With 800,000 copies of their debut album Star sold, it wouldn't be surprising if Tanya had developed an ego so big that it demanded a 20 per cent cut of all royalties. Not so. She may have a reputation for keeping it all in, but today she reveals a sense of humour that shows up her transatlantic adversaries for the contrived, pole-up the-arse personalities they are. Hey Limeys, chill out.

It's not that Belly's new album, King, is even a tribute. The title track is actually dedicated to a friend's lighting-technician brother, who was hired by some prince or other to brighten up his birthday party with his lights. Money being no object, he lit up the ocean bed. Tanya being Tanya, she equated the image of a dark and dangerous ocean being changed into something bright and beautiful with a kind of love.

"As soon as you're in love you're in incredible danger. You're floating on top of this ocean with things underneath that can kill you; how wonderful and terrifying that is! In the middle of this fear, you have these lights, and this wonderful naked person you can go home to.

Uh-huh. So why 'King'?

"He was called Roi and I wanted to call it that, but The Breeders [Donelly's last band] have a song called 'Roi'. But 'Roi' means 'King'."

Still, she once wore a pair of shades that said "I Love Elvis"....

"We did that in Nashville, and I was just being silly. They have sunglasses in Nashville that say 'I love Travis Tritt' and 'I love this, that and the other thing', but I wanted something slightly cool."

Naturally, The King Of Rock'N'Roll was an early influence.

"When I was a little kid I used to listen to Elvis. His voice is just beautiful, and there is something really cool about him. I like his very, very early years and his very, very late years. Even though the late years are pathetic, there's something sort of sad and sweet about him. But when I started to get really seriously into music, he definitely wasn't one of my inspirations."

Sadly, Tanya can't remember if she was holding a packet of weenies or a box of Golden Grahams when she heard that Elvis had gone to the great burger bar in the sky.

"I remember being in a supermarket in Newport [Rhode Island] when I found out, but I can't really remember much... It was a heart attack, that was the official line. But everybody already knew about his problems."

"Their mythical road-trip! It was really good fun, actually, for the most part. I remember little snatches. I remember lilies of the valley in Arizona. I also had a lot of weird thoughts; I imagined I saw animals that couldn't have been there. At night we'd sleep outside sometimes, and my brother and I would sit there and make things up. There's a tiger outside the tent! There are gorillas standing on the fire escape. There are giraffes out in the hallway."

No amount of hallucinating, however, could quite prepare her for her experiences with New Order at the tailend of the '80s, when she toured with Throwing Muses.

"There was a lot of drugs, and we got a little bit into it as well... just because it was our first sight of it. By the end of that tour, my fingernails and my hair were pretty much falling off -- and out!"

The tour that nearly broke New Order is infamous, and Belly were up all night, matching them line for line. "Fortunately, it was a very brief tour," says Donelly. "It's never really gotten to that extreme ever again."

Belly may have resisted the self-destructive urges, but Donelly is well aware of how Kurt Cobain's death is only the tip of a very large iceberg.

"Heroin is pretty much the new drug of choice, because it's semi-Utopian, I think," she says cryptically. "It's just different... every decade has its tastes."

Nevertheless, it seems that whatever the drug of choice, smack is the level to which each rock'n'roll generation inevitably descends. Hindsight fingers Seattle's Grungers as obvious victims but until Evan Dando opened his stash, the collegiate Boston scene seemed too whimsical and kooky to be involved in heroin, a drug that remains the taboo narcotic.

Today, the subject is a little too close for comfort. Kelley Deal, who replaced Tanya after her brief dalliance with The Breeders in 1992, is currently awaiting trial in Ohio on heroin-related charges. Understandably, Tanya is reluctant to say anything other than that heroin was not on the rider when she played in the band. Nevertheless, it's a subject that refuses to lie. Later, a seemingly innocuous conversation among the rest of the band about Elastica's talent soon revives the subject, when someone recounts Damon Albarn's allegations that Brett Anderson took heroin.

"Why, is that a bad thing?" guitarist Tom Gorman asks, only half-joking.

"Taking heroin is the hip thing in the States," mumbles his brother Chris, drummer, photographer and supplier of much of Belly's sleeve-art.

"Everybody's dying though," mutters bassist Gail Greenwood.

"Well, they do it, then they lie -- that's the 'hip' part," says Tanya, meaning "hip" as in hip-ocritical. No one mentions Kelley Deal. Only the rustle of Gail's box of Raisin Splitz disturbs the unexpected air of gloom.

"I'm always interested in dichotomy and paradox; the kind of things that I listen to are the kind of things that trick you. That's really fascinating to me. Really morbid pop has always attracted me. Something that seems... sweeettt but ends up burning you."

When she says "sweet" she hisses the word and smacks her lips and sounds just like Kaa in The Jungle Book; and for no better encapsulation of Belly' s mastery of "sinister sweetness" look no further than the evil serpent's 'Trust In Me', a song that Belly made their own for the B-side of the 'Gepetto' remix that was released in March 1993.

Donelly once told an American interviewer: "My hands want to play pop songs and my head is attracted to despair." Is this her own version of Kristin's bi-polar disorder [Hersh has been diagnosed as suffering from this form of schizophrenia]?

"That's right!" she cries. "It's a kind of physical bi-polar disorder!"

And do you ever try to reconcile the two?

"Yeah. It's really strange, because I kind of have to let myself be almost autistic when I'm writing, because if I think too much about what I'm going for, it always ends up coming out shitty. I have to make myself incredibly stupid in order to get anything really worthwhile."

Huh? She laughs halfheartedly. "Stupid's the wrong word. Not present. As soon as I start to stick my fingers in it, it's like... finger-painting with your own shit! Which nobody is interested in hearing!" She shrieks, gleefully.

Whereas with Star other people's excrement provided the raw material, on King the shit is personal.

"It is more autobiographical," Donelly nods. "Whether that's fortunate or not, I don't know yet. King is definitely more streamlined in a lot of ways. It's hard for any band to be objective about how they're evolving. There were a couple of times that I was thinking it was maybe too similar to Star. But now that it's down and finished, I can listen to it as a piece; I can tell that it's much different."

King is, among other things, more pop. Donelly will admit that "there is a certain strange shame that comes with being accepted and being... palatable", and the pressure of her past in heroically cult outfits will never be totally relieved. Within months of its release, Star was approaching the total US sales of the entire Throwing Muses catalogue. Even with The Breeders' second, post-Donelly album Last Splash selling a million, even in the post-Nirvana soundscape where the alternative is the mainstream, Belly still wrestle with the notion that to be pop is to be less worthy; to be "palatable" is to be "disposable".

"Compared with Throwing Muses and The Breeders -- those two things that were part of my life -- it is so pop. And that gets magnified. I never had ambitions to sell in the pop market. It's just the music that comes out of me naturally. We'll be rehearsing and I'll go 'God this is excessively hooky!' but it's not something I'm gonna warp because I'm too hyper-aware of it. That's not honest. At the end of the day, I'm very happy with the music we make."

King was recorded in five-and-a-half weeks in the Bahamas last autumn. It was more island prison than tropical idyll, more Papillon than Bounty-country. "Part of the thinking behind the Bahamas was that we could be sequestered on our own and isolated," Donelly explains.

Veteran British producer Glynn Johns was at the controls, a rock'n'roll Forrest Gump who appears to have been in on every landmark moment in musical history over the past quarter of a century: The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and The Clash are among those who benefited from his production and engineering know-how.

Belly were impressed by Johns' lack of knowledge of the current alternative scene -- Donelly explains that the band wanted a more "timeless" approach, one unswayed by "conceptions of what other people are doing". Contemporary colours, though, were provided by engineer Jack Joseph Puig, last heard producing 'The Black Crowes' Amorica.

Johns visited Belly in Rhode Island, Providence last summer to hear the demos they'd been banging out in the practice room since spring. The lyrics were still all Donelly's work, but the music was now more of a group affair. Long months on the road had tightened up Belly and focused their songs. With this in mind, Johns suggested they record the album live, together, with no farting around.

And it shows. King has fewer of the dark crevices and crannies of Star, more of what Gail Greenwood calls "straight-ahead pop". When they are pushed, the band will variously describe Star as "tentative" (Tom), "spooky" (Tanya) and "understated" (Chris). "I want to say spooky, too," says Gail. So what, then, do they think of King?

Tom: "Honest."

Tanya: "Joyful."

Gail "Direct."

Chris: "Robust."

"It's a more essential album," the drummer adds. "We stripped all the fat out of everything. Playing it live, you developed a part that you could play all of, with two hands, in one take."

"It's pretty lean," chimes his brother.

"Belly are probably more capable of producing themselves than any other of the artists with whom I've worked," was Johns' opinion.

King cruises by with an addictive rush that borders on the illegal. It flashes back with nagging choruses that sound like déjà vu. It is thick with seemingly fluffy lines -- "When you breathe you breathe for two... send a rocket for Red... are their heartstrings connected to the wings on your back?" -- that gradually, gently betray hidden agendas and shades of meaning.

Tanya shrugs. "If you're gonna write something that sticks in somebody's head, you always have to be really careful about what that's gonna mean. If it is gonna be some-thing that runs through somebody's head, it had better be worth it."

'Now They'll Sleep', for example, the first single, appears on the surface to be a giddy love song, tipsy and flighty and thoroughly nice. But there is a deeper meaning.

"It's about obsessive love gone wrong," Tanya expounds. "Couples who have lost sight of each other, who are drugging themselves with whatever they can to avoid the fact that they can't see any more. Relinquishing your own identity but not having any concept of the other person's. It's just a kind of weird, grey outline of a relationship."

Then there are the album's two greatest pop moments, 'Red' and 'Super-Connected'. Both boast glorious, gravity-defying melodies. Yet one is about a neglected child dreaming of escape from her sad life, and the other about sad fucks in the music business who really do buy the myth of their own celebrity.

"It's just amazing to me that anyone at this stage in the history of rock'n'roll would buy into that crap. It's just a chimera, a mirage, and that seems so obvious to me and it just fascinates me when people don't get it," Tanya says. "It's not about me, it's not about our success..."

Success has left Belly in good shape. They're a better, tighter and closer band. The all-new, road-tested, collaborative approach has paid off handsomely in an album that is as intelligent as it is sexy and as sexy as it is poppy.

"Four heads are... stranger than one," reckons Tanya. "And better to listen to."