I have to agree with both DJLegba and blgentry here, as there seems to be some fundamental lack of understanding of how MC works regarding tags and import, whether auto- or not.
tunetyme: do some searching here on Interact or via Google for the MC tagging window and how to set that up, and maybe also the "tag dump" (if that's what it's called), which will show you all a given file's tags. Doing so would help you find that "1-N" you mention, which must be in a tag somewhere ([Album Artist], maybe?) and then is reflected in whatever view you've set up and/or what fields show up in the default tagging window (you might do some searching on Views and how to create/manipulate them, too, if you haven't done so already). MC doesn't just "create" new artists or anything else: it just reads the tags that are in the files you have. I have over a million tracks, and I use auto-import and have no problems like these becaue I control my import rules, my tagging, and my views, all within MC.
For both the OP and tunetyme: do what blgentry suggested, too, and make sure you're writing your tags to the files so that they're saved.