BELLY: PUSHING ALL THE RIGHT BUTTONS

"Her hmmm goes to your heart,
her hmmm sticks in your head,
hmmm, hmmm, hmmm . . . " ("Dusted")
"IF ANYONE offered any amount of money to sleep with me, I wouldn't do it," protests Tanya Donelly with a grin like John Kennedy left her his teeth. "It's free, or it's nothing!"
A good answer, I concede.
"A good question," she enthuses graciously. The question being - would you sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars.
We are discussing the nature of sexual attraction. Tanya and I. She's the motivating force behind Belly, a band with its hand in all the right pockets. It's Tanya who writes all those superficially dippy lyrics and sings the often deceptively fey vocal lines that get buried in Belly's jostling guitars. But there are veins of darkest distortion in there. Grim and grimmer fairy tales of confused and confusing emotional debris, an Angela Carter gothic psycho-sexual "Company Of Wolves" transfigured by the narcotic of dream.
Belly - tested for the Unexpected. And they do a stylish t-shirt too.
"Can you close that door," she yells over her shoulder, as the sound-check cranks up through the wall.
But Tom Jones! Belly cover his lumberingly inept, "It's Not
Unusual" (on the 'Gepetto' remix EP). Is his blunt unsubtle sexuality really a turn-on, Tanya?
"No. Not really. He is totally unsubtle. He's not sexy in my terms, but he represents sex to a lot of people."
You wouldn't throw your underwear at him, then?
"No. No - not at all." She laughs that kind of intoxicating laugh you last heard in a Swinging London movie, "Up The Junction" or "Blow Up". "I've never really been a big 'fan' person anyway. I've never really been a super-'FAN' of anybody. I admire and respect loads of people, but I don't wanna meet them. I mean - I'm not a 'fan' in the normal sense of the word. I don't mean to sound snotty when I say that. I suppose I'm a fan of certain people but it's not in a 'wanting-to-meet-them' kind of way."
Whose picture did you pin to your bedroom wall when you were a kid?
"Hmmm. Let me see. I used to have a Jim Morrison poster, yeah. And I liked Iggy, and I liked Paul McCartney actually . . . this is when I was very young. And - erm, Michael Stipe."
It used to be said you could psycho-analyse what they used to call a teenage hippie-chick by finding out which Beatle she preferred. Lennon was for the cool intellectual. George for the weirdly mystic. Paul for the dippy romantic.
"Well, I am actually dippy and romantic." Then a moment's thought. "No, I'm not dippy. But I am romantic."
There's a line in Tanya's Throwing Muses song "Angel", which runs "spastically romantic . . ."

"Do you have a sister?
Would you lay your body down
on the tracks for her?" ("Star")
Tanya, and half-sister Kristen Hersh were raised in Newport, Rhode Island, home of the famous Folk Festival; host to Bob Dylan's finest hours, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger. "When I was a little kid my parents used to work at the Folk Festival," she explains. "So I was there when I was, like - in my mother's belly one year, and then when I was two or three the next time. They were there, but after that I've never been. It's the kind of thing I would love to go to, but it's just such a mess. It's such a fucking madhouse in Newport around that time, that if you've been raised with it, it's more an irritant than an excitement."
Kristen and Tanya were the children of a hippie couple who divorced when Tanya was just seven years old. "To this day drugs make me intensely nervous," Tanya confided to Melody Maker, "because my parents did so many."
Was Kristen more of a hippie victim than you?
"Victim of our parents you mean?"
No, not necessarily. A victim of the hippie ethos - after all, she has a child called Dylan.
"Hmm. Oh yeah, but he's not really named after Bob Dylan. No. Both of our parents were hippies. But none of us are victims. In some ways, yeah, we're totally influenced by that culture. In so many ways. We were raised in it."
It was in 1982 that Kristen heard the voice of the prophet, and it sayeth Yea, heavy on the bass, get on the good foot and the bad foot too. And the result was Throwing Muses. In "Devil's Roof" Kristen wrote, "I have two heads . . .", perhaps a reference to her own fractured schizophrenia, but for the sake of this article it could also refer to the band.
The Muses' other head belonging to 16-year-old anthropology student and part-time short story writer Tanya Donelly. Tanya wrote one song - "Green" - for the debut "Throwing Muses" album, extending her ambitions to grab two prime slots on the acclaimed 1989 "Hunkpapa". And what do you know? "Dragonhead" is a complex mosaic of guitar changes riddled with spaced dream-state 'I swallow creepy things' lyrics. It's only marginally less odd than the already mentioned "Angel".
Two more Tanya songs made it onto their final collaboration, "The Real Ramona" in 1991; "Honeychain" and the 'breathtaking Surf Pop' "Not Too Soon" with its solo driving like it's alive. But by then the creative pressures of playing second guitar-string to Kristen were becoming so restrictive that Tanya was moonlighting with The Breeders.
At first she played part-time with Kim Deal (of the Pixies) and Jo Wiggs (of Perfect Disaster), overlapping her time with the Muses. But following the split The Breeders went full time, breeding one Steve Albini-produced LP called "Pod" in May 1990, but Tanya again found her compositional contributions overshadowed, this time by Kim's songs.
"The Breeders were heavier than Throwing Muses. Melodically, Kim is one of the strongest Pop songwriters I can think of. Like, it's very chorus and melody orientated. But she does have really strong guitar sensibilities as far as sounds go. So there is a heaviness there too. Which I learned from. I learned a lot from her."
For Tanya, looking forward to a bright shiny new career in sonic insurgency, there's no Norman Lamont-style retroactive savaging of former colleagues. The process from Breeders to Tree Feeders was part of a natural evolution.

"I was friendly with this girl who insisted on touching my face/she told outrageous stories, I believed them till the endings were changed/from endings before, she's not touched me anymore." ("Feed The Tree")
The name of "Feed The Tree", Belly's first Top 30 hit of 1993, is a death euphemism similar to 'pushing up the daisies'.
"Star", the title track of the hit album that closely followed, is allegedly about a TV-documentary on the bizarre sex appeal of the macabre serial killer Ted Bundy. All that, mixed into a roaring riff-led hook-laden Pop fired by Tanya's Belly cohorts - guitarist and drummer Chris and Tom Gorman, with manic bassist Gail Greenwood. Thank your gods for CD mere mortals - "Star" is an album with a stylus-blunting tendency to demand repeat plays. So don't buy it in its vinyl format.
Tanya's favourite album track is "Low Red Moon", the song she wrote for her fiancé Chick Graning, who dubs slide guitar onto it, and who provides his "strong arms for a skinny girl". But fiancé? That's an odd word seldom used these days outside of Barbara Cartland novels. Surely the only people who get engaged now are members of the Royal Family - and look how they wind up.
"We're engaged . . . technically. But we don't have a wedding date set, and we probably aren't going to settle for a while. It's just - hmmm, yeah, it is a weird word. But I know a lot of married people. And the concept of marriage is important to me . . ."
"Can I have another second," she yells over her shoulder as the sound-check lurches closer.
Does her 'concept of marriage' indicate traditional values towards Sexual Politics: (adopting a psycho-analytical approach) perhaps like her nervousness with drugs, it's a reaction to observed excesses?
"I'm in a kind of privileged situation," she admits, "because I've really honestly never come across any problems being female and working in bands. I mean, no-one's even ever really yelled at me to take my shirt off or anything like that. So I don't think I've really been exposed to a lot of bullshit that women still have to put up with.
"I'm aware of it, but I've never seen it. I live my life well. And I'm a Feminist in the way that I live my life. But singing about it, and taking a very direct political approach in my lyrics does not come naturally to me at all. So I can't make it that way."
So you prefer to work by example, in much the same way that Patti Smith might do it?
"Right. Yes, I think that's the strongest way. The strongest message is to do it by example."
We are discussing the nature of sexual attraction. Tanya and I. But is it possible for men and women to work together without an element of sexual frisson?
"Oh yes," - then a considered pause. And more emphatically, "Yes, I do. I mean most of my male relationships are free of that. And I have a lot of extremely close male friends. And there's no tension, and there's no problem. Sometimes it can be nice if that buzz is there. But I have that buzz with women too. I mean - there are women that I have this relationship with, and with female friends there can be more physical tension than there is with some male friendships. So - alrightee, Sex Makes The World Go Round!"
A fitting punch-line?
"Good timing," she grins. "You said that just as I was being called to go back into the other room." The sound-check is accelerating towards critical mass. "So - Okeedokee, thank you so much. And . . . take care."
Belly's next cover version, for their next B-side will be their version of Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me To The Moon".
Hmmmmmmmmmm!