Don't call her "pale and interesting"...

... Or frail. Or wan. Or shy and retiring. There had to be a harder, brasher, more ambitious side to the Suzanne Vega who exchanged the cosy security of the Greenwich Village folk clubs for the rigours of the arena circuit. "Who wants to see some shrinking violet?" She asks Adrian Deevoy.

The first time Suzanne Vega says "oral sex" it is most physically disturbing. But you get used to it after a while. Look, she's saying it again...

"My sister had Undertow playing at her wedding reception," She says, "and my brother came over to me and said, I can't believe you'd let them play a song about oral sex! He actually said oral sex and another word like that. No, not fellatio... it will come to me later. But the line in the song that got to him was: If I could right now I believe I would swallow you whole."

Later that evening on stage in Rotterdam before singing the opening lines of Undertow, a track off her first album, she says, "I was saying in a conversation I had earlier that someone had said this song was about oral sex and I couldn't remember the other word. It's "cannibalism". Oral sex and cannibalism."

Way past bed time at the Rotterdam Hilton, in the middle of a conversation with a group of record executives, she suddenly turns to me with her round, almost innocent eyes and mouths the word again. "Cannibalism". It's enough to make a grown man cough.

In the flesh, Suzanne Vega is unexpectedly strong, straight backed and confident. She is not - as we have come to expect - crouched, knees against mouth, in the corner of a derelict tenement or gazing reflectively from the nearest available rain-spattered window. It is also worth noting that she is neither grainy nor black and white. The horsehair cassocks of yore have been replaced by a rather dapper navy suit and her hair which is cut boyishly short, occasionally disappears beneath a smart black pill-box hat.

She thinks clearly and speaks articulately, punctuating her conversation with a breathy, high-pitched giggle which descends to a fully blown Sid James dirty chuckle particularly when discussing libidinous pursuits of the upside-down variety.

Could this be the same Suzanne Vega who introduced the expression "frail, wan, waif-like poetess of enormous sensitivity" to the masses? Were these unholy oaths falling from the same mouth that sang intimate laments about being "a small blue thing/ Like a marble or an eye..."? Had we arrived by mistake at a Lenny Bruce convention? Indeed not. For this was the self-same songstress of deathly pallor and painfully introspective disposition. The folk singer turned stadium capacity star who had recorded two massive selling albums (Suzanne Vega, her debut has sold a million copies, Solitude Standing two and a half million worldwide) and found a uniquely diverse following. Under the same roof at her concerts are quiet, studious types who've memorised the lyrics and gung-ho air-punchers, both feet on the armrests three songs into the set.

In much the same way, the Suzanne Vega story itself comprises two distinct and contrasting halves.

There is the mythical version in which a stray waif wanders into a New York folk club clutching her acoustic guitar, wins over the unimpressible audience and becomes everyone's favourite manic depressive and, apparently by accident, a major international recording artist.

Then there is the real story in which a determined half Puerto Rican girl grows up in the Hispanic neighbourhood on the Upper West side near Harlem, hell-bent on success. Her performance-orientated family, driven by their novelist father's artistic enthusiasm, encourage her to attend the New York High School Of Performing Arts (of Fame fame) where she studies dance but discovers a taste for the more immediate medium of music. After listening, all be it unfashionably in 1977, to early Dylan and reading Sylvia Plath she sings self-written folk songs in Folk City, The Speakeasy and The Bottom Line whilst working by day as a receptionist. She is adopted by two managers - a lawyer and a recording engineer - and after three years of gigging and getting turned down by record companies gets signed, records her first self-titled LP and goes touring like a woman possessed to encourage its sales, stopping only to write and record a second album, Solitude Standing, before launching into a massive 11 month world tour to promote it. Far from drifting ethereally into our lives, Suzanne Vega has determinedly kicked her way into our collective consciousness. In marketing terms, she's about as frail and sensitive as Jon Bon Jovi.

So, as she prepares to bring her world tour to a climax at Wembley this month the question on a million lips is: Suzanne Vega - Small Blue Thing or Ass-Kicking Mother-Bitch?

"It's true that I'm not what people think I am," she says backstage at the 2,600 seater Munster Congresshalle in Rotterdam. "I am a little shy but I don't like the implication that I'm timid because if I read in the press that someone was timid I wouldn't want to go and see their show. Who wants to see some shrinking violet? I get irritated with all this, she's so pale and shy and quiet, because I'm not actually that quiet."

"But I would describe myself as a brave person. I think I have done very difficuly things in my life. For a supposedly shy and timid person I went down to the Village every night and sang and had people stare at me and I did well at it and succeeded at it and did it on my own terms. I think that's accomplishing a lot. I didn't listen to any rock'n'roll until I was 20. That was only eight years ago and suddenly I'm well respected in a field that I had no intention of becoming involved with."

"When I was growing up I had to be brave or else I'd get hit on all the time. Fighting doesn't come easily to me but I decided that I wasn't gonna let it happen to me. Fortunately these days I find that I don't have to physically defend myself. Most of the men I'm involved with don't hit women and don't want to hit me. People used to always tell me, if you ever get into a fight pick up the nearest bottle and smash it. Whether I could do it or not is an interesting question. I haven't been pushed to that degree. I'm not aggressive but I'm extremely resistant."

But despite being able to handle herself and fluently talk dirty, it's still inordinately difficult to imagine Suzanne Vega getting blind drunk, trashing televisions, sexually harrassing bellhops and generally being - dare one say it - a 24-hour rock'n'roll chick?

"Well I don't know about trashing televisions or even the sexual harrassment," she chuckles, "but I drink quite a bit. I don't now drink half as much as I used to. There was a time when I was hanging out and drinking a lot. I drink red wine, I like that, gin, brandy and horrible sweet drinks like Brandy Alexander. I went through a phase of drinking White Russians but I found that after four or five of those you'd find yourself waking up in strange and unknown places. So I kinda stopped drinking them in my early twenties. I'd stay up all night at folk clubs like the Kettle Of Fish on MacDougal Street in New York and I'd run into people from Ireland and stay talking to them until dawn. What kind of drunk am I? Well, I'm either extremely flirtatious and I giggle and laugh a lot and sit on people's laps and hold their hands. Or other times I get really sad and weepy. The bad thing is it got to the point where I couldn't remember why I was sad. I'd wake up the next morning and go. What the hell happened? What was I carrying on about? The last time that happened seriously I was very upset and I was telling whoever I was with at the time that they should tell me the truth. Of course he had no idea at all what I was talking about. I don't think I did either! But that's what I'm like when I'm drunk. Either I'm really happy and dancing in the lobby or miserable and a pain in the ass."

"I got really drunk when we were in Australia recently. But wild drunk as opposed to quiet and sad drunk. It was very badly timed because I had to sing the next day on live television at midday. But they told me that I was dancing in the lobby of the hotel the night before and suddenly I woke up with this amazing hangover and found myself coming to on midday live TV in front of two million people. But my hangover put me out of commission for quite a while - they've got worse as I've gotten older. I got sick afterwards."

Would the author of such tenderly written songs as Luka, Tom's Diner and Small Blue Thing describe herself as a bit of a party girl, then? "I used to hate them," she says, "but I really got into parties when I was 19 or 20. But at that time I didn't realise that the best way to talk to someone was to get them to talk about themselves. I hadn't really learnt the basic rules of human company. So I would always talk about myself. I'd just corner someone at a party and tell them every single thing I'd ever thought in my life and they'd generally run away. I remember cornering one poor guy and talking to him until six in the morning. I was still going and he said, I think maybe you should have something to eat."

"I'm different at parties now. I get dressed up and put on my make-up and if I have a couple of drinks I'll dance and have a good time."

The sexual content of your songs is often overlooked. The aforementioned "swallowing you whole" in Undertow; the rising and falling men in your bedroom in Marlene On The Wall; the breasts and thighs in Ironbound/Fancy Poultry. Has sex always been a motivation?

"I went through a fairly promiscuous period," she says staring hard, brazening out the personal question. How many people did you sleep with 10? 50? 100?

"I'm not gonna sit here and count people!" she laughs. "Although after saying that, I did go through a period when I was actually comparing with my friends how many. That was in my early twenties. I'd just moved out of my parent's apartment; I was drinking a lo, carrying on and hanging out in the Village and... I was exploring! But now I don't think it was the right lifestyle for me. I'm certainly not as promiscuous now. It was too... hectic. You discover that having sex with virtual strangers is very empty too. For me that's not what having sex is really about. To me it's not just the physical thing. That's why I disagree when people say that Madonna is sexy because it's just, Here's my tits. There are so many other things that make sex good, like friendliness, laughing, talking, intimacy, sharing memories. All that kinda stuff. I found that with a lot of men I was very good at talking to them and that surprised some men because they don't expect you to be able to talk to them like another man might. Talking, for me, is a big part of sex."

Have people you regard as heroes ever inspired any of these "untoward feelings"?

"I really like Morrissey because he is so deliberately perverse. I'm not as antagonistic about my shyness but I can see certain parallels. Morrissey has the shyness market pretty well cornered in that respect, because if you have any sympathy with shy people at all you're just completely drawn to him. Then when you go to see him on stage and he just kind of dances around, taking off his clothes, I just go, WHOOOOA! MORRISSEY! I willingly give myself up to it. I become very fan-like, overcome with unnatural desire! If we were put in a room togrther I think that I would... break the ice!"

"Lou Reed is fiercely shy. He can be very nasty in order to protect himself but it's a cover for his shyness. He has a very strange innocence. I saw him walking around at this award ceremony and he's very intimidating when you first see him because he has his shades and his leather jacket. You feel that if you go up to him he might say, Fuck you, get the hell outta my way. I'd seen him all night and I hadn't said anything but finally he walked by me and I grabbed him and said, Oh Mr Reed, I really love your music, or something equally pathetic. It turned out he knew who I was and he was so nice. In fact he was so nice that it made me blush. He raised his glasses and looked straight into my eyes and I could feel myself going crimson and then he said, I'd like you to meet my wife Sylvia. I was in a terrible spin by then."

She has enormous affection for Bob Dylan, citing his immediately pre- and post-electric periods as the most influential anyone has been on her in terms of attitude, expression and musicality. She also liked his little pointy boots.

"I've just read the Robert Shelton biography which was patchy but it was good in that it updated me from the Anthony Scaduto one so in that respect it was informative. But when I see those pictures of him in his oversized jacket and tight jeans and so skinny in his little pointy boots and all pale and intense, that's the character I feel for. If I could have been anyone that's who I wanted to be. It's not so much sexy as neutral and fascinating which I guess is sorta sexy in its own way. Very mysterious and cool."

Is there a lot of bitterness or jealousy in the New York folk clubs that you have become successful after ostensibly using those clubs as a launch pad for your career?

"I hear a lot of different things," she says cautiously. "The people who knew me are pleased. Some of the people that I didn't know that well say, Why her and why not me? and, I hear she's not that friendly anymore. That she's gotten real cool and aloof. But I guess I can understand that. When Steve Forbert and The Roches started to make it I was exactly the same. Why don't they come down for a drink anymore? I suppose I was a little jealous, and some part of me thought they were turning their back on their folk roots. I decided then that if ever I became famous I would never say that I wasn't a folk singer. It seems pretty graceless to me to be on a scene for five years and then deny that you ever were part of that scene. Obviously, now I don't play traditional folk music but I still feel very strongly that I should acknowledge those roots."

"I vividly remember playing when I had just started at around 17. People were saying, She has these little songs, isn't she cute? But I didn't see myself being in any way cute. I used to dress really strangely. Not deliberately but because I'd put on whatever was next to my bed. So I'd end up with long white pants and high heeled shoes or this army jacket with a Vietnamese woman silk-screened on the back and I had long straight hair parted in the middle and no make-up. I never wore skirts because I didn't want people looking at my legs while I was singing. I didn't want guys to make snotty comments about my legs. I used to get them sitting there with their feet up on the stage and their legs crossed or worse still open saying, Hey, baby! Don't you ever smile? It can be a little daunting when you're 16 and you're not even meant to be there in the first place."

Somewhat astutely for a 17-year-old, Suzanne Vega decided that she didn't want run-of-the-mill fame. She wanted a less restricting celebrity that would allow her both artistic and personal freedom.

"I wanted to be famous like Leonard Cohen was famous," she explains. "Because to me, at 17, Leonard Cohen was in this terrific position: he wasn't a pop star so he didn't have to worry about making hits. He was on the fringes and he got to do whatever he wanted on an album without having to worry whether or not it went Top 40. He never got mobbed by wild fans either, it was more like intellectual groupies - people discussed his records."

Cynics would say that this was a precocious young girl displaying the business acumen of a gnarled record company executive: seeing a gap in the market for a female Leonard Cohen figure and personally attempting to fill it.

"I guess that was pretty astute at the age of 17," she laughs. "The thing was I didn't really like anything that was popular. I didn't like Joni Mitchell because she was on every billboard and everyone liked her and I had this great chip on my shoulder because I thought I'd never be popular. I remember liking Ringo out of The Beatles because I felt he was the most unpopular one."

Would it be fair to call you a career woman?

"I suppose I had an idea and saw it through, which is similar. But I think of a career woman as the woman who used to work in the office I worked in who started out as receptionist and ended up as vice president. Instead of doing that I met Ron (Fierstein) and Steve (Adabbo) in 1983 who became my managers. I was extremely cynical at first but I agreed to meet up with them if they paid for lunch. Ron asked me if I was like Joni Mitchell and I said that I was more like Laurie Anderson and he'd never heard of Laurie Anderson and I was thinking, Oh great!"

"Did I trust them? Yeah, I did. But I did get a lawyer to look at the first contract just in case. You know, you hear stories. Then they told me to quit my day job and I said, Forget it. I wasn't going to quit a realistic job and borrow money to live on. But they convinced me. It was never, Yeah, let's go for it! It was always done with great cynicism on my part."

And is the type of fame that Suzanne Vega has achieved to her liking?

"I don't really know if I have become Leonard Cohen famous," she says thoughtfully. "He still has that sort of exclusivity and enigma surrounding him. I guess, for me, it changes around the world. I was very nervous this summer when Luka went to Number 3 in America. I found myself in a position where Madonna is Number 1 and Los Lobos are Number 2. But in retrospect there wasn't any need to get nervous. I'm not perceived as mainstream in America. I'm a "classy iconoclast", as one writer put it."

"In a way it was a bit of a relief when Solitude Standing went to Number 94 and then fell of the US charts. I thought, OK, that's more like what I'm used to! I don't have the burden of people saying, Are you going to write another child abuse song that'll go Top 40? But I'm way more successful than I ever thought I'd be. I just have to figure out what to do with it now."

Photograph caption:
At the Albert Hall, November 18, '86: Psychologically, it was the big turning poin for me, the point at which I first felt I'd become famous.
Everyone was running around like headless chickens and all I wanted to do was treat it like a normal concert."

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