Cole Porter: Red, Hot and New : Fund-raising: 26 years after his death, the great American songwriter’s music still intrigues pop figures. Artists from U2 to Tom Waits perform on an album featuring his songs that will benefit AIDS charities.

Cole Porter couldn’t have been farther from the working-class-hero profile of your average rock ‘n’ roller.

Born into privilege, the man who wrote such pop classics as “Night and Day” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” before Elvis entered grade school attended Yale, where he led the Glee Club and was a member of the Whiffenpoofs.

The Indiana native studied composition in Europe and spent much of his life hobnobbing with what is now called the jet set.

So why does the music of Cole Porter, who died in 1964 at age 73, serve as the foundation of an AIDS campaign that is shaping up as the most ambitious pop charity project since the 1988 Amnesty International world tour?

The campaign begins Tuesday with the Chrysalis Records release of “Red, Hot and Blue,” an album that features interpretations of Porter songs by 22 contemporary pop artists, including U2, Talking Heads leader David Byrne, Sinead O’Connor, k.d. lang, Tom Waits, Neneh Cherry and the Neville Brothers.

Leigh Blake, a London-based filmmaker and the project’s co-director, said Porter’s music was chosen for both aesthetic and thematic reasons. Porter himself, Blake said, was homosexual.

“Cole Porter was one of America’s greatest songwriters, and his music spoke about love and sex and experimentation with intelligence--and that’s what you want when dealing with an AIDS benefit,” Blake said by phone from London.

“I remember in the early days of the project, listening to the lyrics and thinking, ‘My god, how appropriate.’ Lines like ‘Just the thought of you . . . makes me stop before I begin . . . ‘cause I’ve got you under my skin.’ ”

Additionally, Blake said, there was great enthusiasm among today’s artists for Porter’s songs--and the challenge of interpreting music from an earlier era.

Neneh Cherry, the London-based singer whose “Buffalo Stance” was one of the most enticing singles of 1989, opens the warm, imaginative album with an especially bold version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Using only a trace of Porter’s original lyric and melody, Cherry turns the lighthearted expression of romantic obsession into an aggressive hip-hop warning about AIDS. The title line, in the new context, can be seen as either the statement of an AIDS victim or a pregnant woman who fears her baby may have the disease.

Similarly, Porter’s own classic rhyme “Use your mentality / Wake up to reality”--which Cherry preserves--becomes an AIDS slogan, both a warning and a cry for greater support of AIDS research and its victims. Cherry adds her own rap slogan: “Share your love / Don’t share the needle.”

A few other artists also take considerable liberties with Porter’s music, but most keep it pretty much intact. U2 approaches “Night and Day”--one of Porter’s most memorable love songs--with the same anxious rock intensity the group brings to its own expressions of devotion. And O’Connor sings “You Do Something to Me” in a ‘40s torch style that preserves the confessional tone of her “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” album.

Byrne offers an appropriately playful treatment of “Don’t Fence Me In,” while lang gives an especially affecting vocal intimacy to “So in Love.” Not everything, however, works; “Love for Sale,” for instance, a once-scandalous song about prostitution, is embarrassingly labored by the Fine Young Cannibals.

One reason Porter’s songs hold up better than almost any other pop composer of his day is that there was an underlying tension in many of them--a sly, almost mocking humor in the lighter tunes and a melancholy pessimism in many of the most beautiful.

Some of the lyrics on “Red, Hot and Blue” serve as a poignant and uncanny commentary on the suffering and heartache of the AIDS struggle--a commentary that Annie Lennox seemed to sense in her moving vocal on “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Sample lines:

“Ev’ry time we say goodby / I die a little / Ev’ry time we say goodby /I wonder why a little / Why the gods above me / Who must be in the know / Think so little of me / They allow you to go.”

Blake, who’s organized the project with New York art critic and lawyer John Carlin, said one disappointing note about the “Red, Hot and Blue” campaign was the inability to secure a corporate sponsor, which would have made initial financing easier. “We approached lots of potential sponsors and were given all sorts of excuses, but the (truth is) there is still a stigma associated with AIDS that people and corporations don’t want to deal with,” Blake said.

The album will be followed by an ABC-TV special Dec. 1 and a home video in April. Both will feature various short films as well as videos of more than a dozen of the songs made by directors Alex Cox, Jonathan Demme, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders and others. Proceeds will go to AIDS charities.