30 years ago today: Sinéad O'Connor released Universal Mother

An extract from Bill Graham's review of Universal Mother – originally published in Hot Press in 1994:

One could easily give Universal Mother another title. Not Boy but Girl – as performed by Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band and doubtless on the Mother label! It’s definitely the record of an artist determined to restart, with a totally new set of basic principles.

It’s also certain to be totally divisive. Sinead O'Connor probably didn’t even pause to bother about it but so many fifth and sixth-form friendships are set to fray and flounder, never to be repaired, due to vehemently opposed views about whether Universal Mother is hip or wet.

Even the London heavies can’t agree. In the Independent, Andy Gill, obviously among those who thinks Sinead believes the world owes her a loving, slammed it as “a self-pitying patronising piece of work . . . another indigestible lump of her personal traumas”. Meanwhile The Guardian’s Caroline Sullivan – and is the gender difference significant? – selected it above eight other albums as the paper’s CD of the week. So you get the picture: for everyone who loves Universal Mother, there’ll be as many who’ll hate it.

Still there is one common opinion that Universal Mother is unusual as a work of therapy with the listener in the uncomfortable, possibly unwilling and almost unprecedented situation of her shrink, a position reinforced by the stark musical settings that continually close the gap between Sinead and her listeners. But even if there is one previous role model in John Lennon’s earliest solo albums, that example still doesn’t fully describe the uniqueness of the record.

For starters, since we’re all now sufficiently media-sharp to know that even confession with Oprah is just another media sham, we don’t really want our stars to throw off their post-modernist masks. Musicians – and especially so in the white lads’ world of Anglo-Saxon rock – don’t really expose emotion. Instead they deflect, displace and commentate on it using established forms of music to stylise, socialise and safely channel the most unwelcome feelings.

Indeed Sinead and her producing partners, John Reynolds and Phil Coulter, could have easily recast these songs for far less uneasy listening. Just take some whizz like Johnny Marr, build security walls from any set of contemporary guitar sounds and dance grooves and Sinead’s keening might have ballooned off into the ozone.

But there’s a further and absolutely significant difference. Despite the fact that rock so resolutely champions generational revolt as to make it a central reason for its existence, the family is an embarrassing and close-to-taboo topic. Parental bonds get culturally, not emotionally, explored. Family unhipness not unhappiness is the preferred theme: thus dads get rejected for listening to Dire Straits not Dinosaur JR; the real loveless family traumas are avoided – that’s the private life only the most meagre minority sing about.

Universal Mother ventures even further into these uncharted depths, as Sinead is singing as both a mother and a daughter, her traumas as a child impacting on her insecurities as a partner and a parent. And the album can get even more unnerving because of the force of Sinead’s own inarticulate speech of the heart. She can still sing like an angel – but she's also clumsily learning how to order her feelings into the most apt emotions and images.

The opening is deceptive since the Indo-reggae rock groove of ‘Fire On Babylon’ could easily sit on a Jah Wobble album though her singing here is far more icily furious than on ‘Visions Of You’. Its first couplet – “She took my father from my life/ Took my sisters and brothers on” – has already been interpreted as another attack on her mother but another group of meanings can be found. Not just Free Presbyterians but also Rastas and Gnostics abhor the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon.

Thereafter the album settles into a consistent style, a bare chamber-folk that generally eliminates false and distracting flourishes. Even so, the next track, ‘John I Love You’ is fond not grim, smiling not sacrificial, a track of kindliness and grace. Universal Mother isn’t always a descent into hell; it also has its grace-notes from heaven.

Next we take our first step into controversy corner with ‘My Darling Child’, with its burbled coda, 'Am I A Human' from her son, Jake. Definitely not American celebrity Mom fare, it is sappy but then mother love always has a cooing sentimentality that discomfits lad-rockers.

The next three songs, ‘Red Football’, ‘All Apologies’ and ‘A Perfect Indian’, all work to cure the venom of celebrity. On the last song, she recalls her Dublin Kissagram days and wanly asks : “Why in my life is that the only time/ That any of you will smile at me?”

As for the Kurt Cobain cover, it reminds me what Sinead and Kurt share with their audience, the first modern generation for whom the nuclear family is not necessarily the norm. Universal Mother may not be so commercially risky; it just could be the first album to appreciate the fears of an orphaned audience.

‘In This Heart’, where her only companions are The Voice Squad, maintains the standard. But next ‘The Grief Song’ supplies ample ammunition to those who’d accuse her of self-pity .

‘Thank You For Hearing Me’ is a calming resolution to an album remarkable for its self-exposure.

But hey, you’ll stop to ask: is this art?

Certainly not as Andy Warhol proposed it. Universal Mother is totally Irish in its refusal to fiddle around with the dictates of fashion and take the easy ironic route out of its dilemmas and contradictions, for Sinead O’Connor remains an artistic Romantic, utterly incapable of being playful with her confusions.

Often, before, her simplest songs like ‘Three Babies’ have proven her most durable. But at 27, she’s still desperately determined to have the answers; she isn’t yet content to live with just the questions.

In the last liner note, she recommends Universal Mother “should really be listened to in sequence as an album rather than as single tracks” but I doubt if all will have the patience and emotional stamina.

Still, they just might be surprised.

One night, a track will flood out of the radio or the pub CD juke-box. Then they’ll learn she always had their truth in her.