British Steel

The slurry affront comes from the back, somewhere near the bar, stopping both the band and the audience dead in their tracks: “Go back to England, you fake motherfucker!”

Holly Golightly is a few songs into a ninety-minute set at the Subterranean, a two-tiered nightclub in Chicago’s bustling Bucktown district, when the brickbat is hurled her way. It’s only the second date of an exhaustive six-week U.S. tour, and Golightly is in no mood for hecklers, particularly of the besotted frat-boy variety.

“Bring it on,” she bristles, all attitude and British accent and jet-black hair. “I’m ready for you. Come up here and get your cock out. ”

The crowd titters, but Golightly’s invitation is accepted. Moments later, the willowy frontwoman and her three-piece band are sharing the stage with an inebriated doofus whose attempts to unfasten his zipper aren’t going well. He grabs a nearby microphone and mumbles something about biting off more than he can chew.

“We don’t want to hear you,” Golightly mocks. “Get your cock out. Now!”

He leans toward the singer and fumbles with his crotch.

“Don’t show it to me,” she chides, shoving him away. “Don’t touch me.”

The audience, tired of the interruption, begins to chant: Off the stage, off the stage.

Golightly strums a chord on her vintage Hofner hollow-body. “This is a fake song from England,” she announces as the heckler finally retreats from sight.

“I just love a big mouth,” Golightly says, rolling her eyes as the song ends. “So much going for him.”

She then diverts from the prescribed set list, giving the band a break and pulling out the moody “Comedy Time.” Golightly spits out the words like rat poison, closing the number with an impromptu lyrical twist: The gang’s all here/The girls and boys/And that bloke with the stupid cock.

Looks like it’s going to be one of those nights.

“I don’t want to be touring indefinitely,” Golightly says. It’s a few hours earlier in a nearby restaurant, and she’s sipping lemonade and jonesing for a smoke. “I mean, if you’re like the Rolling Stones and you just get flown everywhere, I suppose it’s a whole different thing. But on the level that I do it, it’s the nearest thing to a traveling circus, really. Turn up, unload your gear, play, load your gear, drive out of town. To do it like that is just soul-destroying.”

When Golightly hits you with her big, brown eyes and says something like this — all the while bedecked in a snug, charcoal-colored halter and blue jeans that could’ve been spray painted on her diminutive frame — she’s at her charming best, spinning yarns and tossing off one-liners with a droll flair for wordplay. She’s casual, unassuming and strikingly beautiful. You’re hooked.

Golightly is charming the pants off America these days, largely thanks to a star turn on the White Stripes’ Elephant earlier this year. Golightly sings on the album’s final tune, “It’s True That We Love One Another,” a folksy quirkfest that finds Golightly trading knee-slapping lines with Jack and Meg White. The pairing wasn’t terribly surprising (Golightly and the Stripes are former labelmates who have performed live together), but the high-profile cameo transformed Golightly into an unlikely overnight sensation — more than a decade into her career.

“We’ve known each other a long time,” Golightly says. “We had talked about doing stuff before, but it never worked out at the time. I’d played with them quite a bit. It just so happened that that time, I was there and they were there, and Jack came running ’round with this piece of paper, saying, ‘Oh, we’re gonna try this song.’ It wasn’t an epiphany. He just knocked on the door.”

The tune’s pain-pill-popping lyrics (I gave that horse a carrot/So he’d break your foot, Jack croons) are biographical. Before becoming a working musician at age 21, Golightly was an internationally known horse trainer and pro rider. She’s never given up the occupation completely, and last year her ankle was mangled while directing a massive steed from a trailer. It wasn’t the first time Golightly, who sports an imposing horseshoe tattoo on her right shoulder and an oversized silver, U-shaped ring, had been injured in the name of horseplay; a serious riding-related injury in her late teens led to Golightly’s stiff yet effective guitar style.

“I have a plate in my arm,” she chirps, offering her left appendage for inspection. “And I can’t play a barre chord — I don’t have the strength in my index finger. But [longtime partner and drummer Bruce Brand] showed me a way to play a barre chord, and that was it. As soon as I could make the noise, it inspired me. ‘Cause before that, I was only playing open chords. And I was a punk-rock girl — I wanted to do songs I liked and not just do slow Beatles songs.”

She needn’t have worried. With the newly acquired arsenal of power chords at her disposal, Golightly established a reputation as a prolific singer and songwriter. Under the tutelage of eccentric British journeyman Billy Childish, she caused a stir with Thee Headcoatees, a brash punk-girl quartet that took the UK underground by storm. In 1995, Golightly issued her solo debut, though she continued to tour and record with Thee Headcoatees for another four years. Her latest effort, Truly She Is None Other, is her eleventh solo outing, not including a number of one-off projects and guest appearances. Critics and fans are taken by Golightly’s piercing caterwaul, which invokes the spirits of America’s musical past.

“I quite like the idea that there was a time when there wasn’t radio, when there wasn’t records,” Golightly says. “People on one side of the mountain didn’t know what people on the other side of the mountain sounded like. Everyone sounded fuckin’ brilliant ’cause no one was rippin’ anybody else off. They just had their own thing goin’ on. So my affinity is more for the spirit of the thing than the music itself. It’s a shame, because I should really feel the same about traditional British music. But if I’m walking into a bar and Irish music is playing, it grates on me. The sound of bagpipes is just hideous noise.”

You won’t find any bagpipes on Golightly’s latest, but her authentic approach to music-making is apparent. Not one to laze around the house writing songs all day, Golightly continues to keep a day job. (She manages housing for low-income residents.) She has no plans to leave what she calls the real world, though Golightly makes more than enough to support herself through CD sales.

“I don’t know who they are,” she says of her audience. “I have no idea who buys the records at all. I don’t really have a strategy, so I haven’t really targeted my market. I don’t care. I just get on with the thing I do. In commercial terms, I’m not particularly ambitious. I don’t cling to the idea that one day everybody will know who I am, ’cause I’d rather they didn’t.”

The real question, then, is: What exactly does Holly Golightly care about?

“I care about playing music with my friends, and I care about how happy I am with it,” she says. “I’ve been doing what I do for a very long time without any compromise, and that’s something I’m proud of. Saying that I don’t care who buys my records, that’s really not my attitude. I don’t have a bad attitude towards it. I think a lot of people find me really hard and unapproachable. But that’s them, not me.”

Some fans might disagree. Hours later, toward the end of her Subterranean set, an audience member calls out a request for an obscure Mummies song.

“Why would you even come here tonight if you want to hear a Mummies song?” Golightly retorts. “I’ll tell you what — I’m gonna ruin your evening and play one of my songs.”

Maybe it was just one of those nights.