A folkie for the yuppie Me Generation is how Suzanne Vega is all too often seen but as Alan Jackson found out she and her songs are not as innocent as they seem. Picture: A.J. Barratt

Featherweight? Even I, a man mountain at 9st.2lbs, feel muscle-bound and potentially lethal sitting beside her. Our food reacts accordingly: a spinach salad cowers beneath its French dressing in a bowl before me, while a selection of stir-fried vegetables relaxes prettily on Suzanne Vega's plate. An overweight, slightly camp waiter is hovering solicitously around her, wondering if she might like a cup to go with the pot of tea he had just brought her. "Why yes," she replies in her dry, wry way. "I think that would be helpful..."

And so she turns to me, acknowledging an earlier remark that she, more than most of us, must find that people react to her in a manner almost totally dictated by her outward appearance. She sighs in belated agreeement. That certainly is something she finds.

"People think I'm very thin and very pale and think of me as waif-like or whatever, but inside I'm really a six foot, 220lb. skinhead like my brother," she says matter-of-factly, picking up her cutlery. I feel sure that I can see the vegetables blanch upon her plate.

She has the perfect disguise, of course. Not our fellow diners in this Baltimore hotel, not our waiter, not even I suspected this hidden truth. What we are reacting to is the slender, shallow-shouldered New York girl with the large, clear, wide eyes and the near-translucent skin. Imagine the ways in which such a girl might walk on the wild side... by letting those library books run a day or two overdue, by skipping a dental check-up, by deliberately stepping on the cracks in the pavement. But then, as we all know, nothing in this world is what it actually seems.

The difficulty other people have in perceiving her true identity is something Suzanne is aware of, but nothing that bothers ehr too much. That's probably just as well, because those resistant to her discreet charms have laid a variety of dreadful charges at her door.

One allegation is that she's nothing but a time-warped folkie washed ashore two decades late. Another is that she's simply following in Joni Mitchell's Me Generation footsteps. And the third and most serious, members of the jury, is that she's some kind of Joan Of Arc figure, providing musical catharsis for the upwardly-mobile. Honestly, if a girl weren't so well-bred it would make her want to spit.

"The question I get asked more than any other is do I think I'm a folk singer," she says. "When I started off in 1981 it was very easy to call myself that, because I was hanging out with other people who called themselves folk singers, playing acoustic guitar in clubs that were folk as opposed to rock. I guess that's pretty much a folk singer."

She laughs a little, anticipating the next question. Isn't it a pretty problematic thing to be in the late '80s?

"It wasn't something I had a problem with until it started becoming a problem with record companies, who don't want to know you if you're a folk singer. If anything I got a record deal in spite of that fact, and even A&M turned me down twice before they finally took me on. It's like, 'Folk? Oh god, how gauche...' "

Now, Suzanne figures, people can discuss what she is or isn't until the cows come home, while she gets on with more interesting pursuits. To prove her indifference to the subject she neatly strngles her tea bag with its own little drawstring, squeezing the last drops out over the back of her spoon and into the cup. And then she instances the day she defined her own artistic territory - the one on which she received tapes of two songs commissioned from her by Philip Glass, the most avant garde, esoteric work she has done to date, and of the Arthur Baker mix of 'Left Of Center', the pop song she contributed to the Pretty In Pink soundtrack. "I listened to them back-to-back and thought, well, the margins are pretty far apart, which gives me all this space to run around in between."

If the folkie jibe is irrelevant (and Suzanne Vega doesn't see the tag as the automatic insult many other people do), then the Joni Mitchell comparison is erroneous. Mitchell's concerns have been almost exclusively inward looking - she is the high proestess of the confessional - but Vega shivers with distaste at the idea of competing with parallel self-revelation.

If anything, she tends towards anonymity as a songwriter, most often choosing to submerge herself in the points of view of characters from literature ('Wooden Horse (Caspar hauser's Song)' and 'Calypso,' both on the new 'Solitude Standing' album) or of real or imagined third persons. Could this be out of a high regard for her own privacy, or a fastidious dislike of the cult of the self?

"I'm not really interested in other people's details," she admits. "I don't find I want to know everything about their private lives. Brecht, for example, did not write about his affairs... 'Mack the Knife' is a great song on its own merits, not because it's about someone he slept with. I have this feeling that, just because I've slept with someone, the whole world is going to be happy to hear about it."

Indeed Suzanne. In fact, judging from the earnest faces of the male sector of the audience at Baltimore's Lyric Theater the previous evening, you might conclude that a sizeable proportion of Suzanne Vega's public would welcome an assurance that the slight figure in the spotlight was saving her virginity just for them. Isn't this the point at which other people's expectations get beyond a joke?

"That's an interesting idea," she says, tugging at the shoulder of her black outfit so that the hint of something shocking pink is allowed to blossom forth momentarily. "I remember being asked by some Japanese journalists once how, when I look so innicent on stage, I could refer to such things as cannibalism and oral sex. I told them that I'm just not as innocent as I look."

Nor is she. The impressive 'Solitude Standing,' which entered the official British album chart at No. 2 last week, neatly undercuts those CD-ish prejudices by courting subject matter as black as anything favoured by other, more fashionable prophets of doom. But then, perhaps the real problem is that Suzanne doesn't make enough noise to convince sceptics of darker intents, so that all they're left with is an impression of sweetness and light. She's working on that one - on a warm-up date for her current world tour, ironically enough in Woodstock, she was encouraged by her band to take her electric guitar on stage.

"My first time and the amp caught fire," she says simply. "It was a little embarassing, to say the least."

Suzanne Vega has this problem with the rest of the world, which may or may not account for her against-the-grain success. For a large part of the time she feels like an outsider, and most especially amid the conspicuous consumption of her own country. Judging from the massed ranks of her public, many of them seeming to be very much on the inside, that's a position many of us indentify with, whether with justification or as some kind of emotional conceit. It's a feeling she knew as a child, the eldest of four born within a short space of time to parents young themselves, and which was fanned during her school years. It found its crystallization when, in her late teens, she enrolled as a counsellor at a summer camp for priviledged middle-class kids in America's Adirondack Mountains.

"I remember one girl advising another that if, when they went to college, their room-mate was in any way queer, nt to hang out with them or else people would think she was queer too. At first I thought they meant gay, but they didn't. They meant weird, strange, in any way. Odd. And then I looked at myself - there I was, singing Leonard Cohen songs at them, being paid to teach these kids how to disco dance to the Bee gees. I felt so strange."

Suzanne handles this feeling of otherness by internalizing her feelings. From the demure, black-clad exterior to the detached, almost deadpan manner in which she delivers her sometimes chilly, often sinister songs, she is the very model of restraint. Which helps people to preconceive and misconceive.

She feels this is a product of her upbringing, both as a New Yorker and as a member of a volatile if closely-knit family. "My brother says that on stage I seem so gentle that I'm almost disappearing, fading in and out. I think it's a response to violence. It's not because I've grown up in a pasture somewhere. I guess my character is more restraint than aggressive, but Im not a wimp. I will stand my ground. I will fight if I'm pushed - I used to ahve to fight in school, to defend my brothers and sisters. But having seen so much violence when I was growing up - emotional, domestic, on the street - I have an aversion to it now. I really hate it. It makes me feel very sick."

The summation of this feeling comes in the song 'In The Eye', from the new album. With habitual self-mockery, she introduces it on stage by saying that if someone were to threaten your life, and if you had the opportunity to sing as song before being killed, this might be an appropriate one: "If you were to kill me now / right here I would still / look you in the eye / and I would burn myself / Into your memory/ as long as you were still alive..."

Isn't that called passive resistance Suzanne? Why be so stoical? Why not punch the bastard in the mouth (he's going to kill you anyway), or belt off down the road? this stiff-upper-lip-at-all-costs stuff is the sort of thing your fellow New Yorkers go into therapy trying to breaking through.

"I guess so."

But you're desperately holding everything in...

"Well I do let things out sometimes. But again, having seen so many people letting it all out to no good use ... there's only so much hysteria you can stomach before you have to say, hey, let's get a grip. Someone round here had to take charge, keep things moving, do the dishes, make breakfast. If you were to run around being hysterical all the time you'd never get anything done."

Suzanne has the sense to laugh at herself here.

"One journalist asked me, isn't it exhausting to hold that deadpan throughout one song? I thought, one song? I hold that deadpan throughout my entire life."

When she was a schoolgirl Suzanne Vega used to wonder why it was always she who had to set the good example. On the one side were her parents, old enough to do what they wanted, and on the other her brothers and sisters, too young to know any better. that left just her, not old enough to do what she wanted, but definitely old wnough to know better. Enough to make you ask yourself, why me?

"Yeah, sometimes. For instance, it's strange that when I eventually moved out of my parents' apartment I moved straight in with a woman who, unknown to me, had a ten-year history of attempted suicide and all kinds of mental illness. I'm thinking, well maybe she's a little strange, but then I am too. Before I know it she's spending each and every day curled up on her bed rocking back and forth. Obviously I'm concerned, but this is the first place I've had away from home and I'm saying to myself, this is unfair."

It was, it is Suzanne. But it's never too late to assert yourself against the world's unfairness. Sod that good example. Overturn the table. Throw those congealing vegetables at the maitre d'. Order a bottle of bourbon and start talking dirty...

"This is the way that I am," she is saying. "This is the way I have always been. I can't remember a time when I wasn't restrained. It's in my personality. But..."

Yes, yes. But?

There is a part of me that's very spontaneous, that likes to do things off the cuff and be very funny."

I'm sure there is, Suzanne, but ow much do you indulge that part of yourself? Don't you ever feel like drinking too much and losing all control? She nods sagely and for a moment I believe I can hear a skeleton rattling nervously in a cupboard. Am I about to hear that Suzanne Vega has a serious drink problem?

"for a while I would drink a lot and, you know, find myself sitting in someone's lap and carrying on," she grins, those clear eyes fixing me to my seat. "There's this part of me that gets very flirtatious and will let loose in a second, but I find I don't always want to do that. After all, " and here she pauses a second for effect, "you have to go back to being restrained afterwards."

Watching Vega perform at the Lyric again that night, it becomes clear that whatever personal compromises this inbuilt reserve forces her to, it is the strength behind her art. The songs on "Solitude Standing" that work best of all, subvert from within, gaining their force from the melodies in which their dark lyrics are wrapped and the cool, detached and lovely voice that delivers them.

"If you over-dramatize it and act it out on stage, by the end you're looking at a nervous wreck. It's like, oh, please. You have to understate, otherwise you're looking at someone falling apart on stage, which is embarassing. It's the delivery that makes it work."

So, as she relaxes into the world tour that brings her to Britain this week, it's no good audiences expecting her to stray from the microphone and act her songs out in Kate Bush fashion?

"I'd feel very uncomfortable doing that. I've just made a video for 'Luka' and I thought, come on Suzanne, you really should try and put more expression into this. So, I was acting it out a little - not a lot, just some. And when I saw the results it was just horrible, like Oh Jesus Christ. I had to ask them to cut out the parts where I was trying to look defiant or whatever. The least little bit of exaggeration sent it flipping off into another dimension."

You mean, you tried the Billy Idol sneer, I venture sympathetically.

Suzanne nods quickly, shamefaced.

And the Shirley Bassey arm movements?

"Oh no,," she protests in horror. "No, no, no. Never, ever the Shirley Bassey arm movements."

Well that's a relief. What British audiences can expect however is more of the muscular sound previewed on the new album and created by her now-permanent four-man band. The decision to augment her sound stemmed from her own disappointment at the overly-comfortable feel of 1985's debut set, and by the wish to be surrounded by a team of musicians who could contribute to the writing process. Could it also have something to do with creating a sound more palatable to American radio programmers, who have largely ignored her work so far, hence denying her the chart success she has found in Britain and elsewhere?

"I'd be very surprised if I get onto Top 40 radio with this album, although it depends how carefully people listen to the lyrics. I'd been asked to do some radio promotions here and so I went to one station and they said to me, everyone's really excited about your new L.P. - - what's the first single going to be and what's it about?

"Well, I'm saying it's called 'Luka' and it's from the point of view of a nine-year-old child abused by his parents. The guy's nodding but his eyes are starting to glaze a bit. then he asks me about the second single. I tell him it's probably going to be the title track, which personifies solitude on a character, the third party in this relationship, and he's saying, oh, that's nice, and looking desperate. I begin to tell him about 'In The Eye', the third single, wherein someone's life is being threatened, and I realize I've lost him altogether."

US radio could be something of a problem then, but even so Suzanne's doing her bit backstage, signing albums for a posse of lucky winners in a local radio station's promotional contest. Inevitably there's one guy who thinks he's paying her a big compliment when he tells her she sounds far better without any electronics and that she really shouldn't bother with a band. The situation is made worse by the fact that a photographer is snapping away throughout this exchange and the erst of the contest winners are grinning down at her inanely as she perches uncomfortably on the edge of her chair. Does Suzanne Vega fly off the handle and stab Mr. Tactful in the eye with her pen? Not a bit of it.

"Well, that's certainly one point of view," she says pleasantly, handing him his album and shaking hands goodbye. And as she turns as requested to sign the backstage pass a female fan has foolishly stuck to the leg of her jeans, there's just the slightest cloud of annoyance in those clear, wide, wise, restrained eyes.

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Submitted by Sharon Jennings

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