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By Steve Malins Caption: “bearing the scars of sexual and religious repression, Tori Amos
claims she spits out anything she doesn’t like the taste of. Is her new album, Under
the Pink, an exorcism of the soul or merely the babblings of an L.A.
Fruitcake? “The whole Christian theology is that god came
down to experience life through his son. Well, how’s he experiencing life if he
doesn’t get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created
the apparatus in the first place? Of course he soiled his little dinky,”
Grins Tori Amos, still-at 30- the impish, rebellious daughter of a Southern
Methodist Preacher. Amos’s first hand experience of sexual repression, prejudice and violence
shapes her opinions, her emotionally charged music and the way she likes to
present herself. It’s her idea to stage the photo shoot as a mock-up of Kate
Moss’s advertising campaign for Calvin Klein underwear, replacing the model’s
waifish androgynous physique with her own five-foot-three inches frame. “I don’t want to look like a virgin,” she laughs. “I’m a grown woman. I’ve earned my experiences, my
scars.” Tori’s willful escape from her oppressive religious background in North
Carolina is described in vivid, often disturbing detail on her two solo albums,
1991’s Little Earthquakes (which has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide
to date) and this year’s Under the Pink. Both have touched a cord with
women, who write to her about their own sexual traumas, and with men who want
to find out more about their girlfriends, sisters and mothers. Perhaps they also see in Tori a michevous soulmate. Seated in a cafe’ in
London’s Kensington, she affects a laddish bravado, closer in spirit to her
infamous ‘80s “Rock Chick” alter-ego than the dreamy singer-songwriter person
of more recent acquaintance. “When I’m hanging out
with the guys, a babe can walk into the room and I can totally understand why
they’re in love,” she drawls through a wide, sassy grin. “I’m like, ‘Yea, if I had one of those things that guys
have, I’d totally be rising right now.’” While her labelmates Tracy Chapman and Tanita Tikaram were unable to match
the sales and impact of their respective debut albums, Tori’s recent follow-up
album debuted at Number One in the UK charts. Her continued success is partly
indebted to the size and fanaticism of her following, although her large
blue-grey eyes are still fired with a determination to reach out to new
converts. On her current mammoth world tour, she pours out over an hour and a
half of her soul-baring material to her voyeuristic audiences. Seventeen years as a working pianist has left her with a stamina and
professional guile which belies her New Age hippy looks. Despite the growing
scale of her business operation, the songwriter retains a potent and unusually
open relationship with her devotees. Leaning forward with a fixed stare, she
explains the awkward vulnerability she senses in fans of both sexes. “I’m the Queen of the nerds. I love nerds- by which I
mean, not a cool, bitchin’ person. I guess I was a cool nerd. I wasn’t
shuffling my feet in the corner of the playground, I was the homecoming queen,
but then, all the nerds voted for me.” Among her more famous fans is Trent Reznor from Nine-Inch-Nails, who joined
her in the 150-yaer old Hacienda in New Mexico she rented for the recording-to
sing a duet on the new album. Reznor’s armor-plated Industrial music and
self-abusing stage persona are transparent to Tori, who can still detect the
little boy inside. “There are a lot of hidden
nerds. I’m aware of the exciting man in Trent The Nine Inch, but I can see the
nerd in him, too. People who become the frontrunners often used to be outcasts
or loners.” She’s less sure about the attentions of “the ones with glasses, who read their books and pick
their nose. They’re a little more difficult, but I love them, too. They’re so
heavy on the mental side that they’re cut off from the emotional. Usually, the
hidden ones come to my shows, but when the nerdy nerds show up, I observe them
because they’re so very uncomfortable with their physical selves.” Tori’s wariness of these self-absorbed figures is well rounded. Her
open-legged stance at the piano on stage has attracted a few genuine voyeurs,
but most of her male fans restrict themselves to wishful thinking, or letters
tinged with adolescent pathos about their sex lives. However, some correspondents are more threatening. “I’m
aware that I’m calling up a lot of emotional things,” she says, demurely
leaving back in her chair. “I communicate… [MISSING TEXT] “There are certain people whom you cannot
communicate with,” she says sadly. “I’ve
been face-to-face with people like that at gigs. There was the Avon Lady in the
states, and I felt horrible because I couldn’t remember her name, and she threw
a tantrum. She was screaming and we had to escort her out, because, well, what
do you say?” She adds: “It hurts me when a
woman doesn’t come through for me, more than a man. I’ve had this ideal of
women that of course we’re able to work things through and understand each
other. But a lot of Under the Pink is actually about emotional violence
between women, rather than between the sexes. There’s a definite pecking order,
which men usually don’t see.” Nevertheless, her intimate exploration of rape (‘Me And A Gun’ from Little
Earthquakes) and sexual taboos, coupled with her rakish good humor, has
inspired more rewarding encounters. She often finds that her own experiences
are mirrored by those of her audience: “Although
I’ve only done eight shows so far, I’ve already met several girls backstage who
tell me they can’t get intimate because there’s a part of them that they cut
off. They can only fuck a man by pretending to be someone else.” Tori spent years detaching herself from emotional involvement by imagining
she was being paid for sex. “If you fantasize about
yourself as a whore, that’s about control. I felt judged by men. But I’ve
always been very selective about the men I go with. I might talk a good game,
but I’m very selective about what goes into my mouth. I spit out food I don’t
like, so just imagine,” she grins slyly. Tori’s fantasies were another attempt to burn away her dry Methodist roots.
As a child, she was surrounded by “women who hadn’t
been wet between their legs for 20 years,” and who didn’t take kindly to
her dreams about being Jesus’ lover. “I had a
really big crush on Jesus. I used to think I would have been a really good
girlfriend for him. I got into big trouble for that.” If they had known
what else the inquisitive Myra Ellen (she changed her name to Tori later) had
been up to, they may have been even more severe. A new track, ‘Icicle’, pays
homage to the joys of masturbation, and includes the nostalgic line, “Getting
off, getting off, while they’re all downstairs singing prayers.” Twenty years on, Tori still feels biterness towards her domineering
grandmother, who set out to instill the fear of god in “this
young, brown haired runt.” her mother was more sympathetic, although
often equally constricted by her prudish moral values. Tori vividly recalls her distress and anger when, with blood running down
her leg, she experienced her first period in a school playground at the age of
ten. “My mother hadn’t told me anything about it. I
thought I was going to die. I was like: ‘give me a break, mother, we look at Playgirl
magazines at the weekend at Emily’s in between playing The Who and Led Zepplin.
I’m old enough to know about this.’ I got into trouble then for yelling.” These days, their relationship has improved, although it’s based on some
unexpected common ground. “Sometimes I feel like
I’m the older sister. My mother’s a southern lady, a sweetheart. She’s
definitely the minister’s wife on one hand, and then, on the other, she’s a
witch. She’s a little wicked. She loves being with musicians. She has no
judgment when she sees the earrings and the five studs on the tongue. When she
heard Trent Reznor’s vocal on my song ‘Past the Mission’, she said: ‘Well, I do
see, women are gonna be after him, he just sounds so smooth.’ And I said:
‘Mother, they already are,’ and she goes: ‘well, there’ll be more now, I
promise you that.” According to Tori, they also respect each other’s “visions” and their dreams
of past lives, a talent which she claims has been handed down through their
Cherokee blood-line. The singer gleefully recollects exotic past lives as a “fat little cook, chopping up food for my rough, tough
knights,” and her Icelandic warrior incarnation, Sven the Viking. “You know, if a ‘gorgeous’ man walks into a bar, I look;
I turn my head and check out Brutus, right,” she smirks. “But if Sven walked in, he’d get way more chicks than
this idiot.” She slips into first person, as she re-lives some of her
berzerker conquests. “I think I was a good guy, you
know. Maybe I flayed some nuns and stuff and made some carpets in the old days,
and that was kinda gross, but we’ve had some violent times, I know that.” The media image of Tori as a “kooky” New Age singer is founded on such
offbeat, fantastical stories, but she’s unrepentant. “This
is a very functional civilization that wakes up, takes a shit, goes to work,
eats, comes home, maybe gets it once or twice a week, (if they’re really
lucky), shits (if they’re regular), and goes to bed again. Dull, press the
eject.” As a four-year-old child prodigy, Tori discovered that the creative freedom
she experienced on the Piano was met with simple, narrow-minded resistance. At
weekends, her father took her to the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in
Baltimore, where her taste for self-expression and rock music led to her
expulsion at the age of 11. “I’m an emotional
player,” she says. “I’ve never felt anything
that moves me as much as my piano. I don’t really like people. I prefer my
piano to people. It’s totally reliable and it’s alive. I can hear what it’s
saying. For the most part, pianos are female to me. Sometimes they’re dykes,
and they’re always good fun.” she adds, with a typical flash of humor. Her early retirement from classical music was followed by years of playing
Gershwin standards in a gay piano bar in Washington D.C: “I learned so much about real respectability from gay
waiters. I used to play there when I was 13, wearing my sister’s polyester
pants and all made up to look older. I was happy. The men there were more
interested in my father, who was in his clerical collar at the back.”
She then left home and worked as a jobbing pianist, performing to indifferent
diners at nightclubs and hotels across America. Despite her usually inattentive
audiences, her role as a “piano girl” finally liberated her sex life. “I’ve never gotten a guy without the piano. It’s almost
like I became justified as a person when people heard me play. Before that, men
would never talk or hang out with me.” In the 80’s she attempted to turn
men’s heads by ditching her favorite instrument and turning herself into a
“whoring” L.A. Rock chick. “It’s hard not to notice
a girl with two-foot hair and plastic snakeskin boots up to her thighs,
unfortunately. That’s what my band, Y Kant Tori Read, was all about. I left
home at 21 and I was off to the races.” She released one flop album on Altlantic Records and was described as a
“Bimbo” by Billboard. “My lowest career point,” she confesses. Hurt by the
criticism, she made the decision to return to her piano to write the songs
which would eventually become Little Earthquakes. Atlantic was so
confused by this sudden change in direction that it decided to pack her off to
it’s UK distributor, Eastwest Records, to see what they could make of it all.
In a West-London flat, Tori performed a private candlelight set to Eastwest
executive Max Hole, a devoted Kate Bush fan. He signed her on the spot. Aged 27, Tori was finally able express herself fully through her music, in
the process of opening the door on her darkest, most traumatic experience as
the victim of a rape in her early 20’s. “It’s not
something where you just go: ‘Well, get over it.’ Or: ‘Believe in love and
peace, my child, and it’ll all be over.’ Well, fuck you - That isn’t the
answer. It’s a great thought, OK, but you can go and stick the crystals up your
butt and lets get on with it. I’m all for love and peace, but that’s not the
side I work on. I work on the part before you get into the kitchen, right,
before you make a blueberry pie, sit down and drink herbal tea and watch the
Sunset. First of all, you’ve got to pass me in the basement with the rats.” For a long time after the attack, Tori avoided “any
man who looked like him. If somebody would talk about it - or worse, joke about
it - I would be ready to kill. That’s not healing. It was a very long time
after that before I was with anyone again. And it has never been the same as it
was before.” After failing to work out her problems through several previous
relationships, she’s found more dynamic support in the form of her current
boyfriend Eric Rosse, who co-produced Under The Pink. “Eric was a big change. He’s been a major thing in my
life, mainly because he’s been helping me work through this violent attack. The
way that he deals with it with me has changed my whole view of men.” She
also reveals: “I’m going to throw away my pills on
this tour, in some city, I haven’t decided where yet. At 30, I feel ready to
have a child, although I don’t intend to stop my career. I just don’t want to
do another major tour like this.” Tori’s habit of leaning across the table when she’s about to confide
something becomes more pronounced as she continues: “I’m
a better person when I’m around Eric. He has a little Irish maiden in him. Not
a fair battle against my Sven, it’s true, but he doesn’t mind being conquered.
There’s a bit of ‘do with me what you will’ in him. He was raised by hippie
Russian parents, and I sensed that he had none of those Christian hang-ups, and
he knew that I had them. He was turned on by the hidden filth scene with me.
You know, the revenge of the good girl. The little librarian with a tale to
tell.” VOX Tori’s ten
favourite records: 1. Aretha Franklin: Amazing Grace 2. Led Zeppelin: The Box Set 3. The Doors: LA Woman 4. Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral 5. Joni Mitchell: Blue 6. Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain 7. Janis Joplin: Cheap Thrills 8. Patti Smith: Horses 9. Beatles: Revolver 10. Sex Pistols: Never Mind the bullocks |
