"Everyone, was always wondering what we were trying to do - they still are!" says guitarist John. "Even when we started out, we were doing strange versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart and Part Time Punks!! We just let our own songs evolve. Like any band, starting out, it was great to just be avoiding work. Jamestown is 30,000 people - somehow we all fell together and 10,000 Maniacs grew beyond our wildest expectations."

And still growing fast. 10,000 Maniacs are ready to leapfrog to the front of the growing queue of U.S. contenders, having just returned from a lightening visit to this country that squeezed in three, sell-out London dates. They were totally unprepared for the riotous reception that greeted them here, pivoting on the verge of mass acclaim. Though their debut LP, Secrets Of The Ching was recorded as far back as March 1983, their progress over here has owed everything to John Peel's unrelenting enthusiasm. My Mother The War, the single taken from I Ching was played constantly throughout last year and steadily, their reputation was to spread. In June of this year, they released Human Conflict Number Five, an EP which further demonstrated their rich, strange promise.

Their records and performances reveal a deceptive sense of musical crossover and subtle innuendo. Maniacs might be seen as frail and unadventurous, which would be understandable but unfortunate; their bright, occasionally frantic pop is not necessarily 'new' - its elements are fairly familiar - but their execution is completely individual. Taking calypso-reggae, punk pace, folk charm and a slightly perverse pop sensibility... they take it all, screw it all up, stare hard at the world and spread it thick over their shiny eighties surface. Maniacs are (sometimes) musically restrained. They are also spooky, sensational, unpredictable, dramatic, capricious and pained (which makes up for it). Their star is Natalie Merchant, anxious and angelic - who performs with mischief, magic and temptation tangled in her heart.

"It's because people are watching so I get very nervous and the music is so emotional. If I think about what I'm singing, I get angry or cry. Some of the words I can detach myself from, but most of them are confessional. We like to bring up things that are buried. It's a shame that so many beautiful words have become archaic. I sing alot about death... that seems like the most glorious moment."

Her words - artful, abstract armed with the thrill of personal discovery and political feeling - are sung with a distant passion. Natalie seems immersed in the wonder of their sounds and images, their simplicity and their loose associations. It is hardly surprising that she rates The Smiths and The Cocteau Twins as her favourite British bands; both Morrisey and Elizabeth Frazer, in their separate worlds, are among the few to actually re-invent the possibilities of the pop lyric in recent years. Maniacs deplore the constant barrage of banal images that pop regurgitates - through politics to sex. Instead, they bring ingenuity and poetry into their tinkling, thrilling harmony.

Submerged in all their songs is Natalie's jumble twists of imagination, words that glare with sensitivity and an (almost) hallucinatory, haunting flow.

'Greta's cedar hope chest
Is full of pamphlets
Glass shelves of romantic
vignettes
A journal laced with
sedimentary prose
Norma gathers and collects
vintage photoplays
Hair combs valentines'
(Katrina's Fair)

Besides their own lyrics, they have also adopted the poetry of Wilfred Owen (in The Latin One and Anthem For Doomed Youth), setting his tragic war scenarios to their quirky backbeat. In that, and in their own words, the images are unsettling.

As Natalie suggests, "Especially in America, the images used in pop music stick with one, tired old formula. Maybe the bright people stay out of rock'n'roll? We never think of ourselves as unique but people say we are... I sometimes think that what we're trying to do within a rock'n'roll format is totally absurd."

John: "So many people decide what they're going to do first. Y'know. 'Let's form a rockabilly band and call ourselves something with cat in the title'. They set themselves perimeters within which they can operate."

Maniacs meanwhile, incorporate a wealth of styles, sometimes too literally. Their expansive vocabulary of styles works best in a live setting, their performance simmering to the last gasp of My Mother The War - one nervous shudder of edge and elation. Maniacs are not necessarily a straightforward concern, all their eccentricity and angularity working beneath the surface of their noise. Twin guitars (John Lombardo and Robert Buck) etch out fine-grained melodies - Dennis Drew's organ patterns purr delicately, bass (Steven Gustafson) runs fluid and frictional - Jerry Augustyniak's drilled percussion holds everything solid and controlled. Meanwhile, Natalie's wavering, featherlight vocal floats above it all like a tidal rise.