As a TORI AMOS fan I shall confess that I have not yet bought the new album “American Dolle Posse”, and have heard only snatches of the songs on You Tube, as the current trend of sample-before-you-buy culture allows us to.
I confess this because having witnessed this dynamite performance, I shall be buying the new album tout suite and signing my allegiance to all things Posse!
You may have seen Amos gracing various popular chat shows, sporting a razor fringe and lengths of straightened scorching orange hair, there’s a kind of seventies space rock cool about it. This isn’t just her current new look, but is also the guise of one of the five women populating her new concept album “American Doll Posse”.
To quote miss Amos “that fucking redhead” is also sometimes known as “Talula” - who in the Amos canon is the closest living relative to the singer herself, but for now she is simply “Tori”. So, alongside Tori/Talula, there are four other mistresses: Isabel, Pip, Santa and Clyde. All of these characters have blogs and MySpace pages in order to circulate their personal belief systems and ‘feedback’ in sync with the current tour.
Basically the entire scheme is a latter-day Spice Girl set with the sophistication of a musically talented, intelligent and poetic author and a concept placed somewhere between the Olympian Godesses and Just Seventeen magazine.
So, first out on stage was ‘Santa’, who takes her platinum peroxide blonde status from the iconic sweetness of Marylin Monroe, the defining ultra cool of Debbie Harry and the cartoonish hutzpah of Judy Jetson – in short, a helluva lot of fun on stage.
Santa slinked onto stage through the sublime red lit material styled temple wall, which, if I didn’t know any better, was as close as close can be to a gigantic clitoris, which is totally and utterly unsurprising.
Once seated, the seductive ride continues as "Tori as Santa" mesmerized an unsuspecting audience with zestful and gaily spirited renditions of old and new songs. There was wonderful carnival-esque atmosphere to the proceedings of the new songs, helped largely by the bouncing drums and guitar that filled the auditorium.
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After this tremendous start, there was a brief dress change before Tori emerged as, well… “Tori”. This is the point where the show really took off. Three of her highest selling songs in succession – Crucify, Sirens Song, Cornflake Girl – were momentously rushed along with rippling piano melodies driven to the excess.
There were the obligatory quirky moments – such as when having attempted to perform the rather sombre “January Black Dove” Tori became tongue-tied and instead of mumbling along she cut the show and shouted: “You know what? I just had a brain fart!”, and with the quick thinking guitarist and drummer, the musicians exploded into an improvised song with the lyrics: “ I just had a brain fart/ I just had a brain fart/ I don’t even know my words/ I can’t even work my mic/ I can’t even bring my mouth to sing this song even though I’ve written 500…”
This brought the house down in fits of giggles, highlighted her dexterity as a musician to deal with the individual performance, and really helped her to propel the set along with a whole loada oomph.
The set was filled with hundreds of other inspiring moments – her outburst against George Bush’s contemporary America, the war in Iraq and the war against terrorism being a particularly poignant moment – and even a Y Kant Tori Read song (for the die hard fans out there): “Cool on your Island”.
The entire gig was highly emotionally charged, tinged with beauty, humour, and anger. Hell, we were taken through the entire emotional spectrum. And frankly, we don’t expect anything less from Mrs. Amos. Fabulous stuff.
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