"People think you're bonkers when you say things like this," says Barb Jungr, "but songs do speak to you and sing you rather than you singing them.

"Which means choosing your repertoire is a bit like a love affair: There are lots of people you fancy but it just doesn't work out, and there are some people you don't fancy at all but the sex is great."

Jungr cut her teeth on the Seventies cabaret circuit, performing with the likes of Julian Clary and Alexei Sayle via vocal harmony group The Three Courgettes.

She recently provided the lyrics for Birmingham Stage Company's new adaptation of The Jungle Book (coming to Brighton in September) while developing her own musical, The Ballad Of Norah's Ark, about "a middle-aged woman who builds an ark in a time of ecological disaster".

And she is currently touring her latest album Love Me Tender, an astounding journey into the repertoire of Elvis Presley which reveals those potent tales of love and loneliness so often obscured by the jumpsuits and the hip-shaking.

Jungr, then, is an extremely funny conversationalist and a highly adventurous artist. But, most importantly for Cafe Prague, the cabaret night she hosts monthly at Komedia, she is a chansonnier who goddam knows what she's doing.

One of the world's leading song stylists - a term she elucidates as "singing songs that people might know but in surprising ways so it's not like karaoke" - Jungr intended Cafe Prague as "a sort of European cabaret night, by which I mean that it isn't, and now I'm going to perform a collection of Gerschwin' again and again and again."

"I have a very special relationship with Prague because my dad was Czech," she says of the title. "It's a very beautiful city and if your idea of a holiday is drinking cheap beer then of course it's remarkable. But I have to say the service at Cafe Prague is better."

With a varying format which can see anything from floor spots to spontaneous jazz work-outs, this monthly night attracts a high calibre of guest and tonight concludes its summer season with a special appearance by Jungr's old buddy Ian Shaw, a BBC jazz singer of the year.

But month in, month out, Jungr is the main attraction, reinterpreting, distilling and reinvesting the great songbooks to create what has been termed "European art music noir".

"I'm very pleased that a lot of my performing brothers and sisters earn a living impersonating Alison Moyet," she says, "but I don't understand why anyone would want to.

"I'm always trying to find that seed of a song that I can grow again in different soil and see what plant grows. The one song of my own on the new album is all about that - how you can tell the difference between Presley and an impersonator in the places that aren't measurable by science."

"I'll do material to which other people's attitude is, 'don't go there'," she continues, "whether it's too well known, too unknown, too hard to reinterpret or simply too moving.

"A lot of the work I've done in the past has been about deliberately driving into the thunderstorm. I think, can I stand here, in the eye of the hurricane, and hold this together?'

"The trick is to do that while keeping your grip on the audience's hand at the same time."

Starts at 8.30pm. Tickets cost £12.50/£10, call 01273 647100.

Barb Jungr's new album, Love Me Tender, is out now on Linn Records.