ROCK singer Hazel O'Connor seems to have enjoyed fame, although she regretted losing the freedom to sit and observe the world about her. "I always liked sitting and just looking at people. When you become famous all that changes. People watch you, they want to decide if you are happy or not; if you are nice or not. You can't do anything without being judged. It's like you're not a person with feelings any more.

Even now, 15 years on, the mention of her name elicits a standard response - Breaking Glass. It was a first album which inspired a movie of the same name which she co-wrote and in which she played the lead. The soundtrack with its three hit songs, including Will You?, made her famous; the movie brought her to Cannes and she also won the Best Film Actress of the Year award from the Variety Club of Great Britain. Together, they changed her life.

The story was largely autobiographical - young girl singer becomes a punk success. The film and the life appeared to shape each other.

Curiously, neither has made her much money. "Unless you're in the music business it is impossible, I mean really impossible to understand how little money the musicians get. The record companies are the winners. Me, I got 2 per cent - the other 98 per cent went to other people."

Having been at the centre of court cases in the past, she is finally taking her various financial claims to court. "From now on, I'm going to be paid for my recording work."

How does she feel about Breaking Glass now? "For a while I saw it as a handicap, but now I'm more ambivalent about it." She laughs. "Funny the way things go." She seems very matter of fact, if still a bit bewildered. In fact, her face often wears a bewildered smile. Just when it seems she has reached stoic middle age, she becomes a slightly anxious teenager and her small nose-stud is more noticeable. In either manifestation, she is surprisingly uncynical. If ever there was a battered optimist, it is Hazel O'Connor.

"I've always tried to turn the bad things around. You know when something terrible happens you try to learn something from it. Make it positive. There's this idea that when you are in the middle of something terrible you should be able to say to yourself, "well at least I won't have to go through this again'." Her accent is a mixture of many, but the main struggle is between London and a north country lilt acquired during her time in Yorkshire. "I haven't lived in a city since 1983 when I moved to Hertfordshire. Cities are fine but I can't seem to take them for long. LA was too much for me. I lasted about three months."

Even in the surreal context of the life and times of most modern rock stars, her experiences have been strange and confusing, seldom wonderful, often painful. By 25 she had written an autobiography: it was more confessional in tone than celebratory. "It is a funny business - the music scene - but you can usually tell the ones who will come and make a big splash and then just disappear. Often it's the ones who were really unbearable and rude when they were at the top who disappear quickest."

ALTHOUGH dressed in Adidas track suit bottoms and a pale blue hooded top, she is sturdy and doesn't seem particularly athletic.

She looks more likely to be headed for the nearest builder's suppliers. "I plastered the walls in here. Not bad are they? I've done a lot of the work, I'm really a builder, I like messing about with my hands. When I get any money, I'm off to buy a bag of plaster."

Some of her publicity stills are very dramatic, but in person she is short, pale, ordinary-looking and very friendly. Arrival at her small cottage in Co Wicklow is dominated by the presence of Oisin, her affectionate Irish Wolfhound, a massive dog even by the standards of his breed. His head feels as solid as a large stone between my hands. A swipe from his platter-sized paw sends my notebook flying. "I've been told he's too fat. This is the first day of his diet." Babe, his companion - a big, black, mongrel bitch - is physically dwarfed by him but she has great presence. "She came back from LA with us and went through that six months quarantine thing, it's a hell. But she's a real Valley Girl, she never forgot how to play to an audience. She just expects attention."

The dogs seem to fill the room, vying to sit on the same, tiny section of floor as my feet. It is a small house. "We live moderately and modestly," she says. "I've never been rich but I've often been poor."

There are no obvious signs of her career, no rock memorabilia. The piano in the corner is covered by a heavy cloth, a large vase of tiger lilies on the closed lid. The only obvious theme of the room is that of an informal temple created by the religious paintings.

O'Connor still practises the Krishna faith, her husband is a former Krishna priest and is now the production manager of Graffiti Theatre Company in Cork. His work brings him away "we both seem to spend a lot of time on our own, it's good".

"I like single-God religions. When we were kids we went to the Catholic and the Protestant gigs. My Mum stood up to the priest who came to the house and more or less decided we were supposed to be Catholic. She felt we should be let experience both and then decide for ourselves when we were old enough. But the thing I love about the Krishna religion is its sense of festival, of real celebration."

The cottage is 300 years old and is set on a small rise a few miles outside Rathdrum. There are two acres of land and the beauty of the place is in its views. A heavy mist is lying low on the fields but the mountains are dramatically outlined. The sharp winter light is yielding to dusk. Most of the trees are oak and she says: "I told you I'm a great builder - do you see these paths? I'm also a great gardener."

It is all said with a genuine pleasure; she is not bragging. O'Connor has lived here since 1990, the same year she suffered a miscarriage. "I seem to have to accept now that I won't have children. It's something people don't understand unless they have experienced it themselves. A lot of people don't really understand the sense of loss and guilt you suffer."

Currently appearing as Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, O'Connor admits to being initially wary of the role. "It's so ageist and sexist. The character I play is a woman of 47 who fancies this young bloke of 21 and of course he doesn't even see her. Everyone in the play spends their time telling her she's too old and that she should just go away. Can you imagine what it's like spending your nights having everyone telling you to go away? It kind of gets to you, know what I mean?

"It also bothers me that there should be this outrage aimed at a woman daring to fancy a younger man. Men do it all the time, fancy younger women, but a woman is not allowed to."

There was another reason for her apprehension "I had been appearing in The Cuchulain Cycle at the Gallagher Gallery. There I was, wearing this beautiful, formal dress and the show was a success . . . and having suddenly become this beautiful thing, I was going to play a character in a grey wig with her teeth blacked out."

Once the dogs are settled, she begins to explain her story and the route which led an 1980s punk rock star to a cottage in the Glenmalure Valley. "I was raped when I was 16, I was on holiday in Morocco - Marakesh. When something like that happens to you, you just decide, `well, that's it then, nothing worse can happen to me now'." She was born in Coventry. "My father was from Galway, and my Mum's English. The Irish Catholic and the sensible Church of England girl. I have a brother Neil: he's two years older than me, he was the musician. That's how the music began, fooling about on Sunday afternoons with my brother and my cousins. I never thought I was any good at singing. But I enjoyed it. It made me feel free."

O'CONNOR'S talent as a young girl was painting and drawing. "I was always good at art, I wanted to be an artist. I ended up at art college, but not for long. But I'll tell you what happened." O'Connor and a school friend had gone on a holiday. The man who attacked her followed her from the hotel they were staying in. "We had spoken to him." The rape at knife point was very business-like - and thorough. On returning to her room she discovered she had also been robbed.

Back home in England, there was no comfort. "I didn't tell anyone. You just expect that if you admit to something like that happening, people will assume you were asking for it. And if you don't talk about it, you scan pretend it didn't happen.

I couldn't settle at school either. After about two weeks, I left and started at art college. But I only lasted about eight months. I just had to get away." She headed for Amsterdam and began working as an au pair for a Dutch businessman whose dealings she thought very shady. "He sold second-hand cars. They were supposed to, be re-conditioned. He sold one and the thing fell apart before the couple had driven it a few feet. They came back and then all hell broke loose."

Pulling at her cropped blonde hair, she continues a narrative closer to nightmare than fairytale which brings her back to England and various jobs. Having secured a contract with a recording company, O'Connor was still impoverished enough to be grateful to take over as a temporary switch board operator there. She had already done an audition of sorts for nothing in particular, but was on duty when a call came through. "The caller was asking to speak to one of the managers, but no one was in. Finally, having checked just about every phone in the building, I said: `There's nobody in. Can I help you?' The voice on the other end went quiet and then answered `Well, no. I really want to speak to someone about Hazel O'Connor'." O'Connor's response had a touch of Hollywood about it. "That's me" she shouted.

She was then asked if she would meet the director of a projected rock film. It all began happening then, five-star hotels replacing squats.

Yet throughout the early years of her career, her ambitions for success always seemed to be bound up with whatever relationship she had at the time. There were lots of boyfriends - "I always thought `this time I'm in love': most of the time I was wrong." O'Connor admits to being a lonely person, "but I need solitude. That's why I'm here. I've always been very energetic. As a performer, I'm energetic. But then I get too excited and too tired and I need to recover."

She is very emotional and volatile. "I want things to be nice and peaceful, but then I can just blow up and I'm left wondering `hello, where did all that come from?' I want to be direct and honest, but I'm too straight and trusting and it backfires on me. But I hate the anger, I'm very aware that we only have so many breaths in this life and it is terrible to waste even one on nothing."

Aside from disrupting her hobby of watching people, fame brought her more serious problems. "I couldn't be sure whether people really liked me for myself. You want to be liked for yourself."

Her tenth album is coming out in the spring. "I've been working on it here, with Irish musicians, it's the Celtic grunge vibe. And I'm in charge financially this time. I know what I'm doing."

She sings a snatch from one of the songs, "Would you save me? Would you save me from my darkness?" Earlier she had sat at the piano and sung Will You: "It's a funny old song, everyone seems to like it" and of her voice she says: "It's a big voice, a kind of Jams Joplin one, black and white. It had to get better because I sang so much. I did so many gigs. I've toured for 15 years." Her travels have brought her everywhere, except India - "the one place I really want to go. My Mum was there last year." Popular in Poland and Hungary, she has performed throughout Eastern Europe. "I've also been to Japan, I speak pretty good Japanese. She also speaks German, French, Dutch and Arabic.

Of her younger self she says: "I was interested in adventures, and I had a lot. I had crossed the Sahara before I was 18." She had earned a living dancing in Beirut and Japan and even worked as a glamour model. "I did a few topless photos and forgot about them. But like every mistake you make they come back because people want to hurt you. Funny that."

O'Connor gives the impression of someone who has given a lot of time to thinking about the past. "You reach an age when you know, `this is it, let's have a look at it'. And I suppose while one part of me was set on adventure, the other part of me was obsessed with romance and like I said, I have fallen in love so often. But I think the thing about me is that I can get on very well with men, but I'm not an object of romance. I don't make them feel romantic."

She reckons she knows Ireland, its weaknesses and strengths. "Here I am, living here. That person who ran away at 16 is home. My Dad has stayed in England, he's been there for 50 years. He'll never come back to Ireland now. Like so many Irish men, he worked in a factory and stayed.

"He was in the British army as well. Funny the amount of Irish men who fought in the British army."

She feels she has encountered many of her demons: "I have tried, but I haven't resolved them all." Perhaps one is not supposed to? "Yeah that sounds right. I think the whole idea of being alive is trying to figure it out."

MUSIC has given her a life: "I also like acting, I think I'm good at it because I work with my emotions and I can also bring my energy to it." That energy seems to punish her as much as it sustains her. She is hoping to do a stage production with Michael Scott on the life of Edith Piaf, the French singer. But of all O'Connor's demons and doubts, "if I have a fear, it's the fear of dying, the one there is no doubt about. Know what I mean?"

Intending to continue performing, she knows she can survive. But there is nothing defiant about her survival technique. "You just keep on running, don't you? Running instead of lying downs"