Live Review: Tori Amos

As the diminutive figure of Tori Amos totters on stage in stiletto heeled boots, black leather pants, a long wrap and rimless glasses, the audience ecstatically spring to their feet. 

A flashing thunderstorm sweeping over the city just minutes before didn’t thwart this long-planned date.  Five years is too long.  Amos agrees: “Every time I hear you guys, I ask myself, ‘Why has it taken me so long to come back?’” After a quick introduction with Parasol and Bouncing Off Clouds, Amos beams briefly.

Sitting between a languorous, sleek black grand piano and an electric keyboard, Amos conjures an intimate setting that seems to shrink the space inside the theatre. Her mezzo soprano vocals are still supple, flitting effortlessly from an awed whisper one second to a menacing growl the next. The night, she reminds us, is all about requests made from fans, instead of a hard plug for her latest album Unrepentant Geraldines. It is an astute move. Excited cheers and whoops greet the introductory bars of almost every track as audience members recognise their old favourites from her vast repertoire.

Amos straddles high on her piano stool – facing the audience, with one hand each on the piano and keyboard and also a heel on each instrument’s pedal – and an earlier comment by plus one springs to mind (“She plays the piano sexually”). During crescendos, she leans so far to one side that the stool rocks onto two legs. Her intentions however, are not gratuitous – she embodies the emotions in her songs so completely that they course visibly through her body. It is this powerhouse of emotions that enable her to unwincingly tackle subjects such as sexual assault, domestic abuse and child predators in her songs.

Every gesture is a flourish, every toss of that magnificent, flaming Titian hair a victory cry.

As if on deadline, Amos shuffles feverishly through sheaves of paper that are littered on her piano and runs methodically through her setlist, with very little chatter in between. She even reduces the Lizard Lounge section of the show, during which she plays a couple of covers, to just one track instead of the usual two. Recounting how she first heard Chrissy Amphlett’s voice in I Touch Myself as she was driving down to a gig near LAX, Amos gushes that it’s an honour to play the song in tribute to The Divinyls frontwoman.  

At one point, Amos restarts an instrumental introduction by singing a short, self-effacing ditty – “I fucked up, so now I have to sing about it because I’m menopausal!” It is an endearing moment, and we wish there could have been more. But after a rousing, standing reception to the perennial Cornflake Girl and a trio of quick encores, Amos disappears again amid warm, mumsy waves and smiles. Hopefully not for another five years this time.