by Jonh Wilde (pages 33-34)

As we speed onward, through the horizontal line of the Dutch countryside, through the decorous, schematic towns and villages, I can't help pondering the melting tension of 10,000 Maniacs. Throughout Holland, they are triumphant, inspiring near hysteria and their half-lit glimmers become flaring rushlight. Through Amsterdam, Apeldoorn, Venlo, their flickers become flames, their performances almost brutally overwhelming.

Somewhere between sleepy Apeldoorn and slumbering Venlo, I decide that the sharp sparks of Maniac pop shatter because of their many-coloured natures and not in spite of. The motley, many-sided Maniacs ("Gee, what a goofy bunch," as Dennis Drew says, selecting some acceptable press shots) suck in their fascinations and impressions and breathe out a flash of fiery intuition. As their perceptive manager, Peter Leake was to say to me later . . .all those influences are there, but they're all accumulated and what emerges... is something completely new, so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

As Apeldoorn awakens to this compelling Maniac spell, they end their set with something called Colonial Wing (formerly Toy Helmet), a song which ebbs with a soft sway, but builds and builds . . . and uncoils like a great beast, with such sacred terror ... bass broods dark, ugly, guitar cracks and splashes wildly, Natalie screams the scream of a waking nightmare and finally the Maniacs dispel the stabs of criticism that have suggested that they possess neither shade nor extremes. It is here that their stage becomes a veritable battlefield of passions -- leaving a fully wakened Apeldoorn gasping and crying for more.

Post-gig; Jerry Augustyniak, the anchor, the thrusting, sniping Maniac propulsion... leans silently against the club wall, the buzz of craving applause still rings loud in his ears, he wonders wistfully... perhaps he wonders if life could always be like this. I ask him and he tells me it makes him feel "important". To Jerry a good night like this is when the crowd enjoys it, gives the band energy "so we can give it back to them".

Post-gig; singer/poetess, Natalie Merchant, the spell, the whirl and the elegance of the Maniac race... leaves the club and disappears into the sorrow-stained night, leaving behind the buzz of craving applause, heading toward the open fields where she'll stare up at the stars and dream.

Jerry and Natalie are the two Maniac extremes -- veering away at grit and fleece and meeting back at energy flux. They originally met in front of a Jamestown record store, as Natalie describes.

"He was playing the congas in the street with all these black girls dancing around him. That's when I knew he had to be in the band."

Between them lies time and a story, unfolding in provincial Jamestown, New York state.

Before Maniacs came The Obsession ("hard-core pop") and Still Life, Robert Buck met up with a bassist who couldn't play, Steve Gustafson (Rob sitting in a factory listening to a college radio station, run by Steve, ringing Steve up, pestering him to play Elvis Costello songs) and keyboardist, Dennis Drew.

After picking up "elder statesman of the Jamestown New Wave", guitarist John Lombardo, the band struggled on, Steve inviting sixteen year old Natalie Merchant down to the loft where they rehearsed, promising a party. As Steve recalls, "She didn't realise she was a singer then, it was the last thing she'd thought about. After we did our first gig with her, we had to beg her to come back the next night. She was saying, 'No way am I going to do this again. My mom tells me you guys are evil!!'"

With Jerry completing the line-up of the formative Maniacs, they began gigging in earnest, the first song they performed live as a six-piece being a particularly uncontrolled version of The Gang Of Four's Armalite Rifles.

1983 saw the recording and release of their first vinyl, the EP Human Conflict Number Five on their own Christian Burial label and following that with their debut LP, Secrets Of The I Ching. In stark comparison to the self-assured thoroughness of their current set, both those early records stand as flawed (part) masterpieces, with only Tension from the EP and a handful of songs from the LP hinting at the dynamics and hulking power that was to unfurl over the subsequent eighteen months. Those early releases possess a gleem of brilliance and occasional loose fragments of spine-chilling force, but -- at this time -- all those influences and fascinations were being digested and spat out with too much self-consciousness and too little real imagination. However, Peel picked up on I Ching, particularly the album's closer, My Mother The War and anticipation set in.

When I first saw the band live, at New York's Danceteria last July, I wrote that "there was too much hesitancy, too little exhilaration, too much self-control" and that "the spikey, contagious pop of My Mother The War is as compulsive as they'll ever get."

What difference a year makes.

All those Fairport Convention comparisons are looking more than slightly jaundiced in the light of now.

This is their first visit to the wider European shores -- though they're making their second British visit -- busy recording with Joe Boyd (famous for his work with Fairport Convention), shaping an LP and single. This time round, the hesitancy is vanished, replaced with a bright, shiny lustre and a steely nerve.

Throughout Holland, they perform with previously untapped tease-and-tantalise opportunism. Where the white reggae of Planned Obsolescence previously plodded and plotted itself without aim, now it careers with stamina and style -- its loping percussion and chopping guitar interlocking perfectly. Where the white funk of Pit Viper previously seemed tired and slouched, now it follows 'New Dub' and escalates to a furious pitch of rising excitement. Where most of their set used to wear its origins on its sleeve, now it shreds those obsessions to pieces, creating anew. All those well-documented influences... the reggae and the folk and the blue grass country and... well, piss on those tidy subsets... now, from somewhere, the Maniac advance steams in from a place called the fray.

Natalie and I converge on her Venlo hotel veranda, post-breakfast to document this heady rise upwards. We note the mosaic-like diversification within the Maniac make-up.

"lt's always been like that", she notes, casting her mind back to the early Maniac days. "We always used to do so many covers and that's what led to us trying to do all these different styles. We'd do a reggae number, then a funk number that we had learned from someone else. Then, we'd throw in something that we thought was contemporary at the time. So we'd do a Joy Division song - She's Lost Control -- and we'd all take turns singing. It was great!"

The provincial unworldliness that characterised the band then still remains in a somewhat more subtle form -- Natalie's onstage elegance and chaste grace contrasting with the band's hick unfashionability (collectively possessing the most uncool shoe/boot cluster in pop music) and still, stiff manner. Natalie, meanwhile, uses the stage like total theatre, spinning,twisting, dancing with a divine sense of time and balance.

"I'm never aware what effect I'm having on an audience. The night might finish and the guys will go, 'God! We were terrible!' But I'II have had a wonderful time. Most of the time, I don't even look at the band. It's trance-like when I get on a stage. Losing yourself in performance was something that I heard about but I never believed it could happen.

"The crowd comes to see something honestly and powerfully emotive and that's what we give them, so the day that it stops being like that is the day I want to stop performing.

"We've never been afraid to show different kinds of emotions in one evening, because we experience all these things. You start assessing what you're doing when you're on stage. It is theatre.

"On stage, we're anti-professional if anything. We don't pander between songs. I might make some nervous comments and do some a cappella singing ...I can remember few times, though, when I felt uninspired on stage - maybe just at the end of long tours when on-one was there."

The perfect nights?

"Oh... just that moment when you transcend and you forget who you are and where you are or what song it is, when you're just there, in the middle of it. It's the only kind of meditation I can do."

As far as her lyricism is concerned, she still places a large emphasis on the sound of words, the slight nuances, the scrape and graze of unlikely couplets, the sublimity of words themselves. "I've always been amused by words", she laughs. "Now, the lyrics on the upcoming record have much more structure, they're more conscious of poetic structure. There's a definite maturity now and I've decided to pay more attention to the fact that you need to have connecting words. I always thought that being enigmatic was telling only half the truth, giving little clues and never telling all. Maybe I was a little obscure before. I'm becoming more optimistic these days and that's certainly reflected in the lyrics."

Now achieving a clearer sense of context, Natalie's poetry ripples in the wind of the band's new piercing melodic trails. Her voice, shivery, enchanting casts spells that whisper delicately of the struggles of the human condition.

"Well, a lot of the themes on the new records -- the single and the upcoming album -- are different from the old ones. I'm not trying to tackle huge, huge issues within a pop song like I used to. Now, I tend to pick things that are symbolic more than anything. A lot of it reflects on the fact that, when we are talking of contemporary themes, a lot of the details can be nostalgic, but people tend to do the same things now that they did a thousand years ago -- it's just that the backgrounds in which they take place have changed, they're more man-made than natural. Disease. War. Wages of nature against mankind. Those things don't change -- just details change.

"In our songs, you can ignore the meaning of what I'm saying completely. I like certain words that can convey certain mental images. I'm topic conscious, but I'm good at disguising exactly what I'm saying. It leads people to these different conclusions, because they interpret the songs from their own frame of reference, their own experiences."

Crucially, her words now tend to cut through, dagger-sharp, reflecting the total rejuvenation that has happened this last twelve months. The new single, Can't lgnore The Train is typical of their new aspirations, typical of the chanting, pelting deluge of chords, typical of the grasp of bursting, boiling dynamics. As Rob Buck was to convince me later, Joe Boyd has inspired the Maniac backwash to use its live vivacity as prototype. The single (as well as the new LP tracks I've enjoyed a pre-release peep at) boasts an assertive pop individuality, brilliantly harnessing the deft confidence they now show onstage, embracing both sentiment and simplicity in their warm glow.

Natalie, meanwhile, puts it like this.

"Our music has dynamics, it has crescendos and de-crescendas which don't exist with most bands. A lot of bands choose just one volume throughout a song, with maybe one break. Also, lots of bands don't bother putting the lyrics on sleeves. Well, some people think that's good because it leaves the listener to his/her devices. To write down the lyrics, that's revealing yourself alone -- to tell people something you've thought and you've laboured over and you've felt at one time, put it all on one piece of paper and say HERE. I think that's revealing enough, whether it's talking of your own experience or watching someone else's experience."

People are naturally going to see Natalie Merchant as the primal force in the Maniac mash which might be understandable (considering her many charms) but slightly unfair (considering the growing strength of stylistic charge that the rest of the band now offer). As I sit in their Venlo hotel, on the last day of my four-day Dutch sojourn, I listen to Dennis, Rob, Jerry, Steve and John etch out their own perspectives on the rise of 10,000 Maniacs, struck by their total and absolute faith in this unwinding, rolling drama. It's John Lombardo who finally draws out the greatest shake of absurdity in all these music compartments.

"It would be uncomfortable if, when we did a country song, it sounded like Tammy Wynette - then we started a reggae-influenced one, singing, 'bout ganga maaan'. We try not to exploit style. We sing the same kind of songs, but generally it concerns themes that are important to us. All these lists of influences? It's like doing a painting, and someone coming in and saying, 'Hey! I see you use blue here for the sky! Is that influenced by Dali? Dali used a lot of blue.'

"lt's the same as someone coming up to us and saying, 'Hmm. . . . I see there's some reggae in there. Were you influenced by The Police?"

Just now, the band seem the perfect compliment (onstage) to Natalie's tireless twists and spins -- vocally/physically -- and her playful song interludes -- whispers and fragments of some favourite old folk songs. They now seem the perfect compliment (on record) to her musky vocal charm and her comprehensive word images. When she talks of wanting to put all her experience in that live performance, just let every drop spill out, I'm not wary of saying that -- between the faint tickle of Tide or Back O the Moon to the escalating sexual-sensual climax of Colonial Wing -- they're close to grasping some of the crucial extremes; shaping the loneliness and chaos of great sadness and the tornado-force of great joy with a reassuring strength of imagination. Beyond that, Natalie's words spin out. . . marvellous and mysterious, seemingly aware of their own masked nature but settling with half-glimpses and split glances. Besides, she tells me that "I feel I reveal myself more when I dance than when I sing." On stage, she'll spin and spin, as the other five Maniacs almost casually carve out these twilight melodies that seem (at first) too softly persuasive, too wholesomely calm but... scatter and swarm and catch you up in their infectious magic touch.

"lt's good that there's a sense of joy about our performances now," Natalie reflects. And, as she looks out onto the still, early-morning hushed Venlo streets, I ask her to try and sum it all up, all those spins, all those beautifully strange word-marriages, all that joy ...

"I think we're romantic. I certainly romanticise in my songs, try to lift everything above the subliminal. If you can't glorify things like matadors and great painters... if you can't glorify human life. . ."

Her voice ebbs away to an untroubled, comfortable silence. Sometimes silence says it all.