News: The Financial Times' London Concert Review (July 3, 2007)

Richard Clayton, from The Financial Times, had his eyes opened at the first London show, as his review published in the July 7th edition, describes.

Thanks to SomaRiot for the tip!

Five characters in search of an encore

By Richard Clayton
Published: July 7 2007 03:00 | Last updated: July 7 2007 03:00

A confession: Tori Amos had passed me by until now. Dismissively, I’d marked her down as a self-consciously kooky amalgam of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell, with some Björk thrown in – not a patch on the originals – and left it at that. Overlooking 12m album sales, the Dylanesque devotion of fans and enough costume changes to inspire several Tokyo teenage fads was always going to be rash – just the sort of crass male assumption that Amos seeks to spear – and so it proved.

This was the first of two London dates on her mammoth American Doll Posse tour. At face value, American Doll Posse is a double album to put the fear of Hera into most men. It’s written and performed in the guise of five female personae, “honest extensions of the self who are now as real as the redhead”, derived from the mythological Greek pantheon. “After centuries of being dismembered, literally and figuratively, by the ruling patriarchy,” its blurb goes, “the feminine essence has reassembled to take back the power.” George W. and the Christian right come in for a mighty ear-bashing.

Amos is unveiling one character in the opening half of each gig, according to which takes her fancy at the soundcheck. Here, it was “Santa”, a peroxide-bobbed party girl “related to Aphrodite”. To zealous cheers, she emerged with peekaboo poise to take her place between a Bösendorfer piano and a bank of keyboards. “Body and Soul” began with vampish screeches from Dan Phelps’s guitar and grew into an enormous, off-kilter boogie-woogie. Santa’s vocal whoops, yodelling like Joni on “God”, hit Wuthering Heights of intensity with “Dragon”. It was knockout stuff.

Closing this six-song cycle, “You Can Bring Your Dog” was slithering, riff-heavy swamp-rock: picture Debbie Harry fronting Led Zeppelin. Ambitious but overblown on record, this material works a treat live, and is much more palatable one persona at a time, or rather two: the spirit of Ziggy Stardust was also abroad after the interlude. “Tori”, another American Doll Posse member but happy to play Amos’s other songs, then entered – all long ginger tresses and a shimmery, off-the-shoulder catsuit.

Her Hammond B3 organ was put to groovesome use on “Big Wheel”, a slice of Stax-style soul. “Crucify”, with its jaunty piano line, could have been Elton John in his prime, spangly-trousers phase. On “Siren”, a twinkly kind of trip-hop, thanks to Matt Chamberlain’s dextrous drumming, Amos sounded like a benign banshee. Her most famous track, “Cornflake Girl”, powered by Jon Evans’s rocking bass and Amos’s slinky honky-tonk, brought the house down with its cry of “You bet your life”.

This being the night before the Fourth of July, “the vice-president with a happy trigger finger” was excoriated in the apparently improvised “Independence Eve”, which segued into a grief-crazed hymn for mothers of lost sons. Three solo numbers, including “Cool on Your Island” in its debut airing this tour, had a superior Broadway feel, as if we were eavesdropping on some parallel-universe Evita in unguarded moments. After the huge finale of “Code Red”, the crowd mobbed the stage, and the 4/4 beat of “Bouncing Off Clouds” turned the encore into a near-rave.

“There are things I do as Tori Amos that I don’t do as mummy,” the singer once told her daughter. Triumphantly varied, defiant yet confessional and thrillingly histrionic – no, make that herstrionic – on the road, that includes being the equal of any of pop’s weird sisters.

Tori Amos’s world tour continues today at the Oxegen festival in Naas, Co Kildare, Ireland and tomorrow at the T in the Park festival in Kinross, Scotland