When most artists claim to be one of a kind, mould-breakers or unique entities in the history of music, it’s hard not to suppress a snigger. When Diamanda Galas says, albeit laughing, that she belongs to ‘the isolated tradition of me’ it is im­pos­s­ible to disagree.

Pick any facet of her lengthy career, and it’s hard to find points of com­par­is­on. She has an unearthly voice, that can com­fort­ably stretch across four octaves, ef­fort­lessly switching from an operatic diva-screech to a low blues growl. Her lyrical concerns are not your average pop fodder, either: Galas’ most famous work is Plague Mass, a con­stantly de­vel­op­ing, con­front­a­tion­al med­it­a­tion on the impact of the AIDS virus that claimed the life of her brother, the play­wright Philip Dimitri Galas. Her latest work, to be performed at the CCA this week, is De­fix­iones, Will and Testament, a piece dealing with Armenian genocide and Middle Eastern politics.

‘I’m like the one person in the crowd who says, “Everybody is saying this one fucking thing, but what about this thing that needs to be said?”’ Galas says, ex­plain­ing the genesis of her music, ‘I have a choice: I can go home and not say anything, and go home safely, or I can say it and have everybody call me a fucking asshole. Well, I’ll pick the second one, because that allows me to go to sleep at night, where if I picked the first one, that would kill me, it would just kill me.’

Galas is, then, unafraid to tackle issues many would seek to sweep under the carpet, but she is not to be confused with a cam­paign­er­ or protest singer, a fact which becomes clear the more in­ac­cess­ible she makes her music, drawing on obscure texts in numerous languages and in­cor­por­at­ing elements of ever­yth­ing from con­tem­por­ary classical to tra­di­tion­al Middle Eastern music via blues standards. ‘I’m not a fucking pro­pa­gand­ist,’ she says, ‘If someone used something I’ve said on a poster I’d probably be the first to faint. In disgust. When I was first working on Plague Mass, people were saying, “Hey, you’re singing this in like ten different languages, maybe you should do it all in English,” and I was like, ‘Oh right, only people who speak English are getting this virus, how could I have not realised this?’ No! The most important thing is that I know what the fuck I’m singing about, I’m not going to make it more simple so that you and Joe Blow over there can figure it out.’

As with the work on AIDS, Galas’ current work on Armenia is rooted in the personal as well as the political, tying together musical in­flu­ences with the Galas family history. ‘Well, here I am, an Anatolian Greek - a middle eastern Greek - and I’m an American, which is a bloody weird com­bin­a­tion,’ she explains, ‘It already says that I’m a Greek in the middle east, which means living under the influence of the Turks as a slave to Islam, and that has a lot to do with De­fix­iones. Then you have the American side, which is, well… the finest music here that I know is from the south, whether it’s white country blues, or black country blues, it’s really powerful music. I think that when you’re coming out of a culture like that, that was dominated for many, many years, you see the death of your culture through dis­in­ter­est and powerful interests from outside. That’s what the work is about in a way, the betrayal of these countries by the large powers.’

De­fix­iones, then, is nothing if not timely and, since few musicians are willing or able to tackle such topics at all, let alone with the breath­tak­ing power that char­ac­ter­ises Galas’ live work, her per­for­m­ances at the CCA are un­mis­s­able.

This interview was first published in The List in September, 2002.

You can read the full interview conducted for this piece here.