A man in a pub recently told me that Tori Amos is every bit as good as Kate Bush, but people can’t see it because they “don’t actually like her very much”. Perhaps he was on to something. If Bush admitted on Woman’s Hour, as Amos did last week, that she likes to dress up in thigh-high boots and a faux-fur gilet and stand among the cows in the rural Cornish idyll she shares with her husband and child, it would be in-keeping with everything that makes her so attractive. But it made poor old Tori sound like a kook, and not for the first time. For many she does not inspire romantic awe like Bush, but rather the kind of cool feeling we have towards Yoko Ono. Looking at the tiny woman on stage tonight in the turquoise pant suit and specs, a superfan tells me: “Every year she goes somewhere in the Amazon and sees this real shaman and takes all this LSD. She is a proper free spirit!” My first thought is: groo. But I wouldn’t think groo if Joni Mitchell did it, would I?
Amos is performing her new album Gold Dust at the Albert Hall, a classical re-working of her songs with the Dutch Metropole Orchestra and two pianos. On this hallowed stage 43 years ago Deep Purple premiered their bombastic Concerto For Group And Orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic. Rick Wakeman and fellow prog giant Keith Emerson have also swivelled here over the years, reaching between multiple keyboards, the latter – like Amos – thrusting his hips out in gestures of neo-classical confidence. Tori may not stick knives in her piano but she does have a habit of punching it triumphantly as each song ends – and shedding her long sheet music with a flourish, letting each page tumble on to the floor like the scarves of Scheherazade. I don’t know when I last saw this kind of behaviour from a “popstar” – though she’s not the only one to have reworked her songs with an orchestra recently; Peter Gabriel and Antony Hegarty have done the same. Like them, Amos strikes you as a bit of a “cold fish” – musical ambition on this scale is intimidating in the pop world, and hard to warm to. It shouldn’t really be so – she grins broadly tonight; she even starts the first piece, 1992’s Flying Dutchman, in a different key to the orchestra and realises after a minute or a so with a great big “fuck! I fucked it up again!”
Artists who baffle or turn off half the population always seem to inspire a burning, protective layer of hardcore fans who keep their career running. Tori Amos doesn’t need press. Her concerts are quiet sell-outs – intense communions populated with sensitive men and women who dye their hair the same colour as hers. I first noticed the crowd’s hair back in 1994 at the Ipswich Regent, when I saw her with a school friend. I’ve seen Amos four times now, completely by accident, and each time I find the music surprisingly moving. Enhanced by the lush arrangements of John Philip Shenale tonight, it becomes clear how complex these songs are – how they appear to have been written backwards from a piano part, with lyrics forced to follow the strange, rugged path of the music wherever it leads; how the words tumble breathlessly so you lose your thread, and then a simple pearl of reported speech or household wisdom will pop up with alarming poignancy – like “feeling old at 21” (from “Jackie’s Strength”), or “Pretty Good Year” with all its repressed emotion. Amos was always stuck in her own extended adolescence and maybe that’s why these songs still work – her wintry psychodramas send you spiralling back to that claustrophobic but infinite space between childhood and adulthood, in much the same way a Bronte novel does. Who are the modern equivalents? Imogen Heap? Too friendly. Regina Spektor? Too normal. Amanda Palmer? Too much fun. In “Precious Things” she’s still angrily recalling a boy who said, “you know, you’re really an ugly girl” in the seventh grade – and in that respect she’s a bit like Taylor Swift. With the groin of Keith Emerson and the windswept aesthetic of a Scottish widows ad. Whatever, there’s still nothing quite like it.
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