Toriphoria — Tori Amos Digital Archive

"I was nursing Tash in Florida, and I was hearing a lot of male artists on alternative radio. And some of them really hated women. I thought about my daughter and what these guys were thinking about women. I wanted to build some kind of bridge, and I figured that was the only way to get into the heads of these men."

"I'll tell you about the guy Kevyn Aucoin did the make-up right, everybody's heard of him, he's the make-up artist who does the characters...he does everyone. But the thing is, to make the different characters, and ladies if you're listening, he was tying parts of my face. They have...I'm not supposed to tell this but um, a lot of the celebrities in photographs, they get their faces tied. They're pieces of tape with strings that you put under the chin and around the cheekbone and around the forehead and you give people a mini lift."

So you pull it back and tie it around the back.

"Around, and it goes under wigs, it goes under hair and a lot of people, um that you know, go do television, you don't even know..."

And they wear that when they're on TV?

"Well, if it's say it's a concert and it's for TV and they can hide it with wigs, they can really do a lot and it can change everything."

What a terrible thing if you then forget to take it off when you go out for a coffee afterwards.

"You don't forget to take it off. It's one of the most painful...oh yeah. Yeah well, it's torture. I mean think about it, your face is getting tied in knots, but the thing is, that's how the women were created to be different ethnicity or from different places, different stories."

"On September 11th, I was in Midtown New York only 2 or 3 kilometers far from the World Trade Center when IT happened. At that time, not only the Twin Towers have been torn apart, but also a whole country. Since then, the masks have been thrown off and people finally start questioning things again. Of course, there is a huge amount of patriotism, but this always happens when people are under attack. In America, there has been a movement out of hatred for a long time, and many think that the event of 11.9. now overshadows all the hatred that has been existing before. But this is the wrong approach. I am not talking about the "good old pure murder", but I am talking about the senseless hatred against homosexuals, blacks or women. Because when all those people now talk so loud against the Taliban, they are nothing but hypocrites. Because the truth is that anybody who exercises power, whether it is a partner, a government or a religion, only wishes that the others remain fools."

For years she lived in London. "I loved it - I used to play along with all the reggae, it influenced me a lot." She now has a house in Cornwall, though for the past three months she's been living on the road. That's quite a production number with a small child (who gets bored on long bus journeys, while aeroplanes have a bad effect on her ears) yet her tightly knit touring crew seem to make it work. "Home is where your love is and we travel as a family," she says simply.

She was in New York when the Twin Towers were hit.

"You can feel it in your stomach. You can walk down Fifth Avenue and smell it. Your senses are filled and the emotion is so raw you have no delusions. I do believe in non-violence... but I became a warrior mother. How can you be rational with the irrational? You want to see fury? Just wait till the soccer moms start marching. Once the body bags for the children are brought up it's game over. If you come after my cubs you give up your rights..."