Night Beat Part 12

These are questions that each of us can answer only for ourselves and I must admit I'm not sure what my own answers might reveal. Like many other pop writers, I have often celebrated the angry, violent impulses of rock & roll, because, in part, such impulses seem born of a hard-earned moral courage, though also, I should admit, because the angry, violent side of rock can be fun. (If you doubt me, listen to the Who or the s.e.x Pistols, or see The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle, The Harder They Come, Quadrophenia, or High School Confidential-the latter featuring Jerry Lee Lewis on the t.i.tle song.) But it is also true that fans and critics have often romanticized rock & roll's violent side to a distorted degree-until a roughhouse aesthetic and mean-eyed stance seem to take on matchless and inevitable value. By example, the hardened, menacing posture of punk was so widely reported and lionized that violence appeared as a genuine and off-putting trait of the movement, though in fact it was always more stylized than it was necessary or actual. Of course, that didn't stop some punks from living up to an acquired style: When Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978, and then died by heroin overdose later, to many punk followers those deaths had the ring of idyllic, inescapable pop history about them. And yet the critics and fans who venerated "punk violence," and who memorialized Vicious' pathetic end, didn't have to live with the consequences of his life. It was as if the rise and fall of the s.e.x Pistols, Spungen's murder, and Vicious' death were all part of a merciless pageant lived out for our dark enjoyment.

But then that's the immutable allure of violence: It makes for great entertainment, great mystique, and as a fan of hard-boiled crime novels (the best of which inquire after the impulse to murder), I am hardly one to moralize. The problem develops when an art form's stylized violence becomes so idealized to its critics and audience that its real-life performances seem some sort of enactment of bravado. Or worse, when we begin regarding real-life victims as less consequential than the music or mystique of their victimizers.

How all this relates to the troubles of Jerry Lee Lewis is a tricky question. Certainly, to read Nick Tosches' fine biography of Lewis, h.e.l.lfire, or Myra Lewis' equally adept account of her marriage to the pianist, Great b.a.l.l.s of Fire, is to come face-to-face with the heart-affecting story of a wild, mean, and unequaled pop star-a man robbed of his shot at rock glory and so irrecoverably confounded in spirit that his ambition, intelligence, wit and pride prompted him to turn his back on redemption. "I'm draggin' the audience to h.e.l.l with me," Jerry Lee is famous for saying, and while that may seem a darkly alluring statement, it implies awful possibilities: A man who is no longer fearful of death, but feels certain only of d.a.m.nation, may no longer fear the consequence nor the conceit of any deeds. If that is so, Jerry Lee Lewis may be telling us enough about himself to inspire our distance.

miles davis: the lion in winter.

Face-to-face, Miles Davis seems much like the Miles Davis one might expect him to be: That is, he has the manners and bearing of the legendary Dark Prince of post-bop, one of the last great icons and agitators of jazz. He greets me at the door of his multilevel Malibu guest house, leads me into the lower den strewn with his many-colored erotic-expressionist ink paintings, and graciously offers me some of the homemade gumbo simmering on the stove. But quick as a blink (and it is startling how fast this abiding fifty-nine-year-old man can will moods and wits), the amiability can disappear. At one point he asks me what I think of a particular track on his soon-to-be-released You're Under Arrest, and I tell him I haven't heard the track because it isn't on the advance copy of the alb.u.m that I received. Davis' eyes flicker behind his tinted, thick gla.s.ses and his notorious wrath flares. "s.h.i.t, you're trying to talk to me about my music and you don't even give a listen to my music?" I go out to my car, fetch the advance tape that Columbia Records had sent me, and hand it over to Davis. He studies the tape and sees that, indeed, the track under discussion had been omitted-which only makes him angrier.

"Man, they f.u.c.ked up the way you're supposed to hear this transition," he says in his raw, irascible voice, then pulls out his own master ca.s.sette of the alb.u.m, slaps it into the Nakamichi mounted into the wall, and keeps the music rolling throughout the visit. Occasionally he will call attention to specific pa.s.sages-pointing out the alb.u.m's constant counterplay between the forcible rhythms and hot textures of the band arrangements and the cool, playful, mellifluent, often introspective tone of his trumpet lines. As he talks, the man himself seems much like his music-fiery, then lulling, then impossibly complex, indefinable. His dark, dignified features may seem drawn these days, but they also ripple with the creases of experience, and the wear of myth.

Still, as impressive or disarming as Davis' bearing and temper may seem, for some reason there's nothing that inspires awe so much as when, during an idle point in our conversation, he picks up the trumpet that has been resting nearby, places it in his lap, and begins stroking it, in an offhand way. This particular horn is princely looking-black, with curled, gold gilt that spells Miles around its edge, and a weatherworn mute nuzzled into its flared bell. It just may be the single most famous, best played instrument in all America. And at that moment when he raises it to his lips, breathes gently into its looped tube as he fingers its valves, filling his corner of the room with a tone so subdued it seems almost private-well, the distinctions between Davis and his instrument blur. It is, in fact, a powerful but unconscious gesture that fuses the man's legend with his art. It is also an instant that drives home the fact that one is in the presence of perhaps the most important living musical hero in America-the essential (and solitary) link between the music of Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Michael Jackson.

Indeed, since his first recordings with Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Max Roach in the late 1940s, Miles Davis has been involved in and has nurtured more diverse jazz forms (from be-bop to cool to neo-bop, from modal reveries to electric atonalism) than any other figure in the music's history-and has also connected those traditions to rock and funk style and pop aspiration with bold, controversial, and liberating effect. Of course, in many fans' and critics' eyes, it was Davis' plunge into electronic texture, his mix of open-ended melodic improvisation and hard-edged, R & B-derived tempos, that sp.a.w.ned the dread specter of fusion jazz in the 1970s. In the end, the movement itself proved merely cra.s.s and formulaic, and perhaps also broke jazz history in two, inspiring a generation of technique-obsessed instrumentalists who proved unable to advance Davis' original vision. The style even seemed to enclose the trumpeter himself: Whereas early, groundbreaking excursions like In a Silent Way, b.i.t.c.hes Brew, and Jack Johnson had been seen as imaginative and unforgettable tone poems, later flurries like Agharta, Pangaea, and Dark Magus were seen as furious, pain-ridden, self-destroying exercises-work so forbidding, chaotic, and frustrating, some critics charged that they had been designed to keep an audience at bay (though for me, their fitful, disturbed brilliance places them among my favorite Miles Davis recordings).

Those records were also his final spurt of recording for years. Beset with crippling health problems (including leg injuries and a bone erosion in his hip that has left him slightly stooped), Davis retired into a six-year period of reclusion rumored to be so dark and narcotic, many insiders were convinced that he would never reemerge. When he did-in 1981 with Man with the Horn-several ungracious critics bemoaned his seeming unwillingness to once again move jazz in new directions, and even proclaimed that he had lost much of his tone and phrasing. Yet every subsequent work (the live and good-humored We Want Miles, the blues-steeped Star People, and the protean Decoy) has drawn the intriguing portrait of a resourceful artist who is making his way through resurgent and autumnal periods in the same motion-a man who, for the moment, is more a musician than a harbinger; who has discovered that he can unite and reconcile cla.s.sical repertoire, blues sensibility, and modern texture with a naked and deep-felt expressiveness. True, Davis may not be speaking in the intriguing harmonic and melodic parlance that James Blood Ulmer or Ronald Shannon Jackson have coined, nor playing in the inspiring blend of traditionalism and avant-gardism that Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, and Hamiet Bluiett pursue, but he can still set loose with a straight-ahead yet visionary brand of musical oratory that is simply matchless and, as well, delightfully sly.

But if much of what Davis has recorded since his return has sounded like a man looking to regain his voice-plus looking to find a fulfilling context in which to apply his regained strength-the 1985 You're Under Arrest is the place where this artist again makes a stand, one as vital to his own aesthetic as the stands he took with Kind of Blue and b.i.t.c.hes Brew. It's likely, of course, that with its lovingly straightforward and exacting covers of pop material by Michael Jackson ("Human Nature"), Cyndi Lauper ("Time After Time"), and D-Train ("Something on Your Mind"), the alb.u.m will strike many jazz diehards as a disheartening commercial surrender. But that would be a depthless reading of what is actually a stirring and complicated work: perhaps Davis' most cohesive comment in twenty years on the balance between song form and improvisation, between tone and melodic statement, between cool and hot style, as well as his most exhaustingly worked-over music since his landmark orchestral sessions with Gil Evans in the 1950s. It is also simply a beautifully played alb.u.m: Davis wrings the heart out of "Time After Time" with consummate grace, then turns around and blares into "You're Under Arrest" (the opening version of which features Sting in a cameo vocal) with the same cutting force that he once brought to Jack Johnson.

Asked whether he is concerned how this record may affect his already precarious standing with jazz purists, Davis appears to ignore the question, preferring instead to concentrate on the bowl of steaming gumbo before him. We are seated on the sofa in his den-the only spot of furniture not occupied with the trumpeter's paintings or scholarly tomes on modern art. "I don't put out records just to satisfy jazz buffs," he rasps after a while. He nods toward the TV set that is mounted above us. "These sounds coming out on television-these commercials and some of the music on MTV: That stuff sounds better than the jazz artists I'm hearing lately. These young guys, too many of them are so unsure of their own sound that somehow pop music scares them. They miss the point that that's where a lot of the real innovation-in both songs and rhythms-is coming from.

"Anyway, why should some jazz fan be upset that I recorded 'Time After Time'? It's nothing different than what I've always done. I mean, they liked it when I did 'Porgy and Bess,' when I did 'Green Dolphin Street,' when I did 'Bye-bye Blackbird,' when I did 'My Funny Valentine'-pop songs, all of them. They also liked it when I did b.i.t.c.hes Brew and Jack Johnson. Now why can't they like a record that puts all that together, hmm? The point is, if you keep repeating the old styles, then there's no advancement-nothing happens. Jazz has always drawn on pop songs; it's no different with today's pop, as far as drawing on it for interpretation."

Still, I note, in the jazz-rock fury of fifteen years earlier, n.o.body expected to hear Davis ever play a straight-ahead ballad again-particularly with such restrained tone and without melodic variation. What persuaded him to render Lauper's. .h.i.t in such a plain-spoken fashion?

Davis' features soften and his scowl transforms into a faint smile. "Oh man, if I hear a melody I like, I don't care who plays it. I get that thing up here"-he taps the area between his throat and heart-"that thing you get when you see something you like." He laughs wickedly. "You know, some art work, a girl, cocaine. . . . Anyway, I got that when I first heard it, because she had the sound for the meaning of the ballad.

"But you have to treat the song the way it should be interpreted: your way and hers. I just love how Cyndi Lauper sings it. I mean, that woman is the only person who can sing that song right-the only one who really knows what it means. The song is part of her-it's written for her heart, for her height, for the way she looks, the way she smells. She has imparted her voice and soul to it, and brought something kind of sanctified and churchly to it. Why distract from its meaning by messing around with a lot of variations and stuff?

"So I don't do nothing to it: It's just the sound of my tone and the notes of that song, but they seem to work together in their own right. Still, when I like something, I try to give it to you my own way." Davis pauses and his eyes grin. "Give it to you with a little black on it. Now, when I play it live, everybody seems to like it that way. I also think people know when they like a melody: A song like this gets people in a ma.s.s groove, like a tribe."

Miles says he would talk more but he has a rehearsal to catch. Before we break off, he speaks briefly about his planned next alb.u.m: a live retrospective of his career, recorded with a twenty-piece orchestra, rhythm section, and guitarist John McLaughlin, at his acceptance of the Soning Award in Copenhagen-an honor bestowed previously only on Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, and Igor Stravinsky. We also discuss that this will be his last alb.u.m for Columbia on this contract, and he allows that he is thinking about switching labels. "Man, they never know what to do with me. You know, they'd rather lean toward Wynton Marsalis or somebody like that. Well, let 'em. I'll tell ya, I'm not the one who's afraid of trying something different."

Which, of course, is an understatement. If Davis no longer seems to prompt jazz styles or sire new dynasties, it is also clear he no longer needs to. Instead, he has learned to move comfortably between jazz and funk, pop and blues, to a.s.sert gentle introspection with the same eloquence and savvy with which he expresses his casual melodic fervor-almost as if he were saying that it is the breadth of expression at this late stage in his career that best defines how he cares to be seen. In other words, maybe jazz's most mutable and enduring legend simply wants to be accepted now as a player and not a leader-a man who can imbue modern styles with a venerable, unadorned technique. True, that may make him too irreverent for jazz and too seasoned for pop, but mostly it marks him as an American original who, at fifty-nine, is still too young to be denied his vision.

feargal sharkey: songs of hearts and thieves.

"A Good Heart," written by Los Angeles' Maria McKee, of Lone Justice almost-fame, and sung by the U.K.'s Feargal Sharkey, was played repeatedly on U.S. radio in the spring of 1986 (in England, in fact, it became a number 1 hit), and for fair reason. "A Good Heart" is an irresistibly crafted dance track about romantic search that communicates a great surface of good-natured hope, and a great depth of petrified fear. The song is also the opening track for the eponymous solo debut alb.u.m by Sharkey (once the lead vocalist for Northern Ireland's most promising late-1970s pop-punk band, the Undertones), and with the singer's wavery voice intoning the heartening chorus, "A Good Heart" opens the alb.u.m in the manner of a tremulous invocation: "I know that a real love is quite a price/And a good heart these days is hard to find. . . . /So please be gentle with this heart of mine."

But if "A Good Heart" is a lover's prayer, the song that immediately follows it, "You Little Thief" (written by Tom Petty's keyboardist, Benmont Tench), is as bitter a curse as I've ever heard in pop-a magnificent statement of pain so wrathful, so intense, so true, chances are you will never hear it on radio. "You little THIEF," rails Sharkey, "you let me love you/You saw me STUMbling, you saw me FALL/You left me broken/Shattered and blEEEding/But there's no hard feelings/There's no feelings/At ALL."

Of course, that last claim isn't exactly true: There's so much lyrical and musical temper in this song, and in Sharkey's vocal delivery of it, that it is almost too overpowering to hear. Instantly, you are reminded of the most deep-felt moments in the music of Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry-two singers who, like Sharkey, once sang so forcefully, so nakedly, that they could redeem any conceit or frivolity-and instantly you realize just how inadequately their best music compares to what this Irish aspirant manages to achieve here, by only half-trying. In part, that's because Sharkey isn't weighed down by any of the self-defeating irony or preening hubris that have always been part and parcel of Stewart's and Ferry's acts. Instead, Sharkey just sings as if the art of these songs resides in the meaning of their words, and not in the histrionics of the performer. The result is one of the most genuinely emotive, intoxicating vocal triumphs of 1986.

marianne faithfull: trouble in mind.

I have never heard blues sung in the manner of "Trouble in Mind," the performance that opens the soundtrack to the 1986 movie of the same name. It is more like a painting of the blues-or some kind of stripped-down study of the music's elements-than a true enactment of the form. And yet it's as definitive an example of what blues might do in these modern times as you'd hope to find.

The song opens with an ethereal, harplike synthesizer sweep-not much more than an exercise in texture-played by arranger Mark Isham. Then Isham dresses up the moment a little: some muted trumpet (suggestive of Miles Davis' on In a Silent Way), a few moody piano arpeggios-all the elements weaving together at a snail's pace, congealing into a cool-to-the-touch, high-tech consonance. Then a voice enters, stating its lament as directly, as simply, as brokenly as possible: "Trouble in MIND, that's true/I have AL-MOST lost my mind/Life ain't worth livin'/Sometimes I feel like dyin'." The voice belongs to Marianne Faithfull, and she imparts immediately, in her frayed matter-of-fact manner, that she understands firsthand the experience behind the words: She lifts the song from blues cliche to blues apotheosis. What is remarkable, though, is how she does this without indulging for a moment in the sort of growly vocalese that many singers pa.s.s off for feeling. In fact, Faithfull does it simply by adhering to a literal, unembellished reading of blues melody. But behind that artlessness, the song's meanings inform her tone-they even inform the silences between notes-and that tone alone nails the listener, holding one's ear to an extraordinary performance. Not much more happens in the song, but not much more needs to. The directness of the vocal and the stillness of the arrangement virtually sound like a portrait of emotional inertia-and of course, that's the way they're supposed to sound.

Before Trouble in Mind's soundtrack ends, there is one more unforgettable moment: Faithfull and Isham's rendition of Kris Kristofferson's "The Hawk (El Gavilan)." At the outset, a lone synthesizer delineates a melodic motif, a trumpet dips between the s.p.a.ces of the strain, and Faithfull takes on the lyric in the same unvarnished manner as the earlier song. "Got to make your own rules, child," she sings, "Got to break your own chains/The dreams that possess you/Can blossom and bless you/Or run you insane." The textures move a bit more here, and there's a more gradual undertow to the arrangement-an undertow as gentle and sure as the momentum that carries life to death. Couple the music's steady, calm flow with the lyric's images of loss and flight and yearning, and you have a performance that manages to sound both resigned and unyielding at once. Which is to say, Kristofferson-Isham-Faithfull's "The Hawk" may be pretty-faced, high-tech pop, but at the recording's heart, it is a sp.a.w.n of the blues. Its resonance is beyond trend: It is ageless.

stan ridgway's wrong people.

As leader of the Wall of Voodoo, Stan Ridgway was nearly despicable: He didn't so much reduce hard-boiled cynicism to a cliche as he reduced it to a sneering inflection-which might have been a kick if the attacks hadn't all been delivered in a slurring monotone. In other words, Wall of Voodoo's gambit was a mean-minded, dead-ended one, and apparently even Ridgway realized this, for just as the band reached an audience large enough worth insulting, the singer "fired himself" from the enterprise. The joke, it seems, was up.

Maybe so, but the hard work had just begun. In 1986, two years after checking out, Stan Ridgway checked back in with The Big Heat (I.R.S.), and d.a.m.n if it wasn't among the best L.A.-founded alb.u.ms of that year. Perhaps what made The Big Heat work so well is that, instead of viewing his characters from the outside and laughing at their uneasiness and their seeming dispensability, Ridgway now crawled inside their skin-and discovered that it's actually kind of an intriguing place to be, a place that lends itself to hauntingly, rollickingly effective storytelling. In any event, instead of sneering, Ridgway now shudders a bit as he relates the accounts of people in flight-people running from or chasing after murder and deception, people who seem horrified and enthralled by their own admissions, people who have been forgotten but sure won't leave life that way. They are, in fact, California characters like those in the works of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson (mean and d.a.m.ned), or of Kim Nunn, Robert Siodmak, or Fritz Lang (rugged and redeemed). Either way, they are people you give a full hearing to-and as a result, The Big Heat also demands no less than a full hearing.

In The Big Heat, the wrong people-hateful, bored, lost, hurting, dangerous people-not only are given a voice, but, here and there, are given a shot at victory. Somehow, it's an exhilarating victory. "You gotta watch the ones who keep their hands clean," sings Stan Ridgway in the t.i.tle song. On The Big Heat, the artist gets his hands dirtier than ever. Hence, he's maybe, just maybe, worth our trust. One thing's for certain: There are few artists who can be so scary and unaffected at the same time as Stan Ridgway.

sinead o'connor's songs of experience.

"Can we shut out the lights?" asks Sinead O'Connor, in a soft voice.

It is a cold and bl.u.s.tery late February 1990 night in the center of London, and O'Connor-a twenty-three-year-old, bantam-sized Irish-born woman, with round, doleful eyes and a quarter-inch crewcut-is perched on a stool in a BBC Radio sound studio, holding an acoustic guitar, and looking a little uneasy. She has come here to perform some songs from her newly released second alb.u.m, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. And for reasons of her own, she feels like singing these songs in the dark tonight. After the lights dim, the room falls quiet, and O'Connor begins strumming the hushed opening chords to "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance"-the account of a young woman who has been brought to the edge of her deepest-held hopes and dreams, and then deserted by the one person she needed and trusted most. It is one of O'Connor's most powerful and affecting songs, and for good reason: Not so long ago, she more or less endured the experience that she is singing about, and it transformed her life.

Tonight, she seems to be singing the song as if she were composing its painful recollections and caustic indictments on the spot. In a voice that veers between hesitation and accusation, O'Connor sings with a biting precision about the moment she realized that the man she loved and trusted no longer cared for her need or faith in him-it was in the instant that she recognized he would no longer hold on to her hand as a plane would lift off-and she rues all the abandonment and betrayal that her expectation has left her with. And then, just when the music should surge into the crashing chords and snarling yowls that frame the song's bitter kiss-off, O'Connor halts the performance abruptly, and for several long seconds, there is only silence from the dark booth. "I need to practice that one a bit," she says finally, in a shaky tone. "I need to calm down."

A minute later O'Connor resumes the song, and this time she leans harder into the performance. It is an exceptional thing to witness. Somewhere in that darkened booth, a young woman with an almost supernatural voice-a voice that can convey rage, longing, shock, and sorrow, all in the same breath-is both chasing down, and being chased by, some difficult private memories, and it seems less like a pop performance than an act of necessary release. It is also a timeless ritual: Pop and jazz and blues singers have been sitting in darkened recording booths turning private pains into public divulgence for generations now. But many of the best of those singers-from Billie Holiday to John Lennon-were, in one way or another, ravaged by that darkness. If Sinead O'Connor has her way, she is going to howl at that darkness until there are no more bitter truths that it can hold.

MAYBE IT'S HER startling looks that first catch you-that soft black bristle that barely covers her naked head or those soulful hazel eyes that can fix you with a stare that is hungry, vulnerable, and piercing in the same instant. Sooner or later, though, it is Sinead O'Connor's voice-and its harsh beauty-that you will have to reckon with. According to her father, it is a voice that she inherited from her mother, a pa.s.sionate and often troubled woman. According to Nigel Grainge, the president of her record company, it is a voice that bears the lineage of her strife-torn and heartbroken homeland, Ireland. "We're talking soul singing, like Van Morrison," he says. "That is, real soul singing." O'Connor herself says she never really thought much about where her voice emerged from. Like her heart and memory, it was just another sign of deep familial pain.

Whatever its origins, O'Connor's voice is a remarkable and forceful instrument, and it has quickly established her as one of the most estimable new pop artists to emerge in years. This is a heartening development, though also-given the sort of music that O'Connor makes-a completely unlikely one. On the basis of her 1987 debut work, The Lion and the Cobra-a brilliant alb.u.m about s.e.xual fury and spiritual pa.s.sion-O'Connor seemed fated for a career like that of Van Morrison, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, or many of rock's other great truth-tellers: namely, a career of essential artistry, on the border of mainstream affection. But with her current work, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, Sinead O'Connor has achieved both widespread success and flat-out greatness. Furious and lovely, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is the work of a young woman who has had to weather some hard and haunting losses, and who sets out to rebuild her faith. By the alb.u.m's end, she has won a certain measure of hard-earned peace, but only by venting some racking pain, and by leveling an excoriating rage at those who have betrayed her. In an era when even many of the best pop alb.u.ms are increasingly subservient to the dominance of style and beat, Sinead O'Connor has fashioned a full-length work that takes uncommon thematic risks, and that makes style entirely subservient to emotional expression. Like Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is an intensely introspective work that is so affecting and farsighted, it seems capable of defining the mood or experience of an entire audience.

Which is exactly what it appears to be doing. In the United Kingdon, where it was released in late February 1990, the alb.u.m bulleted to the top of the charts in its first week of release. In America, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got vaulted to number 1 on Billboard's Top 100 alb.u.m chart within a month of its release-an almost unprecedented feat for a relatively unknown female artist. Apparently, there is something in O'Connor's fierce and rapturous music that is touching a public nerve, though the singer herself believes that it is the video version of the alb.u.m's first single-a deep-blue cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U"-that has paved the way for the alb.u.m's success. Indeed, "Nothing Compares 2 U" is a gripping performance: For five minutes, O'Connor holds the camera-and therefore the viewer-with a heartsick gaze, and tries to make sense of how she lost the one love that she could never afford to lose. One instant she tosses out sa.s.s, the next, utter desolation, until by the song's end, the singer's grief has become too much for her, and she cries a solitary tear of inconsolable loss.

"I didn't intend for that moment to happen," says O'Connor, "but when it did, I thought, "I should let this happen.' I think it shocks people. Some people, I know, really hate it-maybe because it's so honest, or maybe because they're embarra.s.sed by displays of emotions.

"But I think I'm probably living proof of the danger of not expressing your feelings. For years I couldn't express how I felt. I think that's how music helped me. I also think that's why it's the most powerful medium: because it expresses for other people feelings that they can't express, but that need to be expressed. If you don't express those feelings-whether they're aggressive or loving or whatever-they will f.u.c.king blow you up one day."

SPEND MUCH TIME around O'Connor, and you'll find that she's a lot like her music-that is, she is smart and complex, and she can effortlessly tap into deep wells of sadness and anger. But as often as not, she can also prove sweet and goofy, and can seem truly bewildered by the rituals and expectations that accompany fame. For example, the day after her performance at BBC Radio, during the photo session for this story, O'Connor takes the occasion as an opportunity for listening to some homemade tapes of reggae oldies and recent hip-hop faves like Queen Latifah and N.W.A. (Hip-hop, says O'Connor, is the one pop form that she feels has the closest spiritual kinship to her own music.) In between shots, O'Connor dances around and shares giggle fits and hilarious private asides with her longtime friend, personal a.s.sistant, and constant companion Ciara O'Flanaghan. Sometimes, right before striking a serious pose, Sinead will roll her eyes and crack up, as if she's both tickled and embarra.s.sed by the notion of her own celebrity.

At other times, the realities of O'Connor's fame can prove less amusing. The afternoon following the photo shoot, O'Connor is walking down a hallway at the offices of her London record company, wearing dark sungla.s.ses and a black leather jacket. She has the hood of a white jersey pulled over her head, and seems deep in thought as she walks along, staring down at her feet. At first, she doesn't respond to hearing her name called. It turns out that she has just finished reading a blistering article about her in the latest issue of the pop music newsweekly New Musical Express, and it has left her near tears.

In England, O'Connor has become something of a controversial figure with both the music and mainstream press. When she arrived on the scene, she was given to uttering often acerbic views about politics, the music business, and s.e.x-and came across, in NME's estimation, as "the female Johnny Rotten of the '80s, an angst-ridden young woman who shocked established society with her looks and views."

Recently, O'Connor has done her best to undo this image, though the British press has been reluctant to let her outdistance or make amends for her past, and NME in particular still regards her as an enfant terrible. In this morning's article, the newspaper takes several of the more controversial statements that O'Connor made a couple of years ago on a range of topics-including her views about U2, the Irish political situation, and her former manager, Fachtna O'Ceallaigh-and contrasts them with her recent statements on the same subjects. It's a scathing and intentionally mean-witted piece of journalism, and at the article's end, writer Eugene Masterson asks: "Does a leopard change its spots so quickly or is Sinead a chameleon who changes her views to suit her moods?" NME's implication couldn't be clearer: O'Connor is a fickle opportunist and manipulator, who has abandoned her forthrightness at the first blush of success.

"When the press looked at me," she says, "they saw a woman with a shaved head and a pair of Doc Marten boots, and they a.s.sumed that I was aggressive and strong and tough. The truth is, I'm not really any of those things." As she talks, O'Connor is tucked into the backseat of a taxi, en route to her home in the Golder's Green area of North London. She stares out the window as the car makes its way through the rain-drenched maze of British urban sprawl, and she talks in a low but intense voice. "Just because I'm a woman that speaks my mind about things and doesn't behave like some stupid blond bimbo, doesn't mean that I'm aggressive. It really hurts me when people think that-when they make me out to be some sort of nasty person, when all I want to do is be a good person. It can hurt so much that I feel like crying."

O'Connor pauses and pulls absently at the hint of forelock at the front of her hair. "They don't care that if they say, 'Sinead O'Connor's a complete b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' I'm going to sit up all night and think, 'I am a complete b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' And when I'm walking down the street, I'll be thinking, 'Everyone's looking at me, thinking what a complete b.a.s.t.a.r.d I am.' Obviously, if they listened to any of my music-to a song like 'The Last Day of Our Acquaintance'-they would realize that I couldn't possibly be as secure and strong as they would expect me to be. Obviously there's a lot of insecurity in there.

"But they don't care about what a person has been through."

A FEW MINUTES later, O'Connor arrives at her home in North London. It is a medium-sized, two-story cottage-style house, nestled into a side street of similar residences, just a stone's throw from an ancient-looking graveyard. "I like dead people," says O'Connor, when asked if she ever minds the proximity. "I find it comforting to have them close by."

Inside, O'Connor's home is strewn with careworn toys and a few stray strands of Christmas lights, left over from the holidays. In the smallish living room, she turns on some heat, takes off her leather jacket, grabs some cigarettes and a lighter from beside a portable ca.s.sette boom box-the house's main stereo-and settles down in the corner of a weather-beaten sofa. A gray cat patiently watches O'Connor's moves, and then leaps onto the sofa and curls into a contented ball beside the singer. There is nothing in this scene of domestic modesty that would tell you that you are visiting in the home of what one critic has called "the decade's first new superstar," and apparently, O'Connor likes it that way.

"I never think of myself as Sinead O'Connor, rock star, she says with a bashful smile. She picks a Silk Cut cigarette from her pack and lights it, and thinks quietly for a moment. "The truth is," she continues, "music doesn't really play a huge part in my life. I know it seems that way at the moment, because I'm just putting an alb.u.m out, and of course, that means a lot to me. But the most important part of my life isn't the alb.u.m: It's the experiences that are written about in the alb.u.m. To me, these records are like a chronological listing of every phase I've been through in my life. They're simply an acc.u.mulation of everything I've experienced. And it's those experiences-not the music-that have made me happy or p.i.s.sed me off."

For O'Connor, many of her experiences have been harsh from the start. She was born the third of four children to John and Marie O'Connor, a young Catholic couple living in the Glenageary section of Dublin, Ireland. John, an engineer, and Marie, a former dressmaker, had married young, and by the time Sinead came along, the relationship had already turned sour. It was a tense, sometimes brutal home life, and the violence was occasionally carried over to the children-particularly the two daughters with whom Marie had a strained relationship. "A child always thinks that it's their fault that these things happen," says Sinead. "I was extremely f.u.c.ked up about that for a long time. Between the family situation and the Catholicism, I developed a real capacity for guilt."

One thing the family shared good feelings about was music. Marie O'Connor had sung Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in her youth, and she encouraged her children to explore their vocal talents. "Sinead, in particular, had a good musical ear," says John O'Connor. "The first time she cut a record, I had her out for a walk one Sat.u.r.day, up in the Dublin mountains, and I had a business Dictaphone along. It was never meant for singing, but Sinead sang so pretty and nice this one time that I kept it on the tape. It's interesting to hear how true Sinead's voice was, even at that stage. She could hit a note on the head and hold it for fifteen seconds or so-just like she can today."

To Sinead, though, singing was more a release than a pleasure. "I remember when I was very young," she says, "I'd go out for walks and I'd sort of be making little songs up. I think I was just so f.u.c.ked up that I wanted to make noises or something-like shout and scream about the whole thing. I suppose that's how it started. It wasn't that I wanted to be a singer: It was just that I could actually express the pain that I felt with my voice, because I didn't have the facilities to express it in any other way. It was just all bubbling up in there and it had to come out."

In 1975, when Sinead was eight, John and Marie O'Connor separated (divorce was not allowed by Irish laws). For the first few years, Sinead lived mostly with her mother. Though Marie was "extremely strict," Sinead felt sorry for her, and also felt guilty for preferring the protection and freedom that her father's home offered. By the time she was thirteen, O'Connor found life with Marie too grim and repressive, and she settled into her father's. "I think I took everything out on him," she says. "I'd just come out of years of being severely abused. Suddenly I had all this freedom, and I didn't know what to do with it."

Sinead began cutting cla.s.ses, sometimes spending entire school weeks holed up in Dublin's bowling alleys, playing video games. She also began stealing-first lifting money from her father, then from strangers, then eventually shoplifting clothes, perfume, and shoes from local shops. "Any book that you read on child psychology," says Sinead, "will tell you that you can't take a child who's been in a violent or psychologically intense situation for years and expect it to be able to cope with normal life. I wasn't used to life being normal. I was used to it being melodramatic and awful."

Eventually, Sinead got caught shoplifting-in fact, she got caught a few times. By this time, John O'Connor had tired of working as an engineer and had taken up the practice of law-and he understood that his daughter might be headed for serious legal trouble. "She had good b.l.o.o.d.y reason to be unhappy with her home life," he says, "though maybe it's my own feeling of guilt, my failure to do what was right for the kids at the time, that is speaking here. Anyway, Sinead never did anything seriously wrong-she wasn't a s.e.x fiend or a dope fiend. But after she got caught nicking a pair of shoes in a shop in downtown Dublin, there was a fear that she was getting wayward."

In the early eighties, Sinead's father sent her to Sion Hill in Blackrock-a school for girls with behavioral problems, run by Dominican nuns-and then to a succession of boarding schools that included Mayfield College in Drumcondra, and Newtown School in Waterford. "I sent her to these places," he says, "because I couldn't handle the problem any other way. She was resentful, but she also knew that she needed help. And she did go through a tremendous change pattern while she was in Waterford. That kid came out of that school and she never looked back insofar as moral integrity is concerned. She's now absolutely and fiercely honest, and she wasn't when she went into that school."

For Sinead, though, it was a hard stretch. "Being sent off," she says, "just refueled the whole thing about being a bad person. Also, I had few friends at these schools. I didn't know how to tell people, "I'm not nasty and horrible and unfriendly. I'm just f.u.c.ked up.' I'd been through a whole lot of s.h.i.t that they could never understand in a million years, these people from f.u.c.king great happy families. They had no understanding of what life was like for other people. So, I didn't enjoy it at all. I was extremely withdrawn and slouched over. I thought I was mental."

It was during her tenure in the boarding schools that Sinead moved closer to music, spending evenings in her room, playing guitar and gradually writing some of the songs that would end up on The Lion and the Cobra. In 1982, a teacher at Mayfield asked the fifteen-year-old O'Connor to sing at her wedding. O'Connor sang Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen," and her full-throated delivery caught the ear of Paul Byrne, the bride's brother, who was also the drummer for In Tua Nua, an Irish band with ties to U2. The two struck up a friendship, and later, O'Connor co-wrote In Tua Nua's first single, "Take My Hand." For a time, there was talk of her touring with the band, but her father insisted she stay in school. However, Sinead's brush with recording had enlivened her, and with another friend, Jeremy Maber, she began singing in a folk duo around Waterford's coffeehouses and pubs, where she became known for haunting and unusual originals like "Never Get Old" and "Drink before the War," and for her forceful covers of Bob Dylan songs, like "Simple Twist of Fate" and "One More Cup of Coffee."

"Whatever depth and intensity was inside me," says O'Connor, "it was coming out in my music. I didn't know whether it was mystical or religious or what, but it was as if I was pulling a big rope out of the middle of me-a rope that had been there since before I was born."

By the next year, O'Connor had decided it was time to leave school and become a professional singer, but her father refused. "And then," he says, "she made the most determined statement she ever made about a professional career in music: She simply walked out of the school, saying nothing to anyone, and disappeared. She was only sixteen, and I was up a wall. I didn't know where she was. When she came home, it was plain that she had made up her mind. So we sent her to the College of Music in Dublin. She had this big booming voice, and I was hoping that she would get some cla.s.sical education in singing so as not to damage the vocal cords. She also studied piano. She's not a naive composer. She knows where she is in music."

Then, in early 1985, Marie O'Connor was killed in a car wreck. It had been almost two years since Sinead had seen her mother, and at the time of the death, their relationship was unreconciled. "I was completely and utterly destroyed," she says. "I felt that we had never really had a relationship. But looking back, I know that my mother knew I loved her very much, and I know that she loved me. More than anything, I just felt sorry for her. Her life had been such misery, and as a result, our lives had been misery. It just must have been h.e.l.l for her. She had lost her career when she got married, she'd had baby after baby, and I don't think she ever had time in all those years to figure herself out, like I've had since leaving Ireland.

"More than anything, I think she is the reason why I sing."

BY 1985, GALVANIZED by the international success of Irish heroes U2, Dublin had become something of a hotbed for aspiring rock and folk acts. In the early part of the year, Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill, the director and manager of London's Ensign Records (and early supporters of Ireland's Thin Lizzy and Boomtown Rats), paid a visit to Dublin, auditioning area bands at a local rehearsal studio. Nothing much caught their attention until the last group on their list-Ton Ton Macoute, who had acquired some acclaim for their new lead singer.

"At first," says Chris Hill, "they looked like another G.o.dawful pub rock band. Then Sinead walked in. She had thick black hair and she was so pretty, though she wasn't made up to look pretty. I mean, she looked scruffy, dressed in a baggy jersey, and staring at the floor. Then she sang. The songs were dreadful, but her voice was incredible. It ranged from this kind of pure little folk voice to a banshee wail, like something from the depths of somewhere. Yet she was so self-conscious. If she could have crawled into the corner and sang with her back to us, she would have. We thought, 'This girl's got a remarkable voice. Pity it's such a dreadful band with no songs.' At the end, Nigel said to her, 'What you're doing now isn't right for us, but if you feel you hit on something, get in touch.' The usual thing."

Six weeks later, back in London, Nigel Grainge got a letter from Sinead. "Dear Nigel," she wrote, "I've left the band. I'm writing my own songs. You did say you would be interested in recording some demos of my stuff, so when I finish the songs, will you do it?" Grainge had made no such promise, but he was impressed by O'Connor's sly ambition and sent her an airplane ticket. Two weeks later, when O'Connor arrived, Grainge had forgotten about her impending visit. Fl.u.s.tered, he called Karl Wallinger, who had just left the Waterboys to form World Party, and asked him to help the young Irish singer through her demos. That night, when Grainge visited the session, Wallinger met him at the door with a smile. "I think you're gonna get a real surprise here," he told Grainge. As Grainge walked in, O'Connor was in the middle of taping her last song, "Troy"-a mesmeric account of s.e.xual need and romantic betrayal. Grainge was riveted. "We never sign anybody," he says. "We're as choosy as can be." But on the basis of the demos with Wallinger, Grainge signed Sinead O'Connor to Ensign. "Her performances," he says, "were absolutely devastating."

Within days, news of O'Connor's signing spread through the Dublin scene. According to some sources, U2's Bono was so impressed by the demos that he offered to help Sinead find a better deal with a bigger label. O'Connor insisted on sticking with Ensign, though she later agreed to collaborate with the Edge on "Heroine," a song for the guitarist's 1986 soundtrack LP, Captive.

Shortly, O'Connor had moved to London and started work on the material for her first alb.u.m. It should have been a heady time, but at first O'Connor found it isolating. "She was clearly very lonely," says Grainge. "She spent a lot of time hanging around the office, making tea, and answering phones. Our big charge was to play her records. The first time we ever heard her, we said, 'You sound like Grace Slick.' She said, 'Grace who?' Another time, I asked, 'How much Aretha Franklin have you ever heard?' And she said, 'I don't know-who's Aretha Franklin?' "

"To get someone that early in their development was remarkable," says Chris Hill. "I asked her once, 'Where do you think you fit in musically?' And she said, 'Well, somewhere between Kate Bush and Madonna. I'm not sure where.' And we thought, 'That covers every f.u.c.king angle, right?' "

O'Connor was writing music and developing at a surprising pace-and the sense of change began to show in her appearance. "She was always playing with her hair," says Grainge. "One minute she had a Mohican. That was on for a couple of weeks, and then it all went-she walked in, and she had shaved herself bald. We thought, 'Well, there's a statement.' " Over the next few years, O'Connor's bare scalp would strike various journalists as provocative, frightening, ugly, gorgeous, s.e.xy, and shocking-and would also help make her one of the most unforgettable new faces in all pop.

During this period, O'Connor met two other people who were to figure prominently in her life. The first was John Reynolds, former drummer with British trash-pop band Transvision Vamp. Reynolds started dating O'Connor after joining her studio band, and a month later, Sinead was pregnant. "I was the only one that felt completely sure and delighted about the idea of me having a baby," she says. "I could understand John's reluctance. Suddenly his whole life was flashing before him. But then there was the record company. They thought I was jeopardizing my career. My att.i.tude was that if I had been a man, and my wife or girlfriend was pregnant, they wouldn't be telling me that I couldn't have it.

"I was very upset, and very hurt. How could I choose between my career or a child? They're both as important as each other. It wasn't a Catholicism thing-I had nothing against abortion. In fact, I was actually in the hospital bed about to have an abortion, and then I left. It wasn't me that wanted to have the abortion. I wanted the baby-and I decided to have it."

The other person that Sinead met in this time was Fachtna O'Ceallaigh-an Irish patriot who had managed Boomtown Rats and Bananarama, and who also headed U2's fledgling label for homegrown Irish bands, Mother Records. To the consternation of Nigel Grainge, O'Connor wanted O'Ceallaigh for her manager. "I opposed the connection," says Grainge. "I knew Fachtna from many years before, when the Boomtown Rats were on Ensign. Fachtna gets very emotionally involved with his acts, to such a degree that some people would call it irrational. He can be very inspiring, but he can also be infuriating when he doesn't get his way. I told Sinead: 'I don't want to work with Fachtna, and I don't want him to be your manager.' Which was the absolute wrong thing to say. It was like a father telling a child, 'You can't do this.' She came back to me and said, 'Fachtna O'Ceallaigh is my manager. Get on with it.' And Fachtna became very closely involved with Sinead. I mean, he was her mentor for a serious period of time."

In the fall of 1986, O'Connor had begun to work with producer Mick Glossop on the first alb.u.m, but the sessions soon fizzled. "The tracks sounded like a cabaret rock version of these wonderful songs," says Grainge (O'Connor herself once described the failed sessions as "all f.u.c.king Irish ethereal and mystical"). Adds Chris Hill: "She was a young girl of nineteen years, who was pregnant and frightened that if she f.u.c.ked up, she was gonna lose her record deal, and be told to go back to Ireland."

A few weeks later, Grainge proposed a solution. "I kept thinking about what she had done with the demos," he says, "how great they had felt. So I said, 'Go in with a decent engineer, Sinead, and produce it yourself. You know what these songs are about, and how they should sound.' About that time Fachtna came heavily into the situation. His style of management is to completely divide the artist from the record company, and from that stage, she stopped coming into the record company."

In April 1987, at age twenty, seven months pregnant and with almost no studio expertise, O'Connor took over the production of her maiden alb.u.m. Two months later, she had finished a record that all parties were thrilled by, and two weeks after that, she gave birth to her son, Jake Reynolds. In theory, it should have been a triumphal time. The Lion and the Cobra was a terrific alb.u.m full of deep-felt songs about desire, d.a.m.nation, and courage, and O'Connor produced and arranged it all in a style that spanned folk music, orchestral rock, and ba.s.s-heavy dance pop.

But within months, O'Connor found herself embroiled in feuds and controversies. In early 1988, U2 dismissed Fachtna O'Ceallaigh from his position as manager of Mother Records, citing "incompatible temperaments" (in addition, O'Ceallaigh had once told a reporter, "I literally despise the music U2 makes"). Later, in an interview with Britain's i-D magazine, O'Connor made some disparaging remarks about U2's "bombastic" music, and found herself reproached by the band's a.s.sociates. Before long, angry feelings and bitter statements had escalated on both sides, fueled by the sensationalistic-minded U.K. music press (in particular, NME milked the schism for a spate of cover stories). At one point, O'Connor was quoted as saying: "I have no respect for Bono and no affiliation with his music or ideas. . . . I know he's faking that sincerity." Another time, in a bit less gracious mood, she told Melody Maker, "[U2] take themselves so f.u.c.kin' seriously. [Bono's] just a stupid t.u.r.d."

O'Connor has attempted to make amends for the affair, but a certain rancor still lingers. "I felt ostracized and punished over that whole thing," she says. "But I also felt guilty because I knew at the back of my mind that some of the things I was saying were not said for myself. I expressed anger with U2 because the band had hurt Fachtna, who was a friend of mine. I was wrong to do that, because, really, Fachtna should fight his own battles. I had been hateful toward somebody I had no right to be hateful toward. U2 hadn't really done anything s.h.i.tty to me. But I also learned that U2 was a popular and powerful band, and that the British and Irish music establishment would not allow you to be critical of them."

O'Connor's comments about the IRA-the outlawed political movement that seeks a united Ireland and opposes Britain's dominance of the country, and has committed numerous killings and bombings to achieve its aims-were considered even more controversial. On one occasion, O'Connor was quoted as saying: "I support the IRA. . . . I don't like the violence but I do understand it, it's necessary even though it's terrible." In the British press-with whom the IRA are extremely unpopular-these comments were construed as an endors.e.m.e.nt of terrorist violence.

O'Connor has long since disavowed any support of the IRA or its methods, but the issue continues to plague her. "I was involved in very complex relationships during that time," she says now, "and I was influenced by the people I was hanging around with. I wanted their approval, and I was expressing things in order to get that approval, without realizing that that's what I was doing. I should not have condoned the use of violence by anyone. I don't believe that it's right for either side involved in the war to kill people. I also don't think for a second that the British government has any right to be in Ireland. But as I say, I was condoning violence to impress the people I was involved with, and I should not have done that."

The period following The Lion and the Cobra was also rough for more personal reasons. Shortly after Jake's birth, O'Connor and John Reynolds separated for a time. Then, following O'Connor's appearance at the 1988 Grammy Awards, she returned to London, and to the surprise of many friends and a.s.sociates, married Reynolds. "I was in a lot of pain during that time," she says, "but it wasn't due to John. It was the fact that I was with somebody else who was f.u.c.king me up."

It is now late in the afternoon, and the light in the living room has grown dim. O'Connor gets up, turns on a lamp, then settles back into the sofa, lighting a cigarette. "Around the time I got married," she continues, "I had been physically ill for a long time. I'd been going to doctors, and n.o.body could figure out what was wrong. Then, for a whole summer, I saw a woman who's like a spiritual healer and a diet.i.tian, and I started doing yoga with her. That process gave me a chance to get my act together mentally, and to begin to see that I was involved with people who were bringing out negative things in me.

"I realized that I had no control over myself-that other people were in control of me, that I was expressing opinions that were other people's, that practically everything I was doing was to please other people. So I decided I had to a.s.sume control over myself in every aspect, and that meant I had to sever some relationships that were very, very difficult to sever. I had to summon the strength to be able to say 'bye-bye' to people that I had previously thought I couldn't function without. Now, I feel like I'm sitting at the helm where I'm supposed to be sitting. Now, I'm the captain of my own ship."

One of the relationships-perhaps the primary one-that O'Connor severed at this time was with Fachtna O'Ceallaigh. According to John O'Connor, "Fachtna came too close to seeing Sinead as a possession. Management should be an arm's-length affair; there's a relationship that has to be kept scrupulously in its place. The manager's first duty is that their client's career should be maximized, and they should not let their personal feelings enter into it at all-whether they're political feelings or emotional feelings."

In December of 1989, Sinead O'Connor dismissed O'Ceallaigh as her manager (she was subsequently represented by Steve Fargnoli, former co-manager of Prince). Neither party is inclined to discuss the details of the separation, though O'Connor says: "Fachtna had given me a sense of my rights as an artist. He instilled in me the idea that if it wasn't for people like me, the record industry would not exist-which is true. And he instilled in me the idea that I must have control over what goes on regarding how my image and work are presented. Most important, he was instrumental in showing me that I should be honest and true, and not compromise myself."

But according to Chris Hill, O'Ceallaigh's contribution went beyond that. "He did two important things: He helped her discover a part of herself-that is, her sense of purpose and worth-but he also badly f.u.c.ked her up. And the two things together are what made Sinead O'Connor what she is."

For his part, O'Ceallaigh says simply, "What is important to me is what Sinead says. She is the one who knows exactly what occurred over the three-year period that I managed her. And even more important than that, her reaction means everything to me because she has always been and will always continue to be, as long as I'm alive, a best friend of mine. Everything else-whether it's success or fame or whatever, all the things that attend success-it's all basically rubbish. I never thought of Sinead as a person or object who made records. I thought of her as a human being and a friend."

Following the firing of O'Ceallaigh, O'Connor holed up in a garage studio with sound engineer Chris Birkett, and in a surprisingly short time had finished writing and self-producing the tracks for I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got-in effect, a collection of hard-hitting and heartrending songs about the circ.u.mstances of her recent life. Says O'Connor: "It is simply a record about a twenty-three-year-old human being and her experiences, and what she makes of those experiences and of herself. Some of the experiences are angry and some are hurtful. I write about whatever it is I happen to be going through at the time, and so if something awful was happening to me, that's what I wrote about."

Around the end of 1989, O'Connor called Nigel Grainge and Chris Hill. She had been trying to rebuild relations with the pair, and felt the time had come to play them the rough mixes for I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. "After we first heard it," says Hill, "we were sh.e.l.l-shocked. I mean, it's so personal, we couldn't even make a judgment about it, and we couldn't think in terms of whether it was a hit record. It is intense. I know she thinks it's a happy record, but it doesn't convey happiness-it conveys trauma. Because of our reaction, she thought we didn't like it, and she said, 'It's not for men to like; it's a woman's statement.' But Nigel and I had both been through divorces. You listen to some little girl singing 'The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,' and you know what it's about. We've been there."

Says O'Connor: "Nigel told me, 'You can't put that out; it's too personal.' I said, 'People that like me, like me because of that. That's what I do.' "

Now, though, as O'Connor sits in her living room discussing the record, it seems evident that I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is going to be more than anyone imagined. "If you think about the kind of songs I write," she says, "it's strange that they would be commercial. I mean, they're so personal. I think about why I wrote a song like 'Last Day of Our Acquaintance,' and then I think about millions of people buying and listening to it. . . . It's really weird."

There is a noise-actually, an ear-splitting scream-at the living-room door, and in a moment, O'Connor's two-and-a-half-year-old son, Jake, bounds in, all smiles and whoops. He is blond-haired and red-cheeked, and has the same deep eyes as his mother, but he turns shy when he sees a stranger sitting in the room. He is followed by his father, drummer John Reynolds, a tall, gracious man, who is home from rehearsals with his own band, Max. John and Sinead have some family business to discuss-Sinead's brother Joseph has just signed a contract for his first novel, and John and Sinead are wondering where to take him and her father for a family celebration next evening. Finally, they settle on a local transvest.i.te club-where a drag queen is reportedly delivering an impression of Sinead singing "Nothing Compares 2 U," replete with tear-and then John and Jake take off to begin dinner. Before going, Jake emits one last glorious yelp. "He's mad, that child," says O'Connor, shaking her head and smiling. "I feel like he really wanted to be born-he's such a happy kid."

She falls quiet for a few moments, pulling at her forelock. "A couple of years ago," she says, "I was having a hard time as far as my personal life was concerned, and that mattered much more to me than whether my record was doing well, or anything like that. But at the moment, I'm very happy. I have a lovely husband, a lovely son, and everything's going wonderfully.

"Really, I don't know what more I could want-except to know myself a bit better. But then, that's what I'm trying to do when I write songs."

A MONTH LATER, Sinead O'Connor stands before a twenty-three-piece orchestra in London's elegant Whitehall Banqueting House, dressed in a lime-green low-cut dress, singing a lush and sweet version of Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me." The occasion is a press conference to announce Red Hot & Blue, an upcoming double alb.u.m and television special that will feature pop artists like O'Connor, U2, David Byrne, Fine Young Cannibals, and Neneh Cherry, interpreting the music of Cole Porter. More important, the project will benefit AIDS charities, as well as disseminate information about the disease and its prevention. O'Connor is the press conference's surprise guest, and it is plain from her performance of this Tin Pan Alley chestnut just what an exemplary singer she is. She rocks gently to the song's steady but tricky groove, and in those moments when the lyric calls for a subtle roar, she pulls her mouth back from the microphone in the manner of a seasoned jazz vocalist.

After her performance, O'Connor bounds down the backstairs to a waiting car and heads across town to a full day of rehearsals for her own show. In the last few weeks, O'Connor's world has exploded all over again, though this time in a beneficent fashion. "Nothing Compares 2 U" has become a huge international hit-the biggest record of the year, so far-and earlier in the week, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got stormed into Billboard's Top 10. In a few days, O'Connor will begin a lengthy world tour, and in preparation for it, her life has become filled up with appurtenances-like personal beepers, portable cellular phones, and the nice new blue car in which she is being driven around. All these attachments are designed to make things easier and more efficient, but in other ways, they also amount to signs of pressure and obligation. Plus, there are the demands of real life itself: O'Connor's son, Jake, has had a bad cold in the last week, and O'Connor has been staying up nights with him, then showing up at rehearsals, too tired to sing. In the last couple of days,