France's pop Lolita has grown up.

She is supposed to be on vacation somewhere outside Paris, but instead, Vanessa Paradis is talking to the press. She is talking in the breathy voice you always knew would come from the pouty lips that have made her a Chanel girl and helped her passage in pop. It's a voice that, on first hearing, is all ingénue, much like the singing voice on her new album.

So it would be easy to slot Paradis next to Mitsou on the shelf of pop baubles and be done with it; easier still when Paradis' Lenny Kravitz-produced album, her adult debut after a teen career as a France's pop Lolita, contains a song whose title dares to be Your Love Has Got a Handle on My Mind.

No flirty act

You might be wrong to think that title gives you a handle on Vanessa. The voice is no flirty act, something which becomes clearer as Paradis explains her tough-minded, no-bull-shit approach to the maiden North American tour that brings her to Montreal tonight.

"It's important to me to go well in America and Canada as much as it is in France, in England, anywhere," she says. "Everybody's always talking about how you have to prove yourself to everybody, blah-blah-blah, but first of all I have to prove myself to me."

So we know she's got attitude and that she's self-assured. The first clue is that she's still around at all.

Paradis became a starlet as the 13-year-old singing Joe Le Taxi in 1987. Blessed/cursed with an appeal beyond her years, Paradis was at once a pop star and a curiosity. The accident of genes that made her look and sound like a sex symbol when she was barely pubescent meant the same people who bought the albums would snicker over the baby-doll voice and the girl singing to a kitten in Maxou.

So it was either find self-assurance as an adult or become one more child-star tragedy, one more pop-culture footnote. But she knew what she was doing in sacrificing her childhood in the first place.

"Maybe I learned quicker than anybody else, but I (chose my career). Nobody forced me to do it. I knew that I would miss something, but I would gain something back."

To everybody's surprise, Paradis' self-assurance put her in a film called Noce Blanche in '89, and her performance made bemused critics concede her talent.

Which brings us to the album. Svengali-ed by cosmic rock love-god Lenny Kravitz, "Vanessa Paradis" is not a bid for credibility. Awash in groovy '60s-isms, it's almost camp, but has at least one great moment, a faux-Supremes song called Be My Baby. And the '60s bits are no accident.

"Of course, it's on purpose. We know what we're doing when we're doing music. It's not a matter of fashion, because the '60s and '70s are really, really fashionable at this period of time. It's just the way you're hearing music in your head."

She likes Sly Stone, Al Green, Bob Marley and Aretha Franklin, but doesn't know why she mostly likes black music. "I like white stuff, too; I like new stuff, too. But if you're asking for my favorites, those people are my favorites."

The tour started in March with dates in France, Belgium and Switzerland, and has gone well.

"It was very surprising," she says. "I've been only touring in France, and people in France have known me for six years. I was nervous about the response of the public, how they would react, and it was very, very good."

'I'm very sincere'

However, she'll leave her trepidation at home. If Canada loves her, fine. If not . . .

"I'm doing my music. I'm very sincere. I'm very passionate about it and I love very much what I do, but I'm not going to do anything to make people love me. They listen to what I do and if they like me it's good. If they don't . . . it's not like a fight.

"I'm not going to Canada and to America like 'I'm so afraid, nobody knows me there, blah-blah-blah.' I'm going there, I'm doing my shit, and if they like it, it's great."