Despite her initials she isn't a bonnet-posing, screeching and whining, fist-shaking rock and roller buried beneath a 'rebellion' style bar-chord barrage of comfy conformity. And I'm not de-personalised and 'professional' enough to stand in line with recorder and a list of questions to fire-off relating to the vagaries of Performance Art.

(To be honest I'm much more interested in the soft spikey clusters and breath-taking transcendental beauty of her haircut and the striking sartorial imperfection of her slightly over-sized jacket with sleeves that terminate at a well-beyond-the-norm point halfway along the hands. Pretending to do an interview was a necessary evil it as to gain first-hand experience of these rare and wondrous things.)

Before beginning in her present line of work, Laurie wrote reviews of minimal sculpture (for four years! I didn't know there were that many minimal sculptures). Often finding these objects lacking in warmth and passion she used her (then) favourite artist, Van Gogh, as a constant reference point. Eventually she began prefacing her reviews with 'This artist, unlike Van Gogh...'. Maybe I should have started this feature: 'This artist, unlike Joan Jett...

You are, American, so I assume you grew up listening to the radio?

"American radio is all (adopts sickening slick drawl) 'Hi, it's 90 degrees today and the freeways are clear'. It basically caters for eight year old minds. I grew up in a town near Chicago and there was a station with a show by a guy called Studs Terkle.

"Studs Terkle (Laurie rolls the name round her tongue enjoying both the happy memory and the way the syllables exercise every muscle in the jaw) was the only person on American radio with a real voice. He did interviews with just ordinary people, housewives and such. I'd crawl under my bed clothes at night and listen. I went back home recently and did a show with him, That was the end. My ultimate performance."

The LP, 'Big Science', is full of multidimensional, modern day fairy-tales. It is tinged with melancholia but also laced with a discreet, high-flying sense of humour. Its finest achievement is the expansive array of images and emotions it can trigger in the listener's mind.

"After concerts the best thing that can happen is for people to come back and say to me 'what you did really gave me ideas'. That has happened but when they describe the ideas they are always totally different from anything I would imagine."

In Laurie-lyrics many key-lines are culled from everyday conversation. Mundane phrases can be provocatively captured in a kind of search-light beam examination.

"I listen to people's conversation and do remember catch-phrase type things, but somebody might have worked four years perfecting their one good line, like the sort of thing you get at New York cocktail parties. Really I remember moods of conversation more.

"Once on a short-hop night flight in the States I sat next to an 80-year-old grandmother who had never flown before. She drank 15 Cokes before taking off. Nobody can get drunk on Coke but with the lights on the ground looking like stars and her having no idea of how high a pla ne flew, she actually thought we were in outer space. That night is one of my favourite memories."

Love it or loathe it, 'O Superman' was a crazy, inexplicable, illogical 'success', an eight-minute single comprising virtually nought but voice and vocoder. It dragged well-established notions of 'chartability' into a topsy-turvy jumble of astonished disorder. For little Laurie one implication is her having to spend a day sitting in a London WEA office ("in the States I keep meeting guys from Warners and they're all called Larry. They all have short hair, neat well-trimmed beards and wear the same kind of jacket. They come up and say, 'Hi, I'm Larry from Warners' ") being on the rough-end of interviews since 10.30am.

My allocated hour was 6pm although at first I'd mistakenly thought the PR person had said 6am, which would have been great! Shake up a few more 'standard practices' (Laurie: I would sometimes ask people who wanted to interview me to meet at 3am, not one ever turned up.").

"The success of the single was just a voice on the phone (how fitting!) telling me the record was in the charts. I was very distant from it and pay no attention to charts anyway.

"But I do have my fantasy which is to finish something. Do something that I can look at and say, 'That is complete, it doesn't need anything else'. I don't feet I've ever finished anything I've done. I'd like to go round to the people who bought the record and say maybe we should have put this part over there or added something to this bit'. Records are just the words and music whereas live there are the pictures too, the whole polyrythmic of the performance which is what it is really about.

"At the moment I'm trying to make a video. A promo-video. You see the usual promo-video of the guy playing guitar in the shower or playing guitar in his car or playing guitar up in the roof-rack which seems ridiculous. You know it's a guitar by hearing it, you don't need to see it as well. But promo-videos, I've found are really difficult – I'm gaining more respect for the guy playing guitar in the shower!

"I have to find a way of doing what I want to do which fits in with what is needed commercially. It's like if you write for a paper and they say, 'Go away and write a novel if you want to write like that' Or else they cut it right down (I know this feeling and in Laurie's words can hear the sound of... ). You have to get it just right, a combination of the two sides ( ... a thousand nails being hammered on the head).

"Video has developed rapidly over the last 30 years and there must be a way of using it that doesn't mean sit-down-and-stare like regular TV. I can sit for hours looking at the TV not watching the programmes but mesmerised by the lines of light moving across the screen.

"Video adverts in the States have things Quantelling all over the place. Cornflake bowls flying around and spoons that become giant spoons. Giant spoons lose their appeal very quickly."

Giant spoons lose their appeal very quickly – apply this phrase to the music biz! (Hysterical gushings... Laurie Anderson will outlive giant spoons! Giant spoons will bend in her Presence!)

How much of what you do is entertainment?

I don't hold with the usual art thing of being anti-entertainment, that entertainment is a cover for banality. I take the view that seriousness is a cover for banality (hammers and nails again). When I came here before (to appear at Riverside last October) I think people expected the shows to be gloomy but I'm not a gloomy person. I'm not a happy person either."

Not 'happy' in the bouncing around, laughing-at-everything sense. When Laurie smiles she means it, you can feel the warmth.

Running through 'Big Science' is an omnipotent fear-rumble. A diabolical drone lurking behind the songs of a technology in control rather than being controlled.

"In the States now a lot of people are very scared. Up in Seattle they think their town is the most important and it'll be them to get nuked first. Down in Houston they think it'll be them first, it's the same all over. Big cities have 'host-towns' where the population can be evacuated to. The idea is that 11 million people get on a bus and go there.

"In Georgia you are now required to carry a gun. Not just allowed but legally required. The bowling alley there is now a shooting range, some of the housewives have become crackshots.

"It's weird but I'd be the last person to deny the death instinct. Life and death both draw us towards them very strongly.

Said with a certain solemnity and tint of sulleness in the eyes. A balance to her 'lighter' side.

"But I couldn't live anywhere except New York. You don't have to fill in forms saying how long you intend to stay and how you plan to earn your living. You can just turn up and be unofficial."

On wax, the voice (THE VOICE!) is an oft authoritative, domineering cadence that choosily enunciates its way through a verbal dub tapestry of American Dream(ing). Laurie's own articulation often drops to a soft-hued whisper. She is the kind of person who can just turn up and be unofficial. The total opposite of the egotistical arty-type hard nut that I had been expecting.

In the UK (and this paper) the Performance Art aspects takes second place to her responsible-for-loopy-hit stature. That vinyl side of her efforts that pertains to regulation rock and roll. In this absurdly predictable sphere Laurie Anderson can, with or without giant spoons, be one helluva stirrer. Eeeergh! and XXXXOOOO.