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The Times (of London) Happily married she may be but, says Nigel Williamson, Tori Amos is as
charmingly loopy as ever. A bride stripped bare We are walking along the cliffs of the aptly named Crackington Haven on a
hot July afternoon and Tori Amos is talking about her newfound contentment. Far
below us the waves crash dramatically on the secluded coves of the north
Cornish coast but in Amos’s once troubled world all is currently tranquil. “My life has become a fierce calm,” says the
36-year-old singer who once appeared on an album cover suckling a pig. We had last met a year ago, just two days before her marriage to Mark
Hawley, whom she also employs as her sound engineer. I had asked if she thought
married life would mellow her. “I don’t know. Ask
me again in 12 months’ time,” she had replied. The answer, it seems, is a very definite yes, but it has clearly not
affected her muse. Many tortured artists have found domestic bliss a bad career
move. Even if the songwriting impulse does not dry up, singing about loving
your spouse and the honeysuckle around the door is not nearly as interesting as
those dark explorations of the inner psyche. Yet the experience has clearly had the opposite effect on Amos. Her record
company was not expecting any new material from her this year (it was preparing
a compilation of b-sides and out-takes). Then, to its complete surprise, she
delivered a double CD, To Venus and Back, featuring 11 sharp-edged new songs
and an album’s worth of live material. They have not come much more tortured than Amos over the years and she has
chronicled her torment with unflinching honesty. Her last album, From The
Choirgirl Hotel, dealt with her desolation following a miscarriage and there
has been an almost Gothic quality to her life. The daughter of a southern
Methodist minister and a Cherokee mother, as a child prodigy she won a music
scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore at the age of five but was
expelled at 11. Despite a turbulent adolescence, she continued conducting the
choir in her father’s church until she was 21, when she took off for Los
Angeles. There she was raped at gunpoint by a man to whom she had given a lift.
The shocking account of her ordeal appeared in song as Me and a Gun on her
first album, Little Earthquakes, a record obsessed with the dual themes of sex
and religion. The 1994 follow-up, Under the Pink, continued in similar vein.
One song said that God needed a woman to look after Him and another, Icicle,
was about masturbating while her family were “all downstairs singing prayers”. The album went to number one, as did Boys for Pele two years later, a
collection of songs mostly about her traumatic split with long-time partner
Eric Rosse, although she still found time to claim that Jesus was a girl. Then
there was the miscarriage and her interviews became peppered with references to
fairies and the spirit world. Now with To Venus and Back it seems that the demons have finally relaxed
their hold. She admits that the themes of sex and religion are “less obvious”
and calls it her “heart record”. One song, 1,000 Oceans, a ballad of
heart-rending beauty, is possibly the most moving she has ever recorded, with
its refrain about crying oceans of tears, “if that’s what it takes to sail you
home”. Eat your heart out, Celine Dion. We last met in a London hotel and perhaps it is simply the change of
setting, but there is a different aura about Amos. “I
love this path. I come here to clear my head,” she says as we walk. It
was her English husband who introduced her to Cornwall and, although she has
homes in Miami, near her parents, and in Co Cork, the 300-year-old farmhouse
near Bude is now her main base. “I love being away
from the city. I spend as much time here as I can. I can go back and tour like
a road dog because I can come to places like this when I’m not working.” She admits that married life has surprised her. “There
are things I didn’t expect. I’d lived with people before for a long time,
thinking we were really together as a pair. And yet nobody told me about the
trust.” She tells of having a bad nightmare in which she dreamt she lost
her voice because she was screaming so loud. She had to go to London the next
day and when she returned, she saw that Mark had a black eye. He explained that
she had punched him when he had been trying to calm her nightmare. “He didn’t tell anybody. He knows those kinds of
secrets and doesn’t use them against me... that kind of trust leaves me
gobsmacked. I feel like I’m having an affair with him.” After the miscarriage she is now thinking about trying again. “I’m touring again heavily and that places a great demand
on you physically but I’m kicking the idea of motherhood around in my head.”
Earlier I had asked her why she had produced a new album when people least
expected it. “Sometimes when you really want to
write, it refuses to come. Other times when it really isn’t convenient, all
this material shows up. I’ve heard women talk about having a kid when it wasn’t
a great time to have one but they wanted the child anyway. I feel a bit like
that with this album.” Just as unplanned was the tour she has embarked on in America, co-headlining
with Alanis Morissette. “Performing is the best
high there is and I hardly do drugs any more. I’ve experimented like most
people - a bit of acid here, a bit of Ecstasy there - but there is nothing like
when you plug in on stage. I don’t know what it does but it feels like having
an affair with 5,000 people. Or like 1983 Margaux is flowing through my veins.
That’s my scene these days. I’m really into good wine. And I have to look after
my health. It’s a bit unglamorous crawling to the bathroom after some of those
drugs.” It has taken many years but she thinks the horror of the rape is finally
beginning to fade. “I have a really good shrink but
I find I don’t need her as much. When I was working with her, it was like
beading a necklace. One little bead at a time. The idea that you just have a
couple of sessions and brush the dirt off your hands and say ‘all right, that’s
taken care of’ doesn’t work. Sometimes I go to see her, just like a check-up at
a regular doctor. It’s good knowing there is someone you can talk to. She knows
things other people don’t know.” Five years ago Amos helped to set up Rainn, the Rape, Abuse and Incest
National Network. She funds a telephone helpline and she plays benefit
concerts. “I don’t get involved with counselling on
a one-to-one basis although I do talk to some of the women when they come to
the shows. They are wonderful people. Real survivors,” she says. Amos is notorious for making provocative statements, but she says her more
outrageous comments are often a form of self-defense. “You
get a feeling when you think the interviewer has the daggers out so I say these
things. You know, pussy can become cheetah real fast, and if I have to go for
the jugular, I have no problem doing that.” As if reminded of her
reputation, she suddenly seems worried that she hasn’t said anything peculiar
enough to make good copy. “I’m a daughter of a
minister and I love chasing the dark. That which is hidden. I like licking it
like an ice cream,” she tells me for no apparent reason at all. Then she
tries to insist that the numbers which are printed in white lettering on her
brown leather skirt have a deep numerological significance. When I point out
that they are probably nothing more than a fashion accessory, she laughs and
admits it. “It’s so easy to create soundbites. It’s
really hard to create beauty,” she says, concluding our interview with
another neat little nugget. To Venus and Back is released on EastWest. |