From performing at Sydney Opera House to inadvertently hosting fetish balls in New York dungeons, Meow Meow is a global singing sensation and exotic performance artist.

Promising to set the Fringe Festival on fire, her shows blaze a wild trail through Thirties Shanghai show tunes, Weimar cabaret, post-punk thrash and pretty suicide ditties.

She is currently creating a two-woman show with China's first acknowledged transsexual and working with Opera Factory director David Freeman.

Her new solo show, Beyond Glamour: The Absinthe Tour is, she tells us, her own answer to the question: As a 21st-Century woman, where do you go with performance art when everything's been done?

On the show
"I feel sad when I think that cabaret has gone into that very nice, clean, sterile land where you know what you're going to get.

"For me it's all about finding little shards of history. I really feel it's Meow's duty, even though she's very iconoclastic and tends to rip things apart, to show how potent these songs still are.

"The Spiegeltent absolutely fits me in terms of beauty and desolation and tawdriness and slightly faded glamour and extraordinary history and bits that might fall off if you push too hard on them.

"If I don't go and rub myself against the walls of the Spiegeltent every now and then it feels like things aren't quite right. The absinthe is obviously something that I've had a lot of and everyone else will have to sit through."

On Kamikaze Kabaret
"It's a kind of blitzkrieg of songs, often sped up, combined with some sort of deeply dangerous thing.

"For me, for instance, it's scary doing things on poles or bars with very high heels. For the audience, well, perhaps they don't expect to be strangled by a pair of old dancer thighs.

"Sometimes, it's about doing it in an unsuitable environment - singing John Cage in gutters in Vegas or opera in a gay bar in Berlin.

"I often find a serious performance art gig will turn into ridiculous cabaret and vice versa. So when people expect me to be much more razorblades I'm much more sequins.

"As long as someone is sacred and dies either literally or metaphorically. Sometimes I get depressed and just lie on stage and cry for an hour. It's not always easy being a showgirl of spectacular proportions."

On her body
"There's a beautiful Gypsy Rose Lee quote: 'I wasn't naked, I was completely covered by a blue spotlight'.

"I'm very pro... I don't want to say pro-porn, but pro-sexual expression and liberation and empowerment of everybody.

"Breast tape is top of my hates along with unwanted waxing. I did use it once for a show but I've got quite unruly bosoms and I looked like a bit of art deco architecture - one breast was pointing up on the right and the other was going diagonally to the left.

"In America audiences are just so easy to shock. One performance I started by popping my bosom into a glass of wine and smoking furiously just to get all the things that you're not allowed to do done.

"They're theatrical cigarettes of course: I'm very professional, I look after my body. It's the only thing I've got left, let's face it. My sanity went some time ago."

On cat food
"The funniest thing I ever did was a cat-food commercial.

"You know Whiskers? I did the most insane audition. I had to impersonate a cat washing herself with my leg up around my ear - this is where it's handy to have the ballet training - and then pretend I had fur balls.

"I'm actually allergic to cats so I was completely drugged on very strong antihistamines. But of course I got the job because I was so, I think, extraordinary.

"I have to say that since that time I've been quite addicted to tinned fish. I think I spent so many days going 'Mmm, mmm, mmm' over it that I sold myself the product marvellously."

Starts at 8.30pm, £8/£6, 01273 657100.