Isn't it great to ADORE again?

Let the dullards and myopics who tell you that popular music can no longer affect, thrill or, inspire, shrivel up and retire to their own little miseries. Let those who demand nothing more than something less, be taken and pointed at in public places. Let those who tell you it's been a bad year for pop, be told loudly about The Sugarcubes, The Pixies, The Triffids, Throwing Muses and, most of all, 10,000 Maniacs. Five grounds sparkling wildly within the borders of something guitary, something inevitably traditional. But they tug, they tangle, they fill the frame with special colors. 10,000 Maniacs have dizzy hues that will take your breath away.

There's a strangeness here, a salvation resisting the knotty dictates of the New Pop Brutalism (Young Gods, Dinosaur, Pussy Galore), preferring to ensnare through a curious inside-out movement, an exquiste reversal revealing otherness inside previously familiar walls. Language, control, emotion, all resonate with kaleidoscopic vigor. The fingertips are touching.

Natalie Merchant from 10,000 Maniacs is looking for a word.

"There ought to be a way of describing what someone like Kristen Hersh from Throwing Muses is doing. It's not pop or rock or folk, it's something with a bit of all three. I can see a link between us, but we're obviously different or we wouldn't have different names, we'd just be Pop Group One, Folk Group Two, whatever."

10,000 Maniacs are molding the word in Columbus, Ohio, halfway through a tour with R.E.M. it's a testing time, a period of introduction, of ascendance. The full force of the Maniacs' oblique beauty is only just beginning to haunt America, a couple steps behind the British response, a reaction to their new LP In My Tribe and recent British dates, hastening a return to these shores this week.

To see 10,000 Maniacs live is to witness them at their most awkwardly impressive. Merchant uses the stage like no other, hurling herself between self-possession and elevation, shyness and ebullience. And then there's The Voice, a starting, frisky, thing.

"I can never listen to live recordings of myself. A live performance should exist for that moment alone."

We're sitting in the dressing room after the gig, just thinking. Suddenly Natalie shouts, "Hey look. MOOR GNISSERD!"

Excuse me?

"Dressing room backwards. The only joke I like is the one about Professor Backward falling down a liftshaft and no one listening to his cries of 'Pleh! Pleh!'"

Do you ever feel strange Natalie? An outsider?

"Doesn't everyone?"

10,000 Maniacs sprinkle an emotional simplicity that sits uneasily in these cynical days. People who understand the group understand when to cry, when to burn, when to tingle at the whirly ease of it all.

"I was talking to this woman who said she plays our Verdi Cries every morning when she wakes up, so that she cries. What a horrible way to wake up! You should be listening to something uplifting, something to make you happy."

Do you ever want to be saddened deliberately?

"I welcome it, but I never really demand it."

Are you responsive to it?

"Yeah, sometimes a little indulgent. I can find something sadness in just about everything. Even in the happiest thing there's the sense that they'll be destroyed by their impermanence. It's not a desperate sadness though, more of a feeling of melancholy. I'm trying to get less scared by transience, to convince myself that change is good, that I should be in love with progress. To resist change is foolish."

There seems a lyrical concern within the group for snatching at the past, keeping it in photographs, memories. In a country held together merely by the myth of some collective past, such nostalgia might be dangerous.

"There was definitely more of that on The Wishing Chair album, whereas this one is more concerned with the present. On the last record there were songs about the Cherokee Indian, the origins of labor unions, Arbor Day. This time the references are more contemporary, just to show the audience that what we're doing is very much concerned with the present. I'm getting pretty tired of people coming up and calling us hippies. There were a lot of good things about hippies, but their frame of reference drew too heavily on the past. We're not interested in taking that far back any more. Everything on the album is in the absolute present."

Let that be the first in a series of slaps about the head for those peculiar souls who are getting obsessed with the idea that the gap between 10,000 Maniacs and Jefferson Airplane is tissue thin. 10,000 Maniacs are perhaps the most 'modern' group we possess.

"I hate all those modern and post-modern buildings, these mirrored towers. Everyone is exposed to a conditioned environment, losing contact with the natural world. We're losing our sense of history, even though in this country 'old' only means 100 years."

Sometimes Natalie stands at the edge of the sea or stares at the sky, she feels like a tiny speck. She feels sort of the same under the giant buildings of midtown Manhattan, "except then it's not a spiritual thing, just a violent, brutal, threatening experience.

"It really irritates me when we drive through the country and every couple of miles there's these adverts for fast food or whatever.. It's like they're throwing a TV in your face all the time. I'm still trying to work out why people let it happen to them."

Have you ever embraced it?

"I suppose I must have done when I was young. I remember my mother taking me to McDonald's and being very excited. My father had this dream of living in suburbia so we moved to Detroit and for a while I was in love with the clean lines of modem architecture, bean bags, and all that. We used to watch 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' on TV, used to wear polyester clothing. Suddenly, I rejected all that, began to hate it. I don't share the usual American desires, needs, fears."

Refreshing that 10,000 Maniacs can appropriate their own culture without resorting to the easy option of regurgitating mediocrity for its kitsch value, for its camp appeal.

"My grandparents were Old Europeans with the morality that entailed. I used to think they were really odd, had a strange view of the world, but now I realize that they understood it much better than anyone around them."

Have you got a strong moral sense?

"I think I need guidance, a teacher of some sort. There's so many things I don't understand about how I respond to the world, so many ways that I'd like to change. I'm losing more and more faith in human nature the more I think about what goes on. I was much more puritan when I was 15 than I am now. I've learnt that other people don't necessarily live like me and that they have the right to do that. I don't think any one person can ever completely know another person and to become close enough to unite is just a dream. I think we will always be alone."

Do you believe in love?

"I believe it's a confusing issue. It should have about 200 different names rather than this blanket term that never communicates what I'm feeling. I believe it exists, what people tell me it's like. I certainly loved my grandmother."

Could you ever live with one person for the rest of your life?

"No, definitely not. I'd always be thinking about the 4.5 billion other people on the planet. I love people. It'd be nice to have the companionship of certain people until I die, but I wouldn't like that mutual exclusivity. My mother's been through several marriages and it seems to me as if marriage is just a really uncomfortable legal situation that you have to endure until it's over. It's a useless institution. When my mother got tired of her men she'd get rid of them, which was fine by me because I was getting pretty tired of them too. Sometimes I think love is a very selfish thing, a desperate attempt to stay secure. I think it's possible to love five people at once with the same intensity and, because of that, monogamy scares me. You can love one person but you're only allowed to tell another that you respect them. Maybe it's because I've never felt that intense desire to possess."

Strange that you never felt it. Are you an obsessive person?

"I can think obsessively, but not necessarily about other people. I care more about nuclear arms depots than I do about boys."

The innocent embrace of a much simpler world much bring with it a huge disappointment.

"It does sometimes. Like I went to this reconstructed village the other day. It'd been made to look exactly like it would have done in the 17th century. I had the illusion that this was some sort of paradise, of Utopian society. Then I realized how imbalanced it was. It was run by the church and controlled by several wealthy villagers. The poor weren't allowed into church because they smelt bad or something, and there was probably no welfare state then either. It was probably a worse society than even now. It's too overwhelming to think that people can change en masse. The only way to change the world is by changing yourself. Unfortunately I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about our ability to do that."

Interesting that the Maniacs, Throwing Muses and Pixies share a femininity that stretches further than just female singers. There's a sensitivity, a vulnerability, an almost frightening honesty that hovers between thrilling and tearing your heart apart. It's not merely the words, but also a strange mixture of sadness and ecstasy that, in the Maniacs' case, drenches the charming Robert Buck's guitar parts with weighty emotive desires.

Buck cuts a strange jib, all funny faces and a big, solid frame. He's at pains to point out that he's not related in any way whatsoever to R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, although its a mistake that's been made quite a few times before.

"One day a hotel receptionist thought that Peter and I were one person and booked us into the same room. I came in and saw these to feet sticking out of the bed and he heard me come in and thought I was a murderer or something. When I told him what had happened he said, 'I thought it was pretty strange that I was in a different hotel to everyone else in the band!' He's strange."

Robert's involvement in 10,000 Maniacs is vital as is that of the rest of the tightly-knit group, drummer Jerry, bassist Steven and keyboardist Dennis. They had to cope with the departure of John Lombardo, one of the most important musical contributors to the band, but seem to have pulled together tighter than ever, constructing a melodic base for Natalie's voice that snags with lush regularity.

The production of femininity within such a lineup is not as easy as it might sound. It takes more than a female singer, even one with such a distinctive style as that of Merchant, to turn the spark of a group away from the blustering pop maleness that bludgeons the genre with apparently limitless gusto. Lyrically, Natalie suggests that she'd like to see a world where the female initiative would dissipate male frenzy, replace it with some kind of responsibility. But is it naive? Couldn't women kill just as easily as men?

"I don't think so. Women will fight with the some fierce survivalist mentality as men but only if attacked. Women in the Polish and French Resistance tortured and killed just like the men but without exception expressed horror and revulsion at what they were doing. Women will kill if they are attacked or threatened, but men will often get together to kill because they're told to. They don't seem to have any commitment to doing it. I don't think there are many female mercenaries."

Maybe they've just never had the chance.

"There's lots of countries who conscript women so we'll see how they change. Militancy of any sort repulses me. Every time I've ever picked up a gun of any sort, I've felt physically sick."

A welcome flash of sense this, in a world where the Public Enemys and the Schoolly Ds are lauded as possessing some kind of startling insight into the workings of society just because they understand communication in terms of splattering your conversational partner's head against a wall. 1 0,000 Maniacs aren't scared to care.

"I hate the way I have to have five locks on my door and feel like a victim every time I walk out. Human life is no cheaper than it ever was, people used to kill for less, but the instruments of destruction have made the robbing of that life much simpler. It's just the movement of a finger now."

Can you get solace from the inevitability of destruction?

"It gives you a kind of desperation, an awareness of the real constraints. I love wild animals, I mean I'm speechless if I see a squirrel or something, but then I realize that they're not wild or free at all. There's still people who own the land, who put them there to hunt them, whatever. We've all got these demands and restrictions on us, and we have to do our best within them, retain some sort of innocence."

Both Natalie and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. communicate that treasured innocence, that dark threat, and both use similar frames of reference. It's not the greatest surprise in the world to find that they're more than just friends.

"Sometimes Michael reminds me of a preacher," says Natalie. "I think a lot of that has to do with his Southern upbringing, but he has the,same skill as the evangelists for controlling an audience. Sometimes it's really frightening. It's how he uses that power that is important."

Are you comfortable with the power of being the focus of a few thousand people?

"I'm rarely aware of it myself. What I do get uneasy about is people who think they know me because they know my work. That can get frightening. I've had some people seek me out at home where I live and they think I'm going to be able to tell them whether there's a God or what they should do with themselves. I barely know what to do with myself, so how can I tell them what to do? There's so many... so many lost souls. I don't know where to send them."

How important is Stipe in your life?

"Pretty important and has been for a long time. We lead such similar lives, have such similar work. I was completely terrified when we put In My Tribe out and he used to tell me how great he thought it was. He used to put it on and dance around the room. He's so good when it comes to things like that. Also he understands the more mundane aspects of all this. What its like to have your body shuffled around a country for weeks on end, to touch things but not really feel them, to meet people that you'd like to spend more time with but can't. There's lots, of thing, we can leave unsaid. In so many ways we're matter and anti-matter, with this huge desire to keep apart. We've already influenced each other far too much, begun to use each other's gestures, everything."

Can 10,000 Maniacs take us anywhere, give us anything?

"All we can really do is make our music. It's a very traditional music, but we have very traditional roots. We were bought up on songs that last less than four minutes, on verses and choruses, on a musical style which is never oridnary but also never extraordinary. I'm quite aware that, if it wasn't for the way that we use the vocal side of things on the lyrics or the shows, a magazine like yours wouldn't be so quick to get interested. At the moment it's all coming together a lot slower than we would have liked, but I'm confident we're right in what we're doing. There is some kind of common spirit linking us with people like Throwing Muses, and it's a spirit that hopefully people will appreciate. We're giving all we an, if we can affect people, move them, please ourselves, then that's all we could ever hope for."

10,000 Maniacs are important. It's been all to easy to ignore them in the past, the only people who appreciated them being those who knew where beauty was to be had anyway. The new single from the In My Tribe album, Don't Talk, should se them break at last into some sort of popular appeal and hopefully cast off those outdated hippie jibes. They're giving me more pleasure than any other group for years, making me rediscover an instinctive, reckless desire. I don't imagine I'm the first or the last person they'll thrill so completely, but I am the one who can tell you to open your eyes. The British tour and new record has the group taking changes, WANTING to prove something. I've little doubt that they'll stroke your heart to the tips of your toes.