Mother was the New York performance club where Mercury prize winner Antony Hegarty learned his art, and it was a creative - if somewhat gory - experience, he tells John O'Mahony.

On the corner of 14th Street and Washington, deep in the heart of New York's meat-packing district, is the site once occupied by the seminal underground performance club known simply as Mother. Today, sadly, it has been taken over by a clothing chain, but little more than a decade ago this was the seething centre of the city's downtown experimental scene, packed to the grungy rafters with punks, drag queens and various self-proclaimed "gender mutants".

Every night, on a little stage tucked away at the back, wild and delicate creatures - with names such as Kabuki Starshine, Sissy Fitt, Lily of the Valley - would strut about in outlandish costumes and garish make-up. Smiling and taunting, they would whip up a storm of improvised camp banter or act out kitschy scenarios borrowed from cult movies such as Psycho or The Blue Angel. On the flimsiest pretext, the performers would erupt into music - comic numbers laced with innuendo and expletives, and torch songs that reduced the audience to silence.

"It was all very funky," says experimental film-maker Charles Atlas, reliving the club's finest moments from the pavement nearby. "There were huge slabs of meat hanging all along the street here, bloody and smelly. And inside, the place was full of these wonderful freaks."

Antony Hegarty, who graced the stage at Mother more times than he cares to remember, is a little less effusive: "It was okay; it was all right," he interrupts languorously. "The stage was tiny, not much more than the size of an elevator. But we did a lot of shows at Mother: installation type things, singing songs surrounded by drug-addicted drag queens and camp ladies of the evening. Everyone performed at the place, from Debbie Harry on down . . ."

Next month, in the somewhat more salubrious surroundings of London's Barbican arts centre, Hegarty, along with Atlas and a procession of models known as the NYC Beauties, will perform Turning, a multimedia work that recalls this early performance phase of the singer's career.

Hegarty has since established himself as one of the most sublime and singular voices in music, producing a yearning, multi-octave sound of immense natural beauty that recalls Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and more than a hint of Marc Almond in one shimmering, androgynous vocal presence. With his group, Antony and the Johnsons, he snatched last year's Mercury prize, and counts some impressive names among his fans: "Listening to Antony's voice is like hearing Elvis for the first time," says Laurie Anderson. "Two words and he has broken your heart . . . when he sings, it is the most exquisite thing that you will hear in your life."

But Hegarty's roots lie not in music, but in the kind of radical performance work he did back in Mother. Inspired by legendary figures such as cross-dressing muse Leigh Bowery and the pop-operatic downtown diva Klaus Nomi, he set up a bizarre collective of avant-drag artists called the Blacklips Performance Cult.

"It was a very rewarding and creative period," he says. "Every week we did a different play. There was that kind of abandon to the process. There was nothing to lose - everyone was being paid $5 a week."

The group was established in late 1992, by a core of three: Hegarty, then a recent graduate of the experimental theatre wing of NYU; a fellow student named Psychotic Eve, who had also played the part of a transvestite nun in a trash-musical Hegarty had written called The Cripple and the Starfish; and a belly-dancing DJ named Johanna Constantine. When they took up a Monday night residency at the Pyramid club, membership ballooned.

"There were all these toothless drug addicts and drag queens," remembers Hegarty, "really creative, amazing people. You'd hand out a script and then everyone would suggest where their numbers would go."

Sets consisted of "trashcan treasure", items salvaged from skips, and performers shared a single microphone, reading their parts from scrawled crib-notes. The plots were barely-rehearsed gems of camp burlesque with titles such as The Birth of Anne Frank (a surreal exploration of the HIV epidemic and the Holocaust) and The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (a homage to Divine): "They did these cabaret-ish things," remembers Atlas. "Some were surreal, some were gothic. It was all done with that kind of youthful New York, gay energy."

Apart from writing, Hegarty's role was to punctuate the action with heavenly interludes of song: "In the context of this garbage set and the air of madness," remembers Psychotic Eve, "Antony would sing beautiful love songs. Our audience were all these punks and addicts and crazy fags. And he would reduce them all to tears."

If there was one element that characterised the Blacklips aesthetic, it was high-gothic blood, guts and gore: "Someone would go to the meat shop," Hegarty recalls, "and buy intestines, livers, hearts and buckets and buckets of blood. There was a lot of dousing." The "blood bags and beauty" approach, which saw performers chucking blood around, Hegarty feels, sprang from the Aids-inflected mood of the time: "I think that reflects where New York was at that time. We were in the thick of Aids. Blacklips was kind of like a Rorschach [inkblot test] of the psyche of the city. It was a very dark period, and we were really camping on the graves of all those queens who had just died."

By the mid-1990s, Blacklips had imploded into a morass of in-fighting, power struggles and coups. Hegarty was soon to concentrate on his music career, but the Blacklips era had left an indelible mark: The Cripple and the Starfish, The Blue Angel, and Hitler in my Heart, plus practically all of the songs on his first album, debuted in various downtown shows.

On the surface, the cool, dreamlike aesthetic of Turning could not be further from the lo-fi lunacy of Blacklips, but the primary inspiration reaches back to that time. "I had been using turntables in my work," says Atlas, "and then I started working with Johanna, who had been one of the founders of Blacklips, doing video portraits of her just spinning slowly round. Antony saw some of those."

The resulting concept is monumentally simple. On one side of the stage, on a rotating platform, are the NYC beauties - statuesque figures from hermaphrodites through to transsexuals, transvestites and, finally, a sprinkling of entirely genetic females. Atlas captures it all on video and projects on to a huge screen behind Hegarty and the band. The result is mesmeric.

"I think what Turning does is take a person that I adore, what I would consider a hybrid person, someone who shines brightly, and then puts them on a platform and watches their spirit turning," says Hegarty. If there is a message hidden in the piece, it is concerned with gender: "The theme for me is that everything moves towards the feminine - that is a theme of my life and my aesthetic and everything I'm interested in."

Hegarty hopes one day to make a film of a performance cycle which he produced after leaving Blacklips, entitled Love, but a full-scale return to performance-based work seems unlikely. If Blacklips reformed, his response would be: "Just enjoy it. I don't think I could participate."

He does acknowledge the effect the period had on his subsequent life and career: "I suppose it did form me, aesthetically and especially in terms of community. My adult landscape and the community that I still hold in my heart is from that world. But I was preoccupied with music when I was doing club stuff; my participation was to come out and sing a song. When I moved on, I just left behind all the heartache. The rest is still very present in everything that I do."