You didn't need to be a folk fan to get off on 10,000 Maniacs singing Just As The Tide Was Flowing. You didn't need to know anything about folk music to dance like a dervish and swoon to Natalie Merchant. A traditional song of impeccable pedigree learned from a Shirley Collins album, but you didn't need to even think about where it came from. You just needed ears.

In a perfect world that's exactly how it should be. A music born of the deepest roots, yet serving no master or mistress bar the little girl in the ankle socks and D.M.s with the voice of a goddess. These are 10,000 Maniacs ... this is Natalie Merchant.

Natalie looks at home on the WEA sofa in front of me, making eyes at her friend. Her friend is sitting precariously on a roof outside the window staring hard at Natalie. He's a pigeon and he's called Sylvester. Sylvester is helping to keep Natalie sane while she's at work. Well, not exactly work. Her work is pouring out her heart in a bunch of lyrics, then touting them around the world while her band plays on. No, this is where piles of dodgy journalists queue up demanding you justify those lyrics, that way of life ... this isn't work, this is purgatory.

I've never understood why people like Natalie subject themselves to questions from people like me. What the hell ... if it's going to assist the remarkable 10,000 Maniacs open a few more cloth ears then the whole damn exercise is worth both our whiles.

It's over two years since the last Maniacs' album, The Wishing Chair, featuring Just As The Tide Was Flowing, Scorpio Rising, Can't Ignore The Train et al was released. In My Tribe is finally with us and has already - rightly - been eulogized about in these pages ... very different from its predecessor both in terms of lyrical content and musical stylization, but in its own way even more gripping.

The delay - and the changes - were provoked by the departure of John Lombardo, guitarist and one of the main songwriting forces in the group (he was primarily responsible for Scorpio Rising, Among The Americans and Lilydale). [note: this is not correct. John did not write Among the Americans or Lilydale and he co-wrote Scorpio Rising with Rob Buck.] He was the oldest member of the group, the one with all the experience, the one serious musician, and for a while there the Maniacs were in trouble. . . "Things weren't going very well for the band," says Natalie. "The Wishing Chair got great reviews but it didn't sell very well. We did a tour thinking we'd come back from England and The Wishing Chair would be doing well and we'd do our last club tour and go into auditoriums and by the time the next record came out we'd be big. But we were still playing empty clubs. We went up to Canada and it was cold and it rained and the bus broke down and we lost thousands of dollars. So we went home and we were supposed to write but ... well, John quit. Now he's teaching."

But they pulled it together. Natalie knuckled down, Robert Buck emerged from the shadows as a credible songwriter and the Maniacs were off and running again. In My Tribe, with its effectively incongruous mix of dance rhythms, swirling vocals and heavy, heavy lyrics, is the result. So why hasn't it or The Wishing Chair taken off commercially the way that gushing critics have suggested it should do? It sure isn't because the music's not good enough.

Natalie reckons the name has a lot to do with it. She thinks disc jockeys and perhaps even prospective audiences are intimidated by it, imagining some desperate hard-core band on the other end of it. In Britain she feels they've suffered from the publicity surrounding the Hungerford massacre. All of which begs the question why don't they change it?

"When we signed to Elektra we did offer to change it, we weren't very happy with it. It described us in our first year together when we were raw and doing covers of other bands, but once we started developing our own writing style it didn't fit any more. But I always felt after a while, what does the name matter anyway? What did The Beatles mean? It just means those four people in the band. And 'maniac' is a mistreated word anyway ... it just means someone extremely enthusiastic - it doesn't mean mass murderer . . . "

"We actually played under different names every gig during our first two months together. But it got ridiculous, and that was just the last name we had and we decided to keep it."

So you didn't anticipate there might be problems with it later?

"We didn't anticipate anything. We didn't anticipate touring the country.. going to England, making albums ... we were a garage band and I thought that's all we were ever going to be. I thought it would last a year and I would go to school. I was all ready to go. I'd applied . . . I'd sent in my fees.... we were just learning to play as we avert along. When we were doing Joy Division covers I never imagined we'd have an accordion in the band."

Natalie likes to listen to the radio. When she was 17 she was listening to a local public radio station one Saturday when a syndicated folk program from Scotland was broadcast. She was entranced by it . . . particularly by the unaccompanied tracks featuring a girl singer called June Tabor. She'd never heard unaccompanied singing before and it had a profound effect on her musical outlook. The next time she was in New York she bought two June Tabor albums and hasn't been the same since.

Her interest in June Tabor and - as a consequence - Dolores Keane, Shirley Collins, the Fisher Familv and the Watersons, allied to John Lombardo's love of Fairport Convention, Pentangle and early Byrds led to the startling folk influences that took everyone by surprise on The Wishing Chair.

"I met June Tabor. We were recording in Los Angeles and this man who was taking her to an interview knew how much I loved her and stopped by the studio. She had a restaurant, right? And she said she had our version of Just As The Tide Was Flowing playing on a cassette in her restaurant. I was knocked out ... I was going, 'You mean, you've heard of me???'"

She was probably more impressed you'd heard of her.

"No, I was paying my homage."

But they've moved on - as bands do - and the folkiness is less prevalent on In My Tribe.

"The folk influences are still there, but they're not as apparent. I'm listening to a lot of black women singers now ... gospel, R & B, soul, and that's really affected the way I sing. I also discovered American folk and country and bluegrass music, so songs like Gun Shy are really flavoured by that. I'm so impressionable. Anything I hear I take in."

Anybody specifically?

"Mahalia Jackson. I grew up listening to a lot of songs that Aretha Franklin had recorded and Dionne Warwick re-did versions of those songs. I re-discovered Aretha Franklin last year.

Natalie is already a wonderful singer, and she's well on target to becoming a great songwriter too. But we're not talking boys and lurve and groovy cars here ... Natalie's songs spare no senses and bruise easily. On the new album, for example, she launches a buoyant attack on the romantic Kerouac myth. Hey Jack Kerouac is The Road reading between the lines.

"The guitarist in the band is an obsessive Kerouac fan. I'm not. I'm suspicious of a lot of the beat generation literature. I can find things to appreciate about it ... they led a lifestyle that was pretty incredible at the time - to be leaping in a car and driving across the country high on amphetamines, stopping off in Mexico and meeting young Mexican girls and drinking tequila and talking about philosophy and writing books is a real experimental way of life, inspiring and exciting and all that. But Jack Kerouac also burned himself out and drank himself to death. And a lot of the ways that women are portrayed in his books ... there's a book called Minor Characters written by this lover of Kerouac's who was very supportive of him, and even financially supported him, and the way he treated her - or at least the way she claimed he treated her - was in a very one-sided way. Plus the fact that the beat generation is about youth and vitality... my song is about these people ageing. Obviously Kerouac himself didn't get much of a chance to age that much, but Burroughs and Ginsberg are ageing and becoming part of the literary establishment that I think they were trying to throw out."

Yet the most chilling song on the album is undoubtedly What's The Matter Here? which deals with child abuse.

"I feel a responsibility to myself to be honest and write about the things that affect me strongly. If the only things that affected me strongly were boys and cars, that's what I'd write about, but that's not it. I see people in pain - in this case, children in pain, and it upsets me, it gets to me. It's the sickest crime on earth. To sexually or physically or emotionally abuse someone as young as three years old ... I think that's a time to shelter children from the evils of the world."

And even closer to home, there's a song called Don't Talk, which is very personal. But it's not about the breakdown of a relationship as some people have assumed, it's about alcoholism.

"I don't feel I take a preacher's stance. It's a sensitive thing to write about alcoholism - people think you're on a crusade, but that's not it. It's so strange that something that is recreational to some people is devastating to others. Some people just can't drink - they can't control themselves. It's like some people have a resistance to a germ and some people don't, they have no immunities. In Don't Talk it's just about two characters and the non-drinker has really put in an effort for this other person and just becomes exasperated and that happens too. I've been to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and . . . "

You actually researched the song?

"I've lived with alcoholism. My mother. It's hereditary. My mother and my grandmother, so it's really close. So the song was easy to write. My mother's given up now and she asked me if I'd write the song. She said, 'You write about all these real important things, why don't you write about this?' This was after she became sober. It's been two years since she's had a drink and she's completely changed. Now she's able to cope with the world."

Was Alcoholics Anonymous inspiring or sad?

"It's inspiring because everyone there's made the pledge to stop drinking. But it's real upsetting because they tell you how their lives have been completely destroyed. To hear a man say how he put a gun to his wife's head because he was so out of control. But even if you don't kill people you kill other things ... you kill trust."

What effect has this had on you? Do you now have an aversion to alcohol?

"Of course. To me it's really foul because of my experience. I know I can have one or two drinks and I can turn into a real caustic bitch, so I know I have to stay away from it in the same way I know that cigarette smoke makes me sick so I don't smoke. If there's smoke I get dizzy and have stomach cramps, so playing in bars for years ... plus the fact that I'm dancing and taking in five times the oxygen and there's no oxygen there any more. I'm always accused of being a prude, but it's just self-preservation. I'm a vegetarian too, but I don't lecture people at dinner. I don't say 'Oh lamb, that's a very upsetting meat to me because lambs are real precious and I couldn't kill one and I don't think you could either'. I don't say that, but if they ask me why there's no meat on my plate then I'll explain.

"Nobody had to preach to me to give up meat. The right book was put in my hand and one good conversation about it and I made the judgment myself. If I'd been preached at I would have been feeling guilty. I felt guilty for a year anyway. I wouldn't tell anyone because I was 16 and for 16 years I'd been eating flesh and I couldn't suddenly call myself a vegetarian after 16 years of the opposite. Leather shoes too, that's pretty hypocritical. Once you establish yourself as something people are always challenging it."

Don't you get sick of being in a band?

"I like a quiet life. I love the travel. 14 hours sitting in a bus don't bother me. It's just the constant race ... that song The Painted Desert ... the reason I want to see the desert is because I think it must be the quietest place on earth."

But the other people in the group ...

"It's as much being in a family as you can get. We've been together for six years. We know each other's habits. I know which food gives them indigestion. I know which people not to bring into the dressing room. I know which expressions on certain people's faces mean 'leave me alone'. They know a lot about me too.

"But music is what brought us together and it's the reason we stay together. We really love the music we're making and that seems a good enough reason to me to do it."