Nicki Leighton-Thomas sings on the new CD

"In 1994 someone called me up and asked me to do a benefit for Aids and they said they'd send a piano player," she tells BBC News Online.

"The next thing [pianist] Simon Wallace was on the phone - he was really funny and I just knew we'd get along.

"We did that gig and we've been writing songs together - 150 so far - and giggling ever since."

The new album, Forbidden Games, is sung by Nicki Leighton-Thomas and includes the ballad Scars, which has also been recorded by Susannah McCorkle.

It is the latest chapter in a story that begins in New York, where Landesman was born and where she met and married publisher Jay Landesman.

I wasn't called a poet until I came to England

Fran Landesman

He was to introduce her to the leading lights of new literary and social movement which was to be called the Beats.

"Jay had this magazine called Neurotica, which Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and people like that wrote for.

"I got to meet all those people and it was certainly an eye-opener for me, because I'd come from a very bourgeois Central Park West family."

Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, became the most celebrated Beat of all.

"He was an influence - I met him when I was young and square.

Landesman: "Young and square" in the 1950s

"And I just saw a picture in the paper, of Jack and Carolyn Cassidy, who's still a great friend of mine - she was married to Neal Cassidy who was the hero of On The Road and lived with both of them in this amazing m�nage a trois.

"She's still hanging out, and I'm proud to say she's a friend of mine."

With her husband, Landesman decamped to St Louis in the early 1950s where they founded a jazz and cabaret club, the Crystal Palace.

"What really influenced me was we had at that club Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and every great comic and half of the year we did theatre, like Becket's Waiting For Godot.

"I sat there every night and it was better than a college education."

Talents who worked at the club included a young actor called Larry Hagman - later the star of the TV series Dallas - and the pianist Tommy Wolf.

'Greats'

With Wolf, Landesman wrote prolifically, producing two well-known jazz songs which continue to be covered today - Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most and Ballad Of The Sad Young Men.

"All the greats, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Sarah Vaughan, have done Spring and there've been recent ones too - they're still recording it," she says.

But in the 1960s St Louis was in decline and business was tailing off. True to character, the Landesmans took radical action.

With club regulars Larry Hagman (on piano) and pianist Tommy Wolf (R)

"St Louis was on the way down with urban decay. So we came to London, which was a little bit of heaven.

"Before we came, we were in a bar in New York and we met Peter Cook and he said 'Call me when you get to London', so we did - I met Dudley Moore and we wrote songs together, and I met Ned Sherrin, Annie Ross and The Beatles."

In the UK Landesman found herself more in demand as a poet than a lyricst.

I think of poetry and song as almost indissoluble

Fran Landesman

"To be honest I wasn't called a poet until I came to England, and I ran into Michael Horovitz and he was putting on these evenings of poetry and music in Hampstead.

"He asked me to come and read some of my lyrics - I was tickled pink and I met the Liverpool poets like Roger McGough and Brian Patten, and they called it poetry, so who was I to argue with them?"

The difference between writing poetry and lyrics is not a subject that detains her for long.

"I think of poetry and song as almost indissoluble, but some people would argue with that."

Few would argue with the fact that Landesman has carved an almost unique niche for herself with verses that are witty, sad, technically accomplished and imbued with their own bitter-sweet bohemianism.

"On the flyer for a gig it describes me as 'Queen of the bohemian dream' - which I like a lot."

Rhymers

And Landesman has not lost her curiosity for today's poets and lyricists.

"I love both of the Johns, John Hegly and John Cooper Clarke - they're my favourite rhymers.

She says she doesn't often think about what might have been - but when she does, she is not sorry she came to London.

"I'd have probably gone to Hollywood, made a lot of money and jumped out of a window.

"I just love London. When I first got here, London was really heaven.

"It's not as good as it was - but then what is as good as it was?" she laughs.