Tim talks to some mad violin woman.

The girl onstage is tiny, dressed in a flimsy minidress and a pair of very cool blue shoes. She is dragging the unholiest racket out of an electric violin and singing, in the sweetest voice, "That's the sound of your brain cracking". She is Tracy Bonham.

Born in Oregon into a musical family, Tracy is the classic case of a child prodigy gone sour. She took up the violin at the age of nine and ended up winning a full music college scholarship, "but at the same time I was kind of rebellious and into rock 'n' roll and always grounded, so I wasn't particularly like any of my classical friends, who just never seemed to get in trouble. So two years into college I just decided to be impulsive. So I moved to Boston to become a singer." Of course, being in the town that has spawned so many great American bands must have helped. "Yeah, that really inspired me. I've been in Boston for about eight years and it wasn't until about four or five years ago that I started to go out and see bands and that's what really kicked me in the ass. I wanted to be in a band, it looked like fun."

The product of this kick in the ass was an EP, 'The Liverpool Sessions', released in August of '95. Six of its seven tracks were raw, lo-fi, call it what you want and showed up the influence of people like Courtney Love and Polly Harvey in Tracy's sound (a fact she underlines by sandwiching her live set between Hole and PJ Harvey covers). She grimaces, "Y'know, 'The Liverpool Sessions' seems so juvenile to me. It doesn't seem like a body of work, it's all over the place, immature and at the time when we were recording it, I felt that way. I wasn't used to being in the studio doing my own stuff, I didn't know what I was doing. I still had members in the band I wasn't sure about- I was confused and I think that really came out in the EP. I like to see the differences now, because it looks like I might be growing up." The seventh track on the EP is very strange. Called 'Big Foot', it seems to be an old man making up the lyrics to a song on the spot. Tracy's face lights up when I bring this up. "That was my grandfather...God, that was so long ago, when I was ten or eleven. He's a total nut and he's very musical, he claims to play every instrument- I think that's where we got it from. We used to camp a lot and my grandparents had a trailer they used to take along. And he made up this song, my stepfather played a beercan, someone else played a folding chair, that made a great sound. And thank God, my mum still had the tape twenty-odd years later".

A year later, and we have Tracy's first proper album for Island Red, 'The Burdens Of Being Upright'. "I called it that because I feel that we, as two-legged creatures, are rather peculiar, with strange behaviour, strange habits and quirks, particularly in the way we treat ourselves and each other. And this is what I think all these songs are about. Some of them are about 4 years old, some of my first and some were written in the studio, so there's a broad span of my life and my experiences. Even going back and writing about past experiences that I had in my early, early 20s, bad relationships where I let myself be treated in ways that I would never let myself be treated now, just being a naïve fool, letting someone manipulate me and dominate me. You learn from those, and I'm pretty much unscathed, but I still had to write about it."

Only one song has survived from 'The Liverpool Sessions', and even that had to be heavily reworked for the album. 'The Real' sums up the themes that run through the album, the idea of being manipulated by someone you thought cared about you ("I know the sun's around to wake the dead / You've got, if anything, a bigger head") and the sense of culture shock that comes of being plunged into real life after a sheltered classical upbringing ("Only the real world is so unreal"). Sounds like the rock 'n' roll lifestyle is catching up... "There's a lot of pressure. You just have to either sleep or take drugs. I'm understanding now why drugs are so popular in rock 'n' roll. There's some weird pressures I'd never even thought of, like talking about myself all the time, that's strange. I'm not really used to it and don't know if I ever will be. But I'm just trying to be myself. I don't want to ever have to fake being some kind of rock 'n' roller. I'm just a musician that's been through phases and is going through a phase right now. I'm not trying to be anything but me, but I see a lot of stuff. I experience a lot of stuff through other people and that's kind of interesting"

Also interesting is Tracy's choice to sign to Island Red, a major label and a surprising choice given the number of smaller, more credible, independent labels in Boston. "I was so new to everything and trying to get my shit together, writing songs, that I wasn't really thinking about a path. I just wanted to put out something. Cherry Disc, an indie label in Boston, and I were talking about putting something out and then a flood of major labels started calling me. So I just chose from what I had. And I think I made the right choice, because Island feels most like whatever an indie label is, down to earth, not corporate and cold, the people seem to genuinely care about their artists. And they had a roster that I really dug; Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, even William S Burroughs. Most major labels probably wouldn't stick by someone like him, because they're just factories".

Tracy's recently released first single, 'Mother Mother', takes the form of a letter from a young Tracy, just left home, to her worrying mother. "I'm hungry, I'm dirty, I'm losing my mind- everything's fine," comes the reassuring chorus. By now, MTV and the radio will probably have picked up on it and it'll be annoying you like hell. "It's got to the point in the States where people are starting to say "Tracy, I'm so fucking sick of your video, please do something about it". Which is good, it's gone a lot quicker than I thought it ever would. I had no idea. MTV is the Almighty one. It's good in some cases and horrible in others and the fear of being over-saturated everywhere and then fifteen minutes later it's gone and everyone just wants to stomp all over you, that scares the shit out of me. But then I just have to keep on going and not let that get to me". A few hours later, Tracy finishes her ludicrously great violin-driven cover of '50ft Queenie', wrenches a final few bursts of feedback from her electric violin, and stumbles offstage. Judging on this, you believe she will.

Tracy Bonham was talking to Tim, in September 1996.