|
High Life A lioness in the confessional It’s all fire and brimstone when singer Tori Amos decides to speak her mind.
Mark Edwars pulls up a pew. The British don’t really get Tori Amos. They buy a lot of her records, but
they don’t really understand her. The Americans realise that she’s a serious
and dangerously subversive artist, using her songs to draw attention to the
hidden truths of their society, their religion and their relationships - the
ones that they would rather not talk about. The ban her records from the radio;
and the hippest musicians - from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to REM’s Michael
Stipe - rapturise about her songs and clamour to collaborate with her. In
Britain, however, she’s been portrayed as a quirky kook, a cross between Kate
Busy and the wacky neighbor from a US sitcom. It’s largely her own fault, mind. When Amos burst into the public
consciousness with her 1991 album Little Earthquakes (her real debut with the
plastic 80s rock band Y Kant Tori Read was largely ignored and is best
forgotten), journalists were introduced to a woman who talked in a unique mix
of 1950’s gee-whiz American, therapy-speak and hippie slang, and who liked to
use metaphors without making it clear that they were metaphors. Thus her
tendency, for example, to refer to the stronger side of her character as “Sven
the Viking” led to articles suggesting she thought she’d been a Viking named
Sven in a former life. Amos has wised up. These days she keeps a closer check on what she says. Our
interview takes place in a windowless, airless, characterless basement room in
the otherwise luxuriuos Lanesborough Hotel in London’s Hyde Park. They call it
the ‘business center’, but its main use is clearly for staff training. A flip
chart in the corner contains the outline of an induction course for new staff,
including an introduction to the company mission statement: ‘always deliver
beyond expectations,’ it reads, ‘never say no.’ That would pretty much have
described Amos’ interview technique a few years ago, when any subject was up
for grabs. Now, however, when I ask her a question with the merest hint of new-ageness
about it, she decides I’m looking for the old kooky stuff and the shutters come
down: ‘Oh, I’m not going there, and you know it,’ she
says. Her unique stream-of-consciousness approach to language remains intact;
describing She’s Your Cocaine, one of the songs on her new album, from the
choirgirl hotel, she explains the relationship in the song like this: ‘she not being me, she being the one that he’s obsessed
about, and whatever we think of her is whatever we think of her - probably we
think about her in cruel.’ The woman in the song that the man is obsessed with could be amazing,
concedes Tori, but equally, ‘she could just be a
black hole.’ This is exactly the kind of relationship that Amos likes to
write about - one with a hostile undercurrent. At any dinner party, she
explains, ‘there’ll be a woman at the table who has
all the men sucked into her pain. That type where it’s just tragic, gorgeous,
victimised needs-nothing-from-anybody, won’t-call-you-back, nothing is good
enough except slitting your writs and letting her drink your blood, and then
you’ll slit another part of yourself and then another part - she’s a passive
vampire.’ Oh, those passive vampires - they’re the ones you’ve really got to watch out
for. ‘They don’t admit they’re drinking your blood,
that’s what makes them so dangerous,’ Amos says. ‘I’m a lioness, but at least I’m honest. I’m like: look, I’ll rip your
heard open and drink your blood. Cards on the table. And I like it when someone
is honest with me. “Hey, I want to drink your blood.” Well, okay - at least I
know what you want to do.’ Tori’s brutal honesty and openness about her feelings has attracted to her a
particularly obsessive type of fan. They’re the quiet, shy types whose school report
cards said: ‘doesn’t play well with other children.’ Tori accepts this and
embraces it. ‘I’m the queen of nerds,’ she’s
fond of saying. Until her fan base got too big, Tori used to spend literally
hours after her gigs talking to fans at the stage door, accepting their gifts,
listening to their stories and giving them all big-sisterly hugs. In return
they lapped up any available Tori product (her records always come out in
several formats, since the record company knows that her fans will buy them all).
Her fans have also created a Tori universe on the Internet. In an ironic
twist on Tori’s regular church-bashing, her fans’ home pages are called ‘shrines’
and have names like The Temple of Tori, and the First International Church of
Tori; fans leave sixth-form, exercise book-cover notes like ‘Tori is the candle
which burns a hole in my soul and the needle that sews me back up after filling
me with her music’, and discuss which hair-colourant their idol uses (Clairol
Torrid Torch Crimson, apparently). From the choirgirl hotel is something of a departure for Amos, it’s the
first album that she has recorded in a band setting - with a drummer and
programmer playing along with her - rather than as a solo singer alone at her
piano. Influenced by the Armand Van Helden remix of Professional Widow, a track
from her last album, which became a huge club hit last year, Amos has put
rhythm at the heart of many of the songs. ‘I wouldn’t make that kind of record,’
she says, referring to the remix. ‘But the energy
of it and the rhythm was quite inspirational for tracks like Raspberry Swirl. I
was like, if I’m going to write a song, I don’t want to just put rhythm on top
of it, I want to write a rhythm into it, so it’s part of the architecture.
Another track, Cruel, is about that. It’s not just written as a ballad at the
piano and then you come up with a catchy rhythm.’ The album also signals her desire to move beyond the piano to embrace
synthesisers and samplers. Despite a dodgy distant past playing synths - she
once auditioned for Billy Idol’s backing band - Amos has been loyal to the
piano for the past eight years. ‘I needed to do
that,’ she says. ‘I just needed to be with
that instrument for a long time. Until I got to the point where I knew it was
okay to try other things because I knew that I wouldn’t dishonour my main
instrument - that the piano wouldn’t feel abandoned.’ The new album is, perhaps, less of a cohesive whole than her three previous
outings. Little Earthquakes was essentially Amos’ diary, detailing in shocking
honesty the events of her life, from her repressed religious upbringing to her
rape by a fan. Under the Pink was themed around the idea of women’s
relationships with other women; while Boys for Pele (described by its authors
as ‘a journey to the underworld’) concerned itself with her relationships with
men. ‘This time I felt the songs were a troupe,’
she says of the new album. ‘They all have different
parts. Some are hanging by the pool having drinks, and some are in Suite 17,
and some are answering the phone. But they’re all in the same hotel. I saw them
as individuals. They work separately from each other, but they know each other.’
The album may not be based around one unifying theme, but many of the songs
did emerge from one event. Towards the end of her last tour, Tori miscarried. ‘I was very ready to be a mom,’ she says. ‘It was a shock, and I was devastated. While I was
pregnant I felt more love than I had ever really felt. And the love didn’t go
away. Feeling love like that, it changed me, even though the spirit didn’t
manifest physically. I didn’t become a mother at this time, but I became a
different woman.’ ‘I think when I’m going through a difficult time
the songs tear across the universe to find me,’ she adds, ‘because we have a pact.’ The song Spark contains the lyrics, ‘She’s convinced she could hold back a
glacier / but she couldn’t keep baby alive / doubting if there’s a woman in
there somewhere.’ ‘You really question that you can’t do this
thing that’s so natural, you can’t come through,’ says Tori. ‘It’s out of your control, you’re helpless.’ Given this subject matter, it’s perhaps surprising that choirgirl hotel is a
much more ‘up’ record than Boys for Pele, more accessible and even radio-friendly.
It’s not simply an album’s worth of difficult emotions. ‘I didn’t want the songs to just be the diary of what happened,’
Amos says. ‘They have many layers happening; I have
historical references; and I’m always going to bring God into it.’ Indeed she is. Her father is a minister, and both his parents were
preachers. Religion is a subect that Amos simply can’t leave alone. ‘You can’t change what’s made you,’ she says. ‘Religion is a huge part of why I write the way I write,
and why I think the way I think. There are people I know who have become
Christians from a different place - because they believe in Christ’s teachings.
Well, I have no idea what it’s like to come through that particular door,
because I know the shadow of the Christian church. I can’t see Christianity
like someone else. ‘What I do in my songs is I take a flashlight
into the confessional,’ says Amos. She describes her songwriting as ‘diving in
after secrets, seeking truths’, but admits that there are many different
truths out there. ‘You know, if you wiped away all
the stuff around Christianity,’ she concedes,
‘the basic teachings are real nice, like the meek shall inherit the earth.’
She pauses for a moment, and smiles. ‘Not that that’s
happened yet.’ |