THEY say you don't interview Meatloaf. You eat it, right? Wrong. At least, when it comes to Meatloaf, the Pavarotti of pop, they really do claim it's best to just beat it or, at least, sit back and let him leap on board his metaphorical Harley Davidson and thunder his way right through the normal question and answer process. Some people suggest he's even likely to ride that Harley over your head if you dare to ask indelicate questions such as: "Tell us about your weight, Meat or that weird name?"

When we did finally collide I realised that what I'd been warned about was totally true - toss Meatloaf even a scrap of a subject that whets his appetite, and it's like kick starting that motorbike into immediate action. You don't believe me? Then try fanning the sleeve of his new CD in front of his eyes while you casually comment on "the Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction influence on its artwork", and, by God, you'll hear him roar.

"It has zippo to do with Tarantino - absolutely nothing," he says, in much the same way he sings less than laid back lullabies like his latest single, I'd Lie For You (And That's The Truth). "All of that represents me, because I love pulp fiction novels, and have, ever since I was a kid. And d'ya know why they're called pulp fiction? Because the paper they were printed on was pulp, the cheapest paper you could buy, paper that wouldn't last! The cover of the new album itself comes from one of those novels. And I do collect pulp fiction art, oil on canvas, like the girl with the guns on the album, which is by an artist named Rafael de Soto, and was painted in 1941. So it's my taste you're seeing there, not Tarantino!"

Actually, the "dame" in this painting don't have no weapons at all. Instead, she's wearing a punkish necklace of handcuffs inside which two male hands are bearing "rods" blasting away, leaving the lady looking, not surprisingly, less than gleeful. Doesn't this bullet has just left the gun edginess also set the mood for much of the song cycle itself.

"It does, yeah," says Meat. "Because Welcome To The Neighbourhood is, really, a symphony set on a block in the twilight zone! And inside that symphony are many movements. That's how I pictured it when we were doing the album, how I described it to the people playing on it and why you have Forty Five Seconds Of Ecstasy, or the Spanish thing. Each movement leads you towards the conclusion of the symphony, Where Angels Sing, because there ain't no place else to go!"

Meatloaf insists that, to him, "songs are like little movies" and that he prefers lyrics that "paint pictures, evoke characters" as in the soundscapes of Jim Steinman, who composed Bat Out Of Hell, its successor, Bat Out Of Hell II. Back Into Hell and two tracks from the new album. That said, although Meat adores analysing movies along these lines he has always claimed he doesn't like applying the same kind of microscopic attention to pop music. Why?

"I don't like to analyse music, but I analyse lyrics to death!" he responds. "I don't know any about music, that's probably why I don't like to analyse it! But when it comes to the lines that someone writes for me I've been known to phone a songwriter halfway through a tour and say this character just wouldn't say those words, can't we get something better? And I do compare that to, say, the way De Niro would interpret a character in a movie, change lines because he just doesn't feel comfortable with the original script. But, on the other hand, when I do something like Tom Waits's Martha the song is so perfect, in terms of its lyrical structure, that it already is a great script! Like, you're not going to change Tennessee Williams, right?

Let's get to the bottom of this, Meat. Off the Harley and explain to all our readers why you so often refer to theatre and cinema's great patron saint of sin, sex and anti puritanical sensuality: Tennessee Williams. And be totally honest here. Like, admit that the "Spanish thing" you referred to earlier, Fiesta Des Las Almas Perdidas which, translated, means Festival of the Lost Souls - is remarkably like the "flowers for the dead" cry of a street seller in Elia Kazan's noirish movie of A Streetcar Named Desire.

"Is that where I got it from! You're right, but I wasn't able to remember until this very moment, though I knew it just didn't work as an English title!" Meatloaf says, clearly bubbling with delight, as though he's just heard he's been appointed president of the Tennessee Williams fan club.

"And I love Tennessee Williams's work. He's an incredible writer. Do you read plays? I read plays all the time, love his. Get inside his characters in Streetcar, The Glass Menagerie, and they are so true to life it's frightening, even though they are fictional. That's what I dig about his work." So does Meatloaf agree that Welcome To The Neighbourhood explores a similar sociological, even psychosexual, territory - particularly in its second section?

"I did make that twist at Festival of Lost Souls," he says, "and after Running For The Red Light which really has been misunderstood by English critics, in particular. That is where the album turns around. But most people have no conception of how I go about putting together a record.

I research a work like this the same way an actor would research a part. Or Williams would research New Orleans for Streetcar."

IN that play Tennessee Williams also split himself into the masculine and feminine poles, projecting various sides of his nature into both the "bestial" Stanley Kowalski character and the "moth like" Blanche DuBois. Doesn't Meatloaf do something similar when he "roars" and "purrs" his way through Welcome To The Neighbourhood. Isn't he a man who is obviously unafraid to reveal the feminine side of his psyche, even though he's probably better known as the epitome of macho posturing?

"Absolutely! Wow! I'm afraid of you!" he says, laughing. "But, no, I'm not afraid to reveal that side of my nature, partly because most of my really true friends have been female. In fact, there have been so very few male individuals in my life that I have ever felt a closeness to, that I could count them on one hand."

So how do Meat's female friends respond to When The Rubber Meets The Road, which has been described as one of the "most politically incorrect songs ever written" because it features a father telling his son that a woman can be called "a slut" and "a slave". If his female friends are also feminists, surely he gets tongue lashed, at least, for this kind of Neanderthal nonsense?

"My friends and family know how to separate the guy I am from the roles I play in this album and know I designed that song off a 1942 movie, Murder My Sweet, or something like that - though I think 80 per cent of people in the world can relate to what that guy is saying," Meatloaf suggests.

"I gotta tell you that whereas I listened to, say, Bat II for only a while after I'd finished the thing, I listen to this album all the time and really do believe it contains some of my best work. And people who know me well like this record better than the Bat records. They get more of a sense of me from it."

The latter will be "really obvious" from the Welcome To The Neighbourhood stage show which Meatloaf will shortly be bringing to Ireland. "Anyone who loves movies, like I do, will love the show," he says. "I really integrate the film aspects of me into this, in that I show the videos we've done, but also film clips of Bogart and so on, paced in such a way that they, too, are part of the suite. For example, when some clips are playing, nothing else is going on. And nobody has done this before. It's unbelievable! And I couldn't be more excited about anything right now."