POP MUSIC : Sinead O’Connor: The Pluck of the Irish

“Do rich people live there?” asked Sinead O’Connor, gazing at the hillside homes opposite her Hollywood hotel room.

The question didn’t seem entirely academic. The 21-year-old Irishwoman is looking for a sunny place to live. And what better city to launch the acting career she has thought about ever since watching those Barbra Streisand movies with her mother in Dublin?

And if she is not exactly rich yet, she is on the way, having emerged as one of the past year’s hottest new pop-music arrivals. Her first album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” has sold a respectable 350,000 copies and has been on the charts for six months. The single “Mandinka” topped the dance chart, and a version of the LP cut “I Want Your (Hands on Me),” revised as a duet with female rapper M.C. Lyte, has kept her MTV profile high.

But O’Connor’s impact isn’t measured just in units shipped. Her skinhead look--she shaved her head two years ago, she explains, simply because she was bored with the way she looked--has given her an unmistakable, attention-grabbing image.

And verbally, her tendency to shoot from the hip has earned her points as an outspoken, independent woman who won’t take any guff and doesn’t much care what people think about her.

Later that night, singing her soul-baring songs at the Wiltern Theatre and looking like a ballerina doll in a leotard, ice-skater’s skirt and combat boots, she conveyed a blend of vulnerability and strength. And the intensity of the audience’s response--particularly from the females--suggested a loyalty and cult-like attachment beyond the usual fandom.

The afternoon of the show, though, O’Connor seemed too subdued and tired to be a cult goddess. Her 9-month-old baby, Jake, had come down with an ear infection the night before, and since he wasn’t allowed to fly, the star, who usually takes a plane, had to join her band in the bus for the overnight drive from San Francisco.

Wearing a sweat shirt and torn jeans, O’Connor (the first name is pronounced shin-AID) betrayed a fairly casual attitude toward her music, but as she contemplated the Hollywood Hills as an alternative to London, you could sense some of the drive and ambition that have replaced the aimlessness of her turbulent teens--years scarred by her parents’ divorce and marked by shoplifting sprees and 18 months in reform school.

The musical career that saved her from a Dublin dead-end pretty much fell into her lap. She was singing in a local club with a “failing funk” band, mainly so she could stay out of school, when she was spotted by some executives from London’s Ensign Records.

“I hadn’t gone looking for a deal or anything,” O’Connor said as she ate a hotel burger garnished with a huge slice of raw red onion. “I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a deal. . . . And when I was offered the deal I couldn’t understand why, because the songs to me weren’t that great.

“I thought you had to be like a genius to get a record deal. I suppose it did make me serious about it. It offered me a whole new life and everything. It made me feel like I had some purpose.”

O’Connor moved to London and recorded a demo for the label, and before making her own album she collaborated with U2’s guitarist, The Edge, on “Heroine,” a song from a film score he was doing. But basically she holed up in a depressing southeast London flat and tried to come up with something.

“I sat a year and waited for some kind of great inspiration to come so I could write some songs,” she recalled softly. “It was a bit scary. . . . I don’t know quite what they expected from me. I’m still not sure really what it was they liked. . . . I was sure I’d be dropped off the label any day.”

She finally got her songs and a band together, and hooked up romantically with her drummer, John Reynolds. But the first sessions were a disaster.

“We had this producer that was chosen by the record company. And he had this idea that . . . we should make this Grace Slick-type album. I’d never heard Grace Slick in my life. He had string lines everywhere, and fiddles. It was just a joke. There were like 15-minute jams on the end of things. A waste of time.

“It was really embarrassingly bad, and the singing was embarrassingly bad, because I was pregnant at the time and I didn’t know I was pregnant, and I couldn’t sing because it affects your throat and nose and everything. . . . So it was all a big mess.”

Unable to find anyone else to take over, O’Connor became the producer herself. “You just need to know how to explain what you want, to describe the sort of sound,” said the novice knob-twirler.

“The Lion and the Cobra,” released on Ensign in the United States through Chrysalis Records, has some routine, trivial tracks, but it also bristles with invention and personality. O’Connor’s best music has a timeless, ancient quality and a contemporary sheen--a mystical whiff of her Celtic roots along with nods to ‘80s hard rock and funk.

What really stands out is the powerful emotionalism of her singing when she lets the stormy romantic encounters depicted in songs like “Troy” send her voice swooping from operatic clarity to ragged, cracked realms of despair and desperation.

The way she puts her trained voice to dramatic effect has occasioned comparisons to English cult heroine Kate Bush. The album has earned its share of superlatives, a fact that puzzles its creator.

“I don’t have any great message,” said O’Connor. “I don’t think the songs are very original or very different. I don’t think the music is some great new form of music. They’re just songs.”

Two samples of the O’Connor Dig:

“I like Kate Bush . . . so it’s quite flattering for that (comparison to be made). I’d rather be compared to her than someone that I really detested . . . like Suzanne Vega, Joni Mitchell.

“(Record company executives) always think that you are prepared to sleep with them in order to be successful. They all try it . . . with secretaries and layout departments right up to Grace Jones. That’s the way it goes.”

If the singer’s outspokenness has earned her some admiration as a role model of fierce independence, it can also make her seem petty and ungrateful. Still, she isn’t one to apologize, maybe figuring that the world owes her one--remember, she isn’t that far beyond some profoundly unhappy years, starting with her parents’ divorce when she was 8.

“I think it had a huge effect,” said O’Connor, one of four children in the family. “You always think it’s your fault for some reason. It left me really confused.

“When I was about 14, I started stealing. Just for the sake of stealing, not because I wanted the stuff. I got caught loads and loads and loads of times. . . . Just silly shops. Stationery shops. I’d steal paper, steal toys.

“The last time I got caught stealing I stole a pair of shoes from some shop and it was too much for my father to handle, so they decided it would be better for me if I went to this reform school, so I went.”

The crowning blow came when her mother--her main source of encouragement as a performer--died in a car accident three years ago.

“I just felt like there was nothing left. I was like suicidally depressed. I wanted to self-destruct, which for me is smoking my brains out. I would go out and buy 60 cigarettes and smoke the whole lot just because I knew it was really bad for me.”

O’Connor, who dedicated the album to her mother, doesn’t enjoy discussing all this, but she is doing better than she used to.

“Before, I couldn’t speak about it without shaking. . . . The thing that really helped me work it out most was when I had my own baby. It’s made me much more confident about myself. Things become more apparent.”

In keeping with her established snail’s pace, O’Connor has written only a couple of songs for her next album, but she has some other projects going.

She has a new song, “Jump in the River,” featured in the new Jonathan Demme film “Married to the Mob.” She will record “Someday My Prince Will Come” for an anthology of Disney songs by various artists and is planning a collaboration with Bjork, the singer of the Icelandic band the Sugarcubes--one of the few things she likes these days besides rap. (In each city on her U.S. tour, O’Connor had a local rap group open the show.)

The American swing would end with a New York show in a couple of days, and as she prepared to wrap up this chapter of her sudden career, O’Connor reflected on her most important progress.

“I’m not naive now. I certainly was. And the reason I’m not now is that I made it my business not to be anymore.”