"Ryder, am I wearing any clothes in this picture?" she asks, as every mother does in these situations. MTV minions with attitude and clipboards who wander past suddenly find themselves entranced by Wyatt’s smile, or shown Ryder's magnetic fridge poem. Kristin's husband Billy O'Connell looks round at his family and shakes his head emphatically. "It’s not like hanging out with anyone else, hanging with these guys." And it's not. In fact, if you had to distil Kristin's 14-year career into one soundbite, encapsulating her arduous journey from teenage singer with the uniquely influential Throwing Muses, to alternative rock star in the pre-Nirvana days when that meant more than Gavin Rossdale, to desert housewife and mother of three, to solo acoustic performer, then that would do as well as any other glib formulation. Kristin Hersh. She's not like anyone else.

"Every story I've ever read about me says: ‘I thought she was going to be really scary and crazy! But she’s not! She's really boring!'" laughs Kristin later, sitting on the edge of the sofa in her hotel room, balancing a king-size mug of tea on her lap and speaking with a vivid intensity that is anything but boring. She knows all too well the sharp double-edges of being an outsider, the price you pay for acceptance and the price you pay for setting yourself apart. She was the principal singer/songwriter with the Muses from their inception in 1984, and along with her stepsister Tanya Donelly and drummer David Narcizo, they stayed fiercely original, mixing Kristin's scarifying lyrics with dense rhythms and precarious structures. But always, for all the love and acclaim, they were outsiders. She nearly lost her sanity when her songs started to push her to the edge of her own life, and she lost her band when their unwillingness to assimilate into the mix’n’match alterno-rock lifestyle meant a lack of commercial success and insurmountable financial troubles. Last year, they were forced to disband for good. There's something shocking in the way that a band as strong as the Muses, who had recorded eight albums and deflected traumas that would have destroyed lesser bands, should be killed off by something as prosaic as money.

"It was the only reason," Kristin says. "The band was in top form. The problem with being signed to Warners for so many years was we had a huge debt. Even a record as successful as 'University' didn't make us a penny. I don't disagree with how the music business is set up, but your advance is meant to be spent on studio costs and if they don't sell that record, those costs aren't recouped. We couldn't afford to finish our tour. We did a goodbye tour in America, taking requests for two or three hours so everyone could hear what they wanted before we ended. It was a bit like going to our own funeral, but it was nice."

Does it make you angry?

"It does. It wasn't like people wanted to reject us - they never got to hear us. I think there are some unsung songwriters in the underground, but that's why it's the underground. You write a song and you encapsulate your emotions and throw it out there and you don't need anything back. You don't throw it out hoping for money and fans, you give it away, so underground songwriters aren't going to be celebrated the way people who are in the music business 'cos they want fame are."

She looks askance.

"To want more money than other people, or to want to be looked at by others, that's strange to me. That's kind of a twisted personality we don't think about 'cos we celebrate those things. What aren't they getting at home that they need that?"

There's one thing Kristin understands, and that's the desire to have her songs heard. It's why she does things she doesn't always want to, like becoming au fait with the embittered mind-set of the fashion industry -"I learnt to be

nice to stylists - they could ruin your day, they could pluck all your eyebrows off"- and means she's given things away she might have preferred to have hidden. Like the song 'Dizzy', as near as the Muses got to a linear pop song and widely admired as such. Except by the band.

"I wrote the song 'Dizzy' to play the game," shrugs Kristin. "We did this record 'House Tornado' which was just on this other planet, really insular and complicated and female. At the time we just thought we were a rock band, but everyone heard 'House Tornado' and flipped out, especially our American label who said: Why do you have to sound so much like Throwing Muses?' We didn't know how much we weren't The Bangles and they didn't know how much we weren't ever going to be The Bangles. So on the next album, 'Hunkpapa', we thought: 'OK, we’ll give them a stupid song, then they'll sell a Throwing Muses record instead of a Phil Collins record.' So we did this terrible song and remixed it in this terrible way, and all these lame jocks started shouting for it at shows. So we quit playing it. It taught me a lesson." She looks up, blue eyes wide. "We were so nice, we kept thinking: 'Hmmm, we're hurting Warner Brothers' feelings'."

And all the time, it was the industry that was hammering the nails into the Muses' coffin. But it's Kristin who's ended up bereft, deprived of a band that occupied 13 years of her life.

"I listened to my first Throwing Muses record the other day because I was so depressed about the band ending and now is about the time when I'd be starting work on the next Muses project and it's not happening. You know, like when someone dies and you don't miss them for a long time because their death is so recent, it's just like: (slips into a panic-stricken shriek) ‘They died! They died! They died! Oh My God!' I'm over that stage of the Muses and now I'm missing them. I keep looking around for them and they're not there. There's no band. It's like my body can't believe it."

THE SADNESS felt by Kristin at the end of the Throwing Muses is tempered by her re-emergence as a solo artist. In 1994 she released her first solo LP, 'Hips And Makers', and now comes 'Strange Angels', the title a metaphor for "Songs or children or any blessings in disguise".

At London's 12-Bar Club, a venue the size of a car boot, she sits down in her schoolgirl black plaits and plays a set of old and new songs, seeming relaxed and happy whether introducing 'Sundrops' from 'Hips And Makers' as "a song about sunshine" or informing the audience that Ryder wanted to call the new record 'A Stupid Man Is Good To Eat'. Is it difficult for her to play alone after years of being backed by a band?

"I liked having my friends around. A Muses show was fun. This isn't fun, per se. Now I'm just sitting in a chair and they're all sitting in chairs and I'm often the only sweaty, drunk one in the room because it's a very adult, sober crowd there."

Is that the curse of the - altogether now - female singer-songwriter?

"People expect you to be really sensitive. When you're in a band, they think you're Courtney Love and you're gonna puke on them if they don't run away. When you're solo they keep giving you herb tea and white wine instead of cases of beer and they think that if they're not really nice to you, then you're going to run away and cry. Or write a poem."

But she's tougher than that. 'Strange Angels' is her tenth album, a simple, charcoal-lined record compared with the dense patternings of Throwing Muses or the piano-and-cello layers of her first acoustic album. She describes 'Hips and Makers' now as "an accident. Some of that writing is really clumsy. One of the songs, ('The Letter'), I wrote when I was 17, like verbal vomiting, which I don't consider very transcendent. 'Strange Angels' is a little more small-life, personal, kooky, if you will." She laughs loud. "Songs just spilled into each other instead of all that herky-jerky stop-and-start scream thing that I'm used to doing."

She says this very matter-of-factly. Oh, that.

"The songs seem to spill into people's ears and they don't even know they've listened to the whole record. Maybe it's just that I'm boring and old now."

A gleeful laugh implies the idea appeals to her, and it's true, it's an easy record to listen to. Compared to the way Throwing Muses could make you feel like you were indulging in psychic eavesdropping, 'Strange Angels' strikes a more conversational tone. When she sings: 'Who me? Oh man, was that out loud?" on ‘Like You’, you feel like you're following someone's train of thought.

"I like people talking. I wish I could hire other people to sing in their own voice. I wish the songs came with their own voices, 'cos it's a fucked-up instrument to play. It's affected by your mood, by sickness, by time of day ... You can't tune it. I never know when I'm going to be able to do a good vocal and I've been singing 15 years. Stuff hides in your voice. It's screwy - that's not professional. It's hard to be a professional singer - at least I know I don't have to be, I'm allowed to sound like a rock chick. At least I know my neck will tell the truth."

Doesn't that element of unpredictability make it hard to work with other people on your songs? How did you tell Bob Mould (who sang on 'Dio' on 'Red Heaven') or Michael Stipe (‘Your Ghost' from 'Hips And Makers') what you wanted from them?

"Bob made up his melody, which was an amazing vocal performance. I sound so lame next to that. Michael made up his own lyrics: "You were in my dreams/ You were driving circles around me". I was telling Michael it hadn't occurred to me the song was about a dream. He said: 'Oh my God, I'm sorry.' I said: 'You couldn't know. I have kids, I don't sleep.'

You might expect that, having lost the band, there might be a surplus of collaborations on 'Strange Angels' to ease Kristin into solo-dom. And at one point, there was going to be - Giant Sand and Lisa Germano were both ready to play on the record.

"It was gonna be a big party," laughs Kristin ruefully, "but every day I'd go to work and the songs were only asking for little bits and pieces. It could have had something to do with the fact that I was feeling really shy and kind of private. I wanted to do the record alone, but Joe Henry (alternative folk-based singer-songwriter) said: 'Come over and hang out in the garage - I'll push the buttons and it'll save you having to think about it.' And it was great - our families are close, our kids are best friends and our spouses are both music managers."

Henry also followed Kristin's lead on keeping the record as spare as possible, avoiding over-production.

"I know how it can leave a record cold. I'd never do that to the songs. It would be like making my children into child models. I think they're beautiful, but that doesn't make me want to make them into little Hollywood babies."

This respect Kristin has for her songs is far removed from the power they exerted over her only a few years ago. She was diagnosed with a condition called Bipolar disorder, and her songs would manifest themselves as hallucinations, which explains a frenetic, often discomforting intensity that led many people, unknowingly, to refer to illness or madness when talking about the band. In early interviews, when Kristin said she didn't like writing songs, no one realized quite why.

"For the first time now I do like writing songs. I didn't because it was so scary. I heard them and nobody else seemed to hear them. It made me think that I was crazy. Then about five or six years ago, I grew up and realized they were just songs and if I didn't censor them, they wouldn't make me sick. I had to do a deal with the songs, where I agreed not to censor them if they quit knocking on the door at 4am and messing with my family. And they've been great ever since. I think of them as some kind of crashing energy. You don't always want to deal with that but some people sell doughnuts, for crying out loud. Who am I to bitch about songs? Songs are good things. I always knew they were good things -but I thought they were going to chew me up and spit me out, they were going to use my life to form song bodies for themselves and I was going to die in the process because I was getting so sick."

Kristin has earlier pointed out that sometimes surviving is a virtue. The last words on 'Strange Angels' are "I'll shut up soon then we'll go home / Covered in band aids and casts", an image of a quietly healing survivor. The whole album suggests there are things worth fighting for, through all the damage.

"I hear about a lot of relationships, and I don't just mean love relationships. People bump into each other all the time and change each other's shape so they fit together better. That's giving someone a lot of power over you, to let them change your shape. I'm really touched by that. I just want everyone to be nice to each other. I don't want drama. I drive my husband crazy - he's this Irish-Italian from New York and he's always talking about feelings. It has to be dragged out of me. I find there's enough drama in what happens anyway. I don't court it. I get my highs from music and my kids and Billy and nature. I don't need anything more extreme than that."

THERE'S A song on 'Strange Angels' called 'Heaven', where Kristin sings: "I'm needing backyard sanctuary... this is heaven where the sissies hang". According to Kristin, it's about "running away to California to hide after the band broke up", a place in the desert where her other gang could thrive. She's talked before about how her children’s names make them sound like "a little cowboy posse", and it makes perfect sense in this setting.

"We can afford 40 acres. We have neighbors, but they’re far away. They've accepted us, they call us The O'Connell Ranch. They all have guns. The nearest town is a town Gene Autry built as a movie set, then people moved in. So there’s a hitching post, and a saloon."

She and Billy talk about becoming bakers, never having to leave the house again. She watches The Simpsons and King Of The Hill and schools Ryder at home. There's an album of Appalachian folk songs on the way that she recorded at her home studio, with the baby on it and Billy singing, and Ryder playing piano. It's a peaceful life reflected in the dusty mood of 'Strange Angels'.

"When we lived in LA, I used to wake up and think: 'What happened! What did I miss?' And now I don't have that at all. I feel like I'm living in the centre of the universe, and I thought I'd fall out of it."

This complete avoidance of all the cliches of rock 'n' roll rebellion seems to have ended up shocking people even more. There always seems to be slight consternation that you should be this underground icon and still have kids.

"You can do every other job pregnant. I've always toured pregnant and people act like I'm going to the moon pregnant. I have to work, it's not like I choose to hang out in rock clubs when I'm pregnant, but it's my job." Kristin discovered some handy tips while flicking though a book called Pregnancy in the Workplace.

"I wondered if any of this advice would apply to my job. The first thing was: 'Request fans that blow smoke away from you' and I thought: 'Woooah! That was written just for me! That's the kind of fan I want...' They meant little fans out on your desk," she adds, slightly sheepishly.

Does it affect the way you get on with people around you?

"I do that mom thing, I try to make everything nice. If something goes wrong, I'm like: 'Oh splendid! Let's see what we've learned!' I've been a mother since I was 19, so it's not like I've had time off. I stopped hearing it from my mother and started saying it myself. I hide food they hate inside food they like and tell them they like it. I'm completely over-protective and I see no reason not to be. I don't think they have to cross that road, or climb that tree."

Were you allowed to roam free ?

"My mother was nervous, and I'm more protective than my she was. She used to make me play with other kids. I know that doesn't sound a big deal, but you know when there are kids about and you have to play with them, no matter who they are?" she laughs, fully aware of the big deal this is when you're six or seven. "I got the shit kicked out of me. I learned to fight. I'd see other kids getting the shit kicked out of them and I'd have to protect them. I was this little kid and I could make boys cry, big boys, 'cos they didn't know how to fight. I had small boys as my friends 'cos other boys wouldn't play with them - I really liked them. They had the great qualities that boys have - they're really congruent, what's on the outside is on the inside - and yet they were sensitised by being fragile. They knew what it was like to be treated like a girl."

There's too many parallels to ignore here - fragile boys, strong girls, confronting your demons, emotional honesty ... There's a metaphor for the Muses - even the whole underground - there, no?

"Oh yeah. There's no jockier jock than a rock musician with their fucking dildo guitar."

BACK ON stage at The 12-Bar Club, Kristin Hersh, braided schoolgirl vigilante, sissy chick, adoring mother and yes, thank God, female singer-songwriter, is introducing 'Delicate Cutters' from the first Throwing Muses LP. "This is a song about self-mutilation," she says, then she smiles. "But remember, I have songs about the sunshine too.' Outside isn't such a bad place to be after all.