Diva "I didn't plan to be a singer. I was just planning to drink and fuck the system and be an anarchist," declares Rita Lynch, whose 1991 debut album Call Me Your Girlfriend made her a cult lesbian heroine. The Bristol-based singer has been playing resonant acoustic punk songs of love, sex, betrayal and redemption since the late 80's, when she stumbled across music almost by accident. She formed an all-girl band at the age of 22, called Rita and the Piss Artistes. Their music remit was, basically, "to get drunk a lot". They lasted six months before Lynch realised she actually could sing and then seriously launched a solo career. Now 38, her trademark spiky blonde coiffure has been tamed into a floppy red fringe and her idealism, likewise, is tempered. She meets Diva in a Soho coffee bar, lights up a cigarette, and talks wistfully about the track What's Going On, from her new album, Victim, a collection of her strongest songs performed live. "I felt quite sad to hear it. I thought, that was me when I was full of hope and thought I could be huge." The song has a sense of raw energy, and Patti Smith-style confrontational lyrics. "You carry your pain like a guitar, like a gun," she sings. "Use it up like bullets, let it rain songs/Whats going on?" Although she has been around for more than a decade, Lynch feels the dream she always wanted isn't going to materialise. "I'm quite old-fashioned. I believe in art and expressing yourself," she says frankly, in her quietly husky voice. "When I started it was cool to be a starving artist, but now nothing's cool unless you're making money. People have got to learn to be free again."

Lynch has always loved music. She was born in South London of Irish parents and grew up on "Irish music, rebel songs, jigs and reels". Brought up a Catholic, as a child she wanted to be a nun. She was clutching a luminous statue of the Virgin Mary when, at the age of 14, she nearly died of an asthma attack. Her family were on the verge of calling a priest for the Last Rites.

"When you come close to death in childhood, you feel you've been saved for a good reason, that something great's gonna happen to you," suggests Lynch. She grew out of nunhood and became a free spirit instead, travelling the world, sleeping on beaches, and, as she says, "taking it to an extreme." Not suprisingly, Lynch made herself vulnerable, hence the themes of pleasure and pain that wind through her songs. This has been misconstrued. Some fans view her as the SM Queen but, infact, Lynch "is not and never was." She deals with emotional violence in relationships and is dismayed that people see it as "titilating...I'm looking at things in wider terms of life and death, so I'm amazed when people immediately associate my lyrics with sex. A bloke once said to me that Beautiful Eyes (her song about a lesbian love affair) is about castration - cutting off a man's prick! A woman interviewed me once and, referring to the line: 'Mother of God protect us in love', said, 'Oh, that's about safe sex and dental dams'. I thought, 'Oh my God, that's literal'." Though she has played the occasional SM/fetish gig and worn leather and rubber ("that was a fashion thing"), Lynch is wary of the subject - mainly because she was the victim of an abusive relationship. "For two years I went out with a very violent woman who was absolutely horrible." She points to a scar on her forehead where her ex-lover head-butted her. "I fell completely and utterly in love with her. God knows why. She was a weightlifter, and kinda wanted to be a man. I stayed in it for so long because I was confused. In a violent relationship, your confidence goes until you don't know right from wrong anymore." She felt pressure from other lesbians to keep quiet. "We don't want any bad press about lesbians, so you can get beaten up, Rita, that's fine," she says sarcastically. "The irony was, quite a few women fancied the girl I went out with and were jealous. If only they knew!" After the relationship broke up, Lynch found herself lonely and isolated. She is now going out with a man. Did she "turn" because she'd had a traumatic relationship with a woman? "Not really. It left its mark, but I wanted to explore things more. I was looking for love, and found it in another place." Typically, Lynch is still breaking taboos, saying that her experience is not uncommon. "At first I felt guilty and ashamed. I'd come out as a lesbian in my twenties and was back in the closet in a different way. Now I feel this is an issue, like domestic violence, that should be talked about. How many women are putting themselves in straightjackets? Pretending? I embrace lesbian culture fully, and I define myself as bisexual. I worked for Gay Pride in Bristol for three years. Just because gay people are fighting for a voice in society doesn't mean they should be prejudiced against others. Who is ever going to be pure enough?" She pauses, stubs out a cigarette, and concludes: "Who is the real enemy? I'll carry on doing my music and singing about women's experiences. I'm not the enemy." Lynch can argue her corner. To the suggestion that, in this post-Oprah age, the album title Victim is a bit, well, unfashionable, she says, "Bollocks! How far can you have control when you can die at any moment? I've made myself a victim, but sometimes it's hard not to be. I don't think 'poor little me, I'm suffering'. I was a willing victim. I wanted to go all the way." Soon after that she graciously bids goodbye and goes out into Old Compton Street, her red head bobbing through the traffic. (Lucy O'Brien, DIVA, April 2000)