Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

It's a bird, actually. And she's big. She's very big. You look up and her face fills the sky. She's Maya. Singer of Feed. And this is just the beginning.

Maya hit the heavens when Nike used her to spearhead an ad campaign for some supersneakers. She suddenly found herself on the biggest billboards Shibuya's skyline could muster and Nike also handed out 15,000 free CDs at its shops which included the Feed song "Bliss."

Then there's Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins main man who handpicked Feed to support his band on their farewell tour at a packed Budokan show last month.

Possibly the best Feed moment yet was when they were asked to contribute to a Pixies tribute album: Faced with the daunting task of covering the classic screamfest of "Debaser," they deconstructed it into a completely brilliant post-techno, dubbed-up acid trip.

And, you know what? They haven't even released their debut album yet. It's a bit like earthquakes and Tokyo. Feed is the big one waiting to happen.

When Feed played Shibuya's Club Asia last week nobody spoke when they played, which means total respect and hardly ever happens; and when each song ended there were whoops of delight and excited whispers; while the guys at the front had a thin film of sparkling tears glazing their eyes. Corny, maybe, but this is the effect Feed have on audiences. They have this distinct aura of greatness hanging about them. But is it the world's most beautiful necklace or a dead albatross? Time will tell, but if I were a bookie I'd stop taking bets. Right now, these guys mesmerize.

What do they sound like? Well, the guitars jingle like the Smiths, jangle like the Stone Roses and often soar like Radiohead, and then there's Maya, who . . .

"I hate it when people say I sound like the Cranberries," spits Maya. "I hate it! It's my voice. I can't help it. It's natural."

We're on the balcony of Feed's management office in Shibuya and I'm being cynical and asking whether Maya is affecting a Celtic trill or Gaelic warble to sell tons of records. Like, say . . . Corrs or Cranberries.

Ikeda (bass): If her voice sounds Celtic it's because the vocal melody is very simple. It's the ancient folk melody you can hear from Okinawa to Europe.

Has the Scottish blood (Maya's dad is Scottish-American, her mum Japanese) got anything to do with it?

Maya: Nothing at all. It wasn't as if my father had tons of Celtic music lying around the house for me to study.

Ikeda: And there's the obvious fact that we're much better than the Cranberries.

How did you get the Smashing Pumpkins gig?

Maya: They wanted an opening act, so some promoters we met in Hiroshima sent in our demo tape. We didn't expect anything to happen. The Pumpkins don't usually have opening acts, and this was at the Budokan! About 1,500 bands sent in tapes and it was whittled down to 10 that were sent to Billy Corgan and then we get this phone call and he'd chosen us as the band!

Ikeda: So we didn't really support Smashing Pumpkins. They supported us. They wanted to give a chance to a band because the Red Hot Chili Peppers had done the same thing for them when they were unknown.

Did you meet Billy Corgan?

Maya: Just for a moment. So many people were in this big line waiting to meet Billy.

Shinsuke (guitar): And there was a guy saying "hurry up, hurry up" just as you were meeting him.

You worked with Nike. Would you do a Moby, who's sold every track on the latest album "Play" to advertising?

Shinsuke: No way. It was a very hard job for us to make a song for Nike.

Maya: They were saying "This is too this . . . that doesn't fit." See, there was a concept for each new shoe: "Bliss," "Rage," "Ecstacy" etc. Five shoes, five bands each doing a theme song.

Ikeda: Our "Rage" song was acoustic but the lyrics were very angry, but they wanted it done obviously. Like techno for "Ecstacy" and hardcore for "Rage," etc.

Maya: The thing is, now we have no money so it's impossible to make 15,000 CDs. So this was a really good deal. If we didn't need that help probably it would be different. It's not that we really like doing it. That would be really sad.

So you're saying it's OK to sell-out if you need a break, but not OK if you're famous and have lots of money. Where are the ethics in all this?

Maya: Nothing was really unethical. It just made sense for this band at that time.

Shinsuke: And Nike shoes are cool.

Maya: If they'd told us to put Nike in the song and sing "All the Nike people are great" we wouldn't have done it.

Dai, the drummer, nods his head in agreement. I mention this because otherwise you wouldn't know he was there. He's the kind of drummer who lets his sticks do the talking.

Would you do an ad for a company that has been accused of exploiting kids and young women in sweatshops in poor countries?

Maya: Erm, there's a secret.

Shinsuke: A big secret.

Maya (looking at rest of band): Errr . . .

Rest of band (looking at her): Argh . . .

Maya: My father was in Berkeley in the '60s and he was a hippie in the student movement and I didn't know anything about Nike and I called him and told him and he was like, "Oh, the company that exploits women and children in the Third World" and, I'm like, "Erm, let's talk about something else." And I didn't know it was such a big thing in the U.S. and then I looked on the Internet and found out about those things and then I started feeling very bad about doing this, so at the end we mixed in backward messages in the song talking about the welfare of workers in Vietnam and China. It made us feel a lot better. We could have just not done the thing, but now there's 15,000 CDs out there with subliminal messages on them.

Could this be taken as cool and subversive in a Sex-Pistols-ripping-off-EMI-for-the-cash kind of way or could we accuse Feed of being naive and a bit silly?

To be honest (I type, adjusting my fan and realizing to my horror that it was made in China and quite possibly in a sweatshop) I don't care, because I've just finished listening to Feed's six-track EP "Make Every Stardust Shimmer" and I'm placing it in my "soundtrack for the summer" stack of CDs, which will go with me everywhere for the next couple of months.