Approach of A Desolation Angel

By JAY COCKS

Lights out. The voice, hushed and full, sings of private places and deep secrets. Hearing it is like a long, seductive and slightly sinister climb up winding stairs to a dark room where someone waits. Or, perhaps, lurks.

The music is not customary hit material. It is a little too odd and altogether too witchy for these flighty, dance-heavy times. But a first hearing of Sinead O'Connor might tempt anyone to believe that, for the moment, lite's out.

Her just released second album debuted in one trade publication at the very top of the charts. Her first single, a rhapsodic rendering of Prince's ballad Nothing Compares 2 U, is also a runaway hit, currently No. 4 on the Billboard Top 100 and threatening to scale the peak. No wonder she can title her album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Easy for her to say. It looks very much like Sinead (say it Shin-aid) O'Connor will have it all.

Hearing such personal, even introverted music making such a commercial impact is like a time trip back to the late '60s. Indeed, O'Connor's writing (with few exceptions she does both music and lyrics) strikes a strong spiritual bond with Van Morrison, who is Irish, as she is, and who uses rock, as she does, as a vehicle for self-examination and psychic speculation. O'Connor, 23, speaks with reverence of Morrison but adds, with subdued asperity, "I don't particularly want to have any Irish connection. I hate 'scenes' of any kind. I'm just a girl, and it doesn't matter where you come from or what you look like."

Well, all right. When O'Connor was last in the U.S., in 1988, she had shaved her head bald, an attention-grabbing device that suited a time when she could hide behind the intricacies of her songs. Her hair these days is a half-inch black corona of fuzz, but she has never been shy about speaking out. "I would rather be compared to Patti Smith than anybody," she says. "I don't want to be compared to people like Suzanne Vega, because I don't like wishy-washy music." She declines to analyze her own work but is keen about rap, reggae and Michael Jackson ("He's a doll, he's a god") and is open as a wound about the lacerating Irish upbringing from which many of her lyrics spring ("I'm walking through the desert/ And I am not frightened although it's hot/ I have all that I requested/ And I do not want what I haven't got/ I have learned this from my mother").

Born in Dublin, O'Connor watched her parents split up "quite violently" when she was eight. Her brother responded to the domestic tumult by "fainting all the time." O'Connor's sister began having extensive conversations with strangers in bus stations. And Sinead turned wild. She was busted for shoplifting and sent off first to reform school, then to boarding school. By the time her mother died in a car crash, her daughter hadn't seen her for nearly two years. "Her life never got better," O'Connor says, "and I suppose it was just as well that she died. But she was the person who, I suppose, meant the most to me. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be singing. She instigated that." The first album was dedicated to her mother. The new one is dedicated "to my father, with love," another sign that the healing has begun.

O'Connor is married now (her husband is her drummer, John Reynolds) and has a 2 1/2-year-old son named Jake. But what makes her songs so startling and vivid is their perpetual tension between lyricism and a stormy, still close past that keeps bearing down hard. "To write harshly," she says, "that's my ambition." And to relive everything, rework it and maybe, finally, to resolve it. That's her likely destiny. And the listener's reward.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York