Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs talks sanely and sensitively to Ruth Picardie
by: Ruth Picardie
Like the late, deeply depressing Joy Division, 10,000 Maniacs are a band trapped in the wrong name. They took it from a cultish '60s splatter movie which was banned in Britain on grounds of excessive gore.
The name reeks of spotty youth, punk guitar riffs, death metal screeching; but the band's sound is the glorious, tuneful, classic guitar-rock you sometimes hear on The Late Show. Lyrically, the band concentrates on issues (illiteracy, alcoholism) rather than suburban alienation.
Singer Natalie Merchant, who favours dusty Victorian dresses on stage and off, hasn't seen Herschell Gordon's film and thinks the name has been "more of a burden than an asset over the years". It was coined in 1981, when the band was changing its name every week, and somehow stuck, memorable for the wrong reasons.
If the Maniacs were marketed as Natalie Merchant they might be more successful. True, the band has a loyal following: their last album, Blind Man's Zoo, released in 1989, went "nearly platinum" in the States. But singer/songwriter Tracey Chapman, whose voice is no more powerful than Merchant's and who once supported 10,000 Maniacs on tour, is now a household name.
"I'm as successful as I think I can be, because that's how successful I am," says Merchant, somewhat gnomically. "It's like my drawings and paintings. I've never shown them to anyone but they bring me pleasure, and I know when they're good."
Merchant - a sensitive, self-declared liberal - hasn't posed for album covers, even in the ironic cowgirl style of k. d. lang. For the first three years of the band's life, she sang with her back to the audience, though she later acquired a taste for swirling and spinning around the stage. "The record company realises that the most important thing to us is our music," she says.
"The fact that we never paid much attention to our image has worked well: we haven't had to re-invent ourselves every year. We just remain ourselves. Maybe that's boring to some people; but it's honest to us. I'm not interested in shocking people and not that interested in being a fashion model."
Try as she might, Merchant, 28 (and not in a relationship), is still your regulation pop love object. Serious boy students are hypnotised by her sweet, serious, sensuous face, her thick, black Italian-American hair, her highly personal lyrics. They are fond of shouting out: "Will you marry me?" at concerts.
"That's pretty honourable, for a catcall," says Merchant. "Nobody says, 'Take it off, baby!' I'm comfortable with that. When I was younger my mother would take me to see plays or modern dance or ballet, and I would fall in love with anyone who was under that spotlight.
"There's something sexual about being able to observe someone emoting while, as a member of the audience, you remain completely anonymous. Also, as much as I've tried to be an anti-image person, I've had my photograph taken and it's been circulated in magazines. It makes my face familiar to people who then feel as if they know me."
The rest of the band - Jerome Augustyniak on drums; Robert Buck on guitars; Dennis Drew on keyboards; Steven Gustafson on bass - seem happy in blokish anonymity. Three out of four still live in the Maniacs' native Jamestown, a post-industrial ghost town in the north east "rust bowl" of closed-down steel mills.
They met at college, where Merchant was finishing high school studies and the band, several years older than her, were drifting around, taking part-time courses and running the college radio station. Merchant wandered in one day with an armful of Brian Eno records, which she had picked up in a sale-bin because she liked the covers.
Though Merchant moved to New York City in 1989, the new album, Our Time in Eden, was written in Jamestown, where she rented a house, on and off, for a year.
The jangly pop sound has been augmented by horns, string quartet, banjo and harmonica; lyrically it stays away from the sermonising of the Maniacs' last album. ("O, they tell us there's poison in the well, that someone's been a bit untidy and there's been a small spill"), "I think it's very lush," says Merchant. I agree.
Our Time in Eden is released by Elektra on Monday. 10,000 Maniacs play the Orange in west London on Tuesday. The show is sold out.