Financial Times (London) April 27, 1990, Friday Sinead O'Connor; Hammersmith Odeon ANDREW CLEMENTS Amid the smoke machines, garish back projections and heavy-duty amplification Sinead O'Connor seems a tiny incongruous figure, hooded and becloaked in ecclesiastical white, as if in remembrance of her lively Catholic girlhood. The new O'Connor, her publicity interviews tell us, is an altogether more restrained figure than the teenage skinhead who championed the IRA, slagged off the music business and its supergroups and generally put her mouth where her music might more usefully have been. The restrained, almost stylised gestures and the barely audible spoken introductions suggest tightly buttoned emotions, as if all that anger now really is channelled into the songs. Her first album was broadly speaking, post-punk; the new one, I do not want what I haven't got, the driving force behind the current tour, is more eclectic and more interesting but still unfocussed. She's at her best on her own with just an acoustic guitar; then the withering indictment of a song like 'Boys on Mopeds' - 'Where the police kill/Black boys on mopeds' - is matched to a voice of distinctive force, capable of extracting meaning and purpose from the most unlikely images. The folk roots are strong and not at all unwelcome - those of a certain age will be reminded of Melanie, some a little younger of Carly Simon - but the blend is a sure one. When moving up a gear though the personality fades: the songs are far less distinguished, the style more obviously assembled from hand-me-downs. And at the Hammersmith Odeon the sound-wash generated by her five-piece band became an engineer's nightmare; anyone who thought new technology had done away with the problems of feedback and howlround would have found much to contemplate. Lyrics sank without trace in such a morass, yet the fans seemed obediently happy. Yet when she eventually settles for just her guitar, and abandons the brittle pop backgrounds and all ideas of a big Stage Show, she will become a much more substantial performer, and start to be taken as seriously as her talent deserves.