peek at O'Connor was like discovering an alien.
With a shaven scalp painted with the logo of the rap group Public Enemy, she
turned up last year at the Grammy Awards to sing the harsh "Mandinka," showing a
penchant for oddly phrased, from-a-whisper-to-a-scream syntax that's become her
trademark.

   She was weird, but fascinating. Her debut album, full of quirky mutterings
and indecipherable lyrics offset by brilliant bursts of passion, sold a
respectable 500,000 copies in all. That was 475,000 more than her record label
says it expected, though not enough to suggest she'd soon be in the rarefied air
of a Janet Jackson or Madonna.

   But O'Connor's new album is a remarkable step forward. She sings clearly and
nakedly this time, in a voice as rivetingly vulnerable as those deep, bulbous
eyes staring out from her videos. Some of the background settings are dry and
gloomily electronic, but her voice is a fully alive, darting instrument. She
shifts vocal tones to achieve various subtle and not-so-subtle shades of
meaning, as if playing the roles of several complex, love-torn women in an
introspective, yet ultimately liberating, musical.

   The new album blends Celtic folk with sparse, Velvet Underground rock,
electronic funk, stately New Age orchestrations, a cappella asides,
Streisand-influenced torch music (she claims Streisand as a major influence) and
even hip hop. The obsessive love song "I Am Stretched On Your Grave" (a musical
"Annabelle Lee") even melds a slow Irish air with a clamorous drumbeat fit for
an urban dance party. You wouldn't think it would work until you hear it.

   She takes risks - and that's a prime attraction for listeners who can't tell
one cloned, cookie-cutter singer from another on most radio stations these days.
No one sounds like O'Connor. And very few, other than Annie Lennox and Tracy
Chapman, can equal her range from earthy, streetwise candor to sweetly pleading,
Van Morrison-like spirituality. (She professes a "reverence" for Morrison, she
says.)

   O'Connor also writes her own music, plays most of her own instruments (guitar
and keyboards) and produces her own records. And she's had to do it the hard
way, surviving childhood struggles that would have floored a less resilient
soul.

   She grew up in suburban Dublin, but after her parents split up when she was
8, she drifted into shoplifting and was put in a residential center for girls
with behavioral problems. What she saw molded her worldview and later shaped the
desperate search for love that characterizes her songs.

   "I will never experience panic and terror and agony over anything like I did
at that place," she told Spin magazine. "If you were bad, they sent you upstairs
to sleep in the old folks home. You're in there in the pitch black and you can
smell the puke and everything; and these old women are moaning in their sleep.

   "I was one of the lucky ones," she said. "I was allowed to go outside to
school, which the others weren't. I started reading things like 'Wuthering
Heights' and stuff like that, which I really loved. I loved all that really
romantic stuff, like William Butler Yeats. I was W.B. Yeats as far as I was
concerned; and I was Tess of the D'Urbervilles."

   Her first musical break came at age 14 when she sang at a wedding attended by
a member of the Irish rock band In Tua Nua. She later wrote a song for them,
"Take My Hand," which the group turned into a hit in Ireland.

   After leaving the residential center for problem girls, she was shipped to a
boarding school in Waterford, about 150 miles south of Dublin. Soon she ran away
to Dublin, becoming a Kiss-o-gram girl and playing Bob Dylan covers at night in
the pubs. Her career finally picked up at 19 when she met ex-Boomtown Rats
manager Fachtna O'Kelly, who helped persuade U2 guitarist The Edge to include
her version of the song "Heroin" on his soundtrack to the film "Captive."

   That led to a record deal for "The Lion and the Cobra," during which she
became pregnant by drummer John Reynolds. They now have a 2 1/2-year-old boy,
Jake, whose presence has softened O'Connor's alienation. In a recent radio hit,
"The Emperor's New Clothes," she openly sings a love letter to her husband: "If
I treated you mean/I didn't really mean to/but you know how it is/and how a
pregnancy can change you."

   Her son's image pops up again in the album's only political song, "Black Boys
on Mopeds," a true story about an English youth who, suspected of stealing, was
chased by police until he crashed his moped and died. O'Connor, who has been
living in London, sings these searing, melancholy lines: "England's not the
mythical land of Madame George and roses/It's the home of police who kill black
boys on mopeds/And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving/I don't want him to
be aware that there's any such thing as grieving."

   The song concludes: "These are dangerous days - to say what you feel is to
dig your own grave." There are obviously thousands of listeners who agree with
her - and are all the more thankful they have a Sinead O'Connor to speak up for
them.