Natalie, the self-styled first maiden of Maniacal mayhem swigs from a bottle of 'Spa-water' and launches into her solo with customary gusto.

Tossing back her raven-black locks, this merchant of meltdown kickstarts her keyboard krieg and lets loose with the virtuoso vocals of Verdi Cries:

'I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand
Sing of a lover's fate sealed by jealous hate
then wash my hand in the sea
with just three days, more
I'd just about have learnt the entire score
to Aida'. . .

A chick with a jackal's head and a tale of fated, doomed love!

I tell you, that has the epic feel of an Iron Maiden conceptual cruncher. And learning a whole opera score in three days! That's a feat of fretboard flashmanship worthy of Ritchie Blackmore.

So far, so good then! But hang on, because to tell the truth, this crew ain't really all that heavy.

I accepted this interview in good faith, certain that a band with a name like 10,000 Maniacs would have a good few blood-curdling tales to tell and, more importantly, songs to sing.

OK, so I knew they were appearing at the Cambridge Folk Festival. But so what, you can easily imagine the Tull getting up to that kind of lark. Anyway to cut a long story short, far from growling about torturing people and going bonkers, this Natalie Merchant seems to sing about saving the world an' stuff.

"Robert (Buck, Maniacs' guitarist) and I just played an animal rights benefit in Washington DC. It was terrifying - it was just the two of us with an acoustic guitar. Every time the wind blew in a certain direction, we couldn't hear each other.

"We haven't thought much about the presentation for the Cambridge Festival, but I know Julia Palmer (cello player from The Dinner Ladies, who featured in Natalie's March solo set at the Donmar Warehouse) is interested in playing with us."

Just as Led Zeppelin have moved from being a punk-era standing joke to become today's most over-dropped reference point, so folk has recently been brought back within the pale.

Folk-tinged activity has taken on the gleam of commercial success (Vega, Chapman) and the status of minor phenomenon as the identifiably similar have emerged (Berryhill, Etheridge, Shocked).

10,000 Maniacs have always had a folkish element, something made explicit when Joe Boyd, a man with a strong Fairport Convention connection, produced their second full album, The Wishing Chair.

Now with 1987's In My Tribe album having just gone gold in America, the world seems to be catching up with the Maniacs.

The irony is that now, when the band are set to give a definite nod to an influence with the Cambridge appearance, they'd rather be at home writing material for the successor to In My Tribe, the album that successfully moved the Maniacs' muse from elaborate wordiness to a more direct approach.

"I just asked myself who I was writing that album (In My Tribe) for; the answer was everybody. I want everyone to understand what I have to say, because the subjects of these songs really apply to everybody, to people universally.

"Though the album reflects mainly on American people and places - Jack Kerouac, The Painted Desert, City Of Angels - subjects like child abuse and illiteracy happen in every culture."

The slightly arcane sentence structure and sheer wordy ostentation of older Merchant lyrics tells you that simplicity doesn't come naturally to Natalie.

"It was an effort, because I have a natural tendency to be verbose. And so to simplify everything, I always had to have that intention in my mind, so that anyone who could read a newspaper should be able to understand my songs. At points I was slightly embarrassed because it was so simple, 'That young boy without a name, anywhere I'd know his name'.

"When I wrote Verdi Cries, it was at least 25 verses long. It was an epic (told you) and I just had to find the four verses that told the story and leave the rest out. On the next album I'd like to find a medium between the complexity of The Wishing Chair and the directness of In My Tribe.

"In the film Wings Of Desire, there's a kind of omniscient entity and that's the voice I want on the next album. I want to be able to express people's thoughts as well as the dialogue and the action."

We're sitting in a park in central Amsterdam, shortly Maniacs play the first of three gigs in 24 hours.

Natalie takes time to smell some flowers and it soon becomes apparent that what her lyrics lead you to believe is true: Ms Merchant is nothing less than enthralled by the senses.

Short-sighted, she carries a pair of battered binoculars. A keen observer, she carries a briefcase full of notebooks and is thrilled by words to the point of reverence: "I live in silence afraid to speak/of my life in darkness because I cannot read/For all those lines and circles, to me a mystery".

To a real word child, illiteracy is anathema.

"I've had at least three letters from people in different parts of America, saying, I work as a volunteer at a literacy campaign at this library and I played the song to a 40-year-old woman, who I've been teaching to read, and she thought it was amazing and cried after hearing it. I know that our bass player cried every time I sang the lyrics when we first rehearsed it."

The Maniacs recently finished a video for the US release of What's The Matter Here. Filmed in the band's native Jamestown, New York State, the video features the delicate subject matter of the song - abused children.

Nowadays, Natalie doesn't see the video as the merciless imagination limiter she once did.

"I used to think video was a tyranny against people's imagination. Then I realized that the people who watch MTV are a certain type of audience, watching of their own free will. If, by way of contrast, they can see a 10,000 Maniacs video, a Motley Crue video and a Johnny Cougar video, then they can judge for themselves.

"Kids need role models, and maybe I'm arrogant, but I think I'm a better role model than heavy metal creatures. Kids as young as ten years old write to me and that's a new part of the population for us - we've always appealed to college age kids or older."

As we're in Amsterdam, Europe's leading drugs emporium, does Natalie have any time for chemical accentuation of the senses?

"I think cigarettes and alcohol are just as powerful as any other drugs and they're tolerated by our culture. I think that certain things can be learnt from drugs and there have been cultures, particularly the American Indians, that used marijuana and peyote in their spiritual quests.

"But as a casual indulgence it's never made much sense to me. I try to live as healthily as possible, so it's a contradiction to take an agent that I know is going to harm my brain and body.

This afternoon, Natalie's dressed anonymously enough, but more typically she opts for a distinctly antiquarian dress code: all chintz frocks and sensible shoes.

Combined with the artwork on The Wishing Chair' sleeve and her formerly archaic lyrical tone, you could almost believe this girl to be out of time, longing for a favorite bygone period.

"Well actually, I do have a favorite period - the '30s. Even with the Depression, there's something about that decade. Maybe it was America's flirting with socialism that I'm attracted to. I'm definitely attracted to the art of the period - the constructivist and propaganda art."

Looking at the person who sang The Wishing Chair, you'd probably expect her to proclaim marriage a grand old institution. But Natalie's not the marrying kind - there's a divide between her love for '30s style and her post-'60s idealism.

"The Wishing Chair was more of a young girl's fantasy type album. The things I'm traditional about are things like music being emotional, an inspired act rather than something motivated by profit-gain."

Perhaps surprisingly, Natalie does not write in an elaborate copperplate, but a brash biro-script. Whatever, she records meticulously and eventually plans to publish straight prose.

"Yes, I've even got the name of my publishing company and its logo sorted out. It'll be called After Dante Books and the logo is a lithograph of Dante (the 13th century Italian poet).

"I have piles of writings. I'm certainly not writing a novel at the moment, but I do have a collection of stories and other kinds of writings. I dream meticulously. All my dream notes look like this - there's a certain kind of notebook you can buy very cheaply in America, it costs two dollars. I've got a stack of these, kept since I was 16."

Of course, this sounds very Little House On The Prairie; very Victorian young ladies' fiction.

In these cynical times, it is easy to mock Natalie Merchant's forthright humanism. After all, doesn't it sometimes come close to the kind of banal sentiments expressed by The Protest Singer - the kind of thing that culminated in Lennon ridiculously intoning, "Imagine no possessions", from the depths of his mansion.

"Sure, knowing what everybody knows about Lennon and Yoko's lifestyle, it is difficult to take that seriously. But it's still an amazing song. When I first heard it on the radio it astounded me. If someday we can do that on the radio, that'll be amazing.

"I think people are assaulted from all directions by information and entertainment, but very little of it has lasting impact. It seems that people remember the text of songs much easier than the text of poetry or prose."

Is it difficult to deal with your subject matter without being cloying or sentimental?

"Sometimes I avoid writing about certain things because I don't want to trivialize things I don't understand. It would be difficult for me to write about Contra atrocities, because I would think that subject matter a little too powerful to go with the rest of the songs.

"It's easier for me to put myself in the position of an illiterate, because I can pick up a Japanese newspaper and it makes no sense to me. Whereas I've never stepped on a landmine."

The Maniacs avoid blithe sloganeering - Gun Shy, for example, takes the form of a direct message to Natalie's enlisted younger brother, yet remains free of the bland generalization and didactic tone beloved of the '60s activist.

"I could have used the same sentiment with no characters at all, but I think it would have completely changed the power of the song. People can listen to that song and it's an older sister talking to a younger brother. But, if I was saying, All you boys in America, don't join the army, because it'll remove your individuality, teach you violent behavior, if you're drafted go to Canada, da, da, da, etc, etc... I could make a big anthem out of it, but it would sound ridiculous.

"It just made more sense to express my feelings about when my brother joined the service. It made it clear to him and he actually quit."

It's this fine balancing that allows 10,000 Maniacs to explore their subject matter without rendering it trite. They remain a band with a magically implicit thrill to go with their explicit topics.