The Daily Telegraph
September 17, 1994, Saturday

BY CHRIS HEATH


   Sinead O'Connor Universal Mother (Ensign) Bryan Ferry Mamouna (Virgin) Sugar
File Under: Easy Listening (Creation) Roger Taylor Happiness? (Parlophone)
SINEAD O'CONNOR does not find life easy. A full list of her troubles - both
personal and professional - over the past few years would fill this page. By all
accounts, things getting no better. In an interview in Q magazine, she announced
that she attempted suicide last year. She is now said to be undergoing
unspecified medical treatment. After the Q interview, she faxed the publication
a friendly but tortured note explaining that she intended to keep her own
counsel from now on. It seems unlikely. She has retired from the music business
before now, but she has always slipped back soon afterwards. Her anguishes are
real enough, but so is her compulsion to share them. Which brings us to
Universal Mother, one of the stranger pop records to be released this year. It
begins with a burst of 1970 polemic from Germaine Greer (who, with the
undogmatic passion of early Seventies feminism, pleads for "fraternity"); there
is a tune written and sung by her son Jake (Am I Human?); a song that compares
Ireland to an abused child (Famine); and a stark cover of Nirvana's All
Apologies, in which she takes Kurt Cobain's saddest line - "I wish I was like
you: easily amused" - and makes it seem sadder still. There are love songs, but
desperate ones: the sound of someone not celebrating love but desperately
clinging on to it.  The music is soft and cosy, but this is not easy listening.
Its invitation to observe O'Connor as she delineates her pain seems both a
privilege and an unacceptable act of voyeurism.