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Lenny Ann Low

IF THERE IS one thing cabaret vixen Meow Meow will never tire of, it is love. Fresh, raw, old, lost, obsessive or dangerous, love fires her every waking moment. "Love is harsh, it is a battlefield," she says melodramatically.

Adorned with bejewelled tulle, white feathers and gold-and-pink satin, she is posing for photographs. Skip back 30 minutes and Meow, doing her make-up and adjusting her lithe figure into a long, slinky and shiny red dress backstage at the tiny Pilgrim Theatre on Pitt Street, is having trouble applying her crimson lipstick. "I'm finding it hard to concentrate, I'm getting all excited about love," she says.

Meow is only preparing to be photographed yet her vivacious and lippy demeanour is already a performance. Not once does she drop the vampy, comic, sexy and slightly deranged Eurotramp-chanteuse character that has cajoled and unnerved audiences in Berlin, New York, Shanghai, Paris, Sydney and every nook and cranny of the Famous Spiegeltent as it toured Edinburgh, Adelaide and Melbourne. The glamorously manic diva was personally selected by David Bowie for High Line, a New York festival he curated in May, which also featured Ricky Gervais, Laurie Anderson and Arcade Fire on its inaugural bill.

Any questions about who might lurk behind the velvet-voiced one are met with a delicate smile and a gracious warning. "I'm very lucky if there is someone behind me," she says, coating one eyelid in shimmering blue glitter. "And in front of me, I must say. I'm not that choosy these days. Desperate, some might say. So, yes, I'm afraid the person behind me should just move away, they might get kicked … " Meow fixes me with a sweet but steely gaze, " … hard."

She points down to her feet with a make-up brush. "You've seen, of course, my beautiful Givenchy shoes?"

One long, fishnet-clad leg is swung up to reveal a weighty black high heel, its ankle buckle glimmering in the dressing room mirror's lights. "They were given to me by a fantastic man, known as Tsar Stefan, in New York. He called out during one of my shows, 'What is your shoe size?' and then I received these wonderful things. He's a great supporter of the arts and, certainly, he's supporting my legs very well."

Meow's brand of performance art has been likened to "a punk-cabaret artist and shambolic showgirl", "an iron fist in a velvet glove" and a "grade-schooler trapped in a woman's body". A recent collaborator, the original Hedwig of the musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch, filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell, described her as "a beautiful old Art Deco building that's just been condemned", a description that delights Meow.

Her extraordinary voice can move from a wailing blend of gravelly opera to velvety seduction and furious squeals, as if an angry and orgasmic dolphin is within. Songs by Jacques Brel, Bertolt Brecht, Dolly Parton, Kurt Weill along with Chinese courtesan tunes are up-ended with a wild, sensual and melodic vigour.

At High Line, Meow sang Bowie's Rock'n'Roll Suicide while screaming at crowd members to get out of her way, "I'm a professional", descending a staircase and crowd surfing to the stage where a chorus of children dressed as mini-Meows finished the song.

In Portland she blindfolded audience members and made them suck lollipops to the beat of burlesque tunes.

In the Famous Spiegeltent, as in most venues she steamrolls through, Meow conjured up and contorted 1920s Berlin by belting, screeching and growling old-time cabaret tunes in Chinese, German, Polish and French. Patrolling the mirror tent, with the crouched and crotchety air of a broken-down cabaret trouper, she ordered patrons to unzip her skin-tight trousers and jacket then straddled their grouped shoulders - her legs, arms and groin careening wildly - breaking into song and using other crowd members as microphone holder and sheet music stand.

"It is all about the voice but I will use whatever gymnastic means I can, be that vocal chords or inner-thigh muscles, to get some kind of reaction," Meow says.

There is a sincere purpose behind Meow's turbulent and extreme deconstruction of traditional cabaret. She is passionate about live music and theatre, about the old songs and their role and importance in the world.

"I would be completely indulgent if I thought I could change the world through theatre," she says. "But I do think I can hit a couple of people over the head with my ideas and also make people laugh. And maybe end up with an extra pair of Givenchy shoes at the end."

Hearing this makes it easier to believe that beneath the one-liners and sequins and violently backcombed dark wig is Melissa Madden Gray, an Australian contemporary opera singer with blonde hair, a thesis in performance art and pornography, a law-fine arts degree and an extensive stage, film, music and multimedia repertoire. Madden Gray, who is from Melbourne, will feature alongside Susan Prior in Venus And Adonis, a Bell Shakespeare production, in 2008.

For now, however, she is irrefutably Meow Meow, readying to perform her new show, Insert The Name Of The Person You Love. The show is directed by Rodney Fisher and will be part of Sydney Festival 2008. Inspired by a magazine article about scientific research into the brain mechanics of falling in love, Meow will merge her famed kamikaze cabaret methods with a compendium of love experiments performed each night.

"I am always obsessed with heartbreak and love and, obviously, torch singers," Meow says. "Those songs are usually the most beautiful and applicable. Mixing that with the science of discovering that the place in the brain that has passionate love in it is the place of hunger and addiction, that's very interesting to me.

"This will be quite a serious piece in a way, not a concert but an intimate piece about love. So there are songs and fishnets and all of those things but it's half laboratory experiment as well."

Should audience members prepare to be guinea pigs in the name of love?

"It's a secret how we will do it but expect contact," she says. "I'd be lying if I said anything else. Although, with me I might just sit on the floor and cry. That's part of love, that's part of the beauty of the malleable concert format."