Rickie Lee Jones: The devil in Miss Jones

It's a cold Sunday evening a week or two before Christmas, and Rickie Lee Jones is playing the only UK show of her European tour at a small auditorium in London's Bloomsbury. The place is packed, but then there's not much of a place to pack, stark evidence of the singer's selective appeal these days.

Time was, following the release of her eponymous 1979 debut album - with its cover photo of Jones as an icon of bohemian cool, in a rakish beret and holding a thin cheroot - men wanted to romance her, women wanted to be her; everybody wanted to hang out with her. Boosted by a huge hit, "Chuck E's in Love", the album sold two million copies, and garnered her a Grammy for Best New Artist. She was the "new Joni Mitchell" - not quite as damning an accolade as being the "new Bob Dylan", perhaps, but still a hefty millstone to drag around. But you could see what they meant: like Joni, she couldn't be contained by the airy-fairy folkie damsel stereotype that had been de rigueur for female singer-songwriters since the days of Joan Baez and Judy Collins.

Instead, her vivid narratives of street-smart scufflers and hustlers with names like Woody and Dutch and Johnny The King were set to jazzy hipster grooves and delivered in a vulnerable but worldly-wise drawl whose insouciant charm was leagues away from the pious purity of Joan Baez et al. Instead of Baez's saintly but somewhat patronising determination to rescue poor underdogs from the plight society had thrust upon them, Jones celebrated them in warts-and-all portraits scraped from the Hollywood sidewalks.

Jones was a former teenage runaway and college dropout running with a fast crowd, poets, beatniks and barflies centred around Hollywood's legendary Tropicana Motel, a notorious rock'n'roll motel long since demolished to accommodate - oh, the irony! - a strip-mall of upscale boutiques. It was a hand-to-mouth, day-to-day kind of existence, with little thought paid to where it might lead. "I was pretty much just winging it," she recalls. "Looking to the next day to see if you would have money for gas, looking to the next week to see if you would get a job; always thinking about what you have to do to escape poverty, to create art that is going to catch the world on fire. You have to live in the moment totally to create a moment that is compelling, and though it may be kind of bohemian, it does make the 'earth' of your soul richer."

The first the outside world knew of Rickie was when she appeared, languidly leaning back over the bonnet of a Corvette, on the cover of Tom Waits's 1978 album Blue Valentine. She and Waits were lovers at the time, a liaison of future celebrities which has effectively condemned them to be forever footnotes to each others' lives - something which used to be a source of some annoyance to her, but which she has since come to accept as part of pop's mythology. Although Waits did, she concedes, have an enormous effect on the development of her public personality. "I always tend to become whomever I am involved with, and so I think I took on his swaggering masculinity," she affirms. "It was a good coat to wear, a good thing to hide behind: myself being so very vulnerable, that big persona seemed safe."

Musically, her main influences were blue-eyed soul singers like Laura Nyro and Van Morrison. "I also got a lot from Taj Majal and Dan Hicks," she adds. "They both played a kind of home-made American music, the one totally blues, and the other a kind of jazzish, acoustic guitar-driven, precise singer thing."

Those influences are still evident in her music. Onstage in Bloomsbury, she's surrounded by an eight-piece band who bring a variety of home-made American elements to fit each song's individual needs. For the country-blues tune "Lapdog", it's the rootsy strains of mandolin, fiddle and dobro; for the funky "Little Mysteries", her choppy wah-wah guitar is joined by organ, trumpet and sax; and for "A Tree in Allenford", the warm tones of accordion, bass clarinet, electric cello and bass harmonica combine to form a warm, comforting bath of sound.

Most of the material is drawn from Rickie's latest album, The Evening of My Best Day. It's the finest of her career, a work of commendable depth and sophistication which gets better with each hearing. "I think so, too," she agrees. "The tree has matured and borne excellent fruit!" It's also strikingly different in one important respect from her previous work, with the boho street stories replaced by polemical songs like "Tell Somebody (Repeal the Patriot Act)" and "Ugly Man", the latter introduced in concert as being about "a person who just pisses me off". So, what is it about George W Bush? "I think he's a dangerous person, and I think it's dangerous that Americans aren't speaking out," she says, before getting personal. "He's smug, he's arrogant, he's really dumb, and he's incredibly wealthy. This pisses me off, because I think that if he has that much money, at least he could be smart, y'know? He's corrupt, and he's dumb, and he'll destroy us all because he's corrupt and dumb, not because he's corrupt and smart."

She shakes her head sadly.

"For the world to be destroyed because somebody is dumb - surely, if we must be destroyed, we want to be destroyed by an evil genius! To go from a president like Clinton, an articulate and thoughtful humanitarian - as far as presidents go - to something like George Bush, is..."

Words fail her. But not for long. Mention of the sinister Patriot Act provokes immediate and further fulmination. "It's like the Enabling Act of Nazi Germany," she contends. "This Patriot Act is meant to monitor Americans, not our potential enemies, and if necessary, to suppress Americans. Who else are they going to come after, than the people who are speaking out? There were high-school kids against the war, and they were kicked out of school. There were all kinds of measures taken if you showed any kind of dissent. You weren't allowed to say: 'I don't agree with it'; you could organise things in support of the war, but you couldn't organise anything against it.

"That's when I knew a fascist thread had been woven through this patriotic movement. They have the right to arrest you, to deny you access to a lawyer, even the right not to tell you why you were arrested. They can come and get you anywhere in the world, and they can hold you indefinitely, as you can see they're doing in Guantanamo Bay. This is as evil as anything, or anyone. If they said: 'Saddam Hussein arrested people without access to lawyers,' he'd be considered evil. Now we're the evil that we say we beheld. Because if it's ever okay for us to do these things, then it's okay for them to do them, too."

The day that the Twin Towers fell, Rickie went for a walk by the beach, and was struck by something strange. There were no aircraft in the sky anywhere over Los Angeles. The eerie calm, she felt, implied a coming storm.

"I thought, this may be the last day - maybe tomorrow we'll go to war, and the life we've known will be gone forever; maybe all of us will be gone forever," she says, with no trace of melodrama. "I think it profoundly changed me. I decided to live with great courage - by which I mean, to come out, to write and talk about what we feel, to try and do good things in the world; to say: 'Hey, we're not gonna let these few guys kill us all, are we?' Because I realised that by staying silent, a billion people might have let 500 or so people kill us all. At that moment I thought, I don't go down quietly, I don't go gentle into that good night, without yelling."

One of the intriguing aspects of The Evening Of My Best Day is the complex morality illustrated in its songs. Alongside the anti-Bush diatribes and clarion-calls for human rights is the title-track, which was initially inspired by the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but somehow became linked, for Rickie, with her mother's illness and the song became, as she put it, "a familiar that walked me from where I was then to where I am now", an expression of universal compassion and empathy.

"Originally it was about a solitary loneliness, which took the shape of a little boy," she explains. "I was always pro-death penalty, but a series of things have happened that have changed me, and I can't tell you why, but I now feel such compassion for many people who perpetrate unspeakable acts. I look at them and I think: 'Once they were little, and they had a Christmas stocking, and wore little pyjamas and drank hot chocolate, just like me.'

"As time went by, I knew it was a picture of something much more than that, that it was woven into my sense of isolation as a child, that there was some episode I wanted to forgive, because I could not understand how a person grows up to be a monster."

Rickie was, by her own admission, a lonely child. Her family occupied one of the lower rungs on the showbiz ladder - her grandad was a one-legged singer/dancer, Peg Leg Jones - and her parents eventually abandoned their dreams of stardom and kept constantly on the move, their peripatetic existence doubtless contributing to the young Rickie's self-reliance.

"I always had imaginary friends," she admits. "I was initially really happy and outgoing in school, but even though I was outgoing, I had imaginary friends - and I see myself as much happier in the company of my imaginary friends. So the picture I have of myself is as very lonely. I'm not sure if I was, but that's the picture I have." Hence her empathy for the lonely outsider who subsequently turns bad, and becomes pinioned by epithets like "evil" and "monster", as if these were inherent qualities present from birth, rather than acquired characteristics.

"It's important to remember," she emphasises, "that [The Evening Of My Best Day] is a picture of the child before it turns into a monster, not a picture of the monster. I'm reminding you of its innocence - I can't account for anything it does when it grows up. It's a 'Portrait of the Monster as a Child'.

"But then, that's not what the song ends up about. Because my mother's stroke, and 9/11, that day which I thought might be the last day of the world - all those things altered how I led my life, and ensured that I would finish my life forthright, courageous, kind, and just keep trying to unfold, unfold, unfold forever."

'The Evening of My Best Day' is out now on V2