Tori, Twice

Quite often people love to bang on about 'good songwriting'. Usually this is in conjunction with a pared down, stripped back cover version: "It really shows that underneath all that kitchen sink production, the bare bones of the song are amazing. It's just a brilliantly crafted song." Blah blah blah. Often this is right. Most of the time this is exaggeration.

Recently Tori Amos, that most divisive of angry feminist 90s singer/songwriters has been touring material from her most recent album, the classical-inspired, concept song cycle, Night of Hunters, with a Polish string quartet called Apollon Musagete. That may sound exhausting. Certainly, Guardian music critic, Alexis Petridis, was recently moved to describe the entire project, which also features a 1300 word essay and a shapeshifting fox called Annabelle, played by Tori Amos' precocious daughter, as awful-sounding and tiring. But he hadn't actually heard the album yet. And the songs, as ever, despite their opulent and rococo classical music high gloss, are in Amos' inimitable style, melding melody and high drama with the songwriting genius of a piano prodigy.

Over the past few nights, once at the Royal Albert Hall and once at Mancheter's Apollo Theatre, Tori entertained us, mixing in the old with the new, fan favourites, b-sides and greatest hits, often accompanied only by herself on piano, and, brain-meltingly, on keyboard at the same time, at other times with alternately lush and violently inventive string quartet arrangements. Here, the songwriting really was the star. The 'bare bones' of the songs didn't turn out just to be simple verses and choruses made novel by being heard in the new context of sparse acoustic chords, but at once complex and deceptively straightforward spiderwebs of rhythms and ideas all held together by Tori's remarkable and remarkably oblique, perfect lyrics.

In the dreadful 'chick-flick' (and that really is the only way to describe it), Crush, a character knows how to deploy chord and song changes on the organ in exactly the right way to make old biddies and funeral attendees cry. Tori seems to be in possession of the very same talent. Just as an eerie but one note verse had started to seem stretched as far as it can go, her songs launch seamlessly into a chorus or bridge where the tonal centres shift in a heart-aching way. Live, these details pack an even heavier punch.

Of course, Ms. Amos is not without her eccentricities and some of her bizarre Valerie Cherish-style prayer hands and motions were almost comical (ok they were definitely comical). All was forgiven, though, when she proved she had the ultimate sense of humour at the Manchester show by turning a microphone mess-up between songs into a totally improvised song along the lines of "Sometimes I fuck up (repeat x10 over jaunty piano tune)".

It's become a bit of a cliché to remark that in the past, many of our most beloved artists didn't receive a proportional amount of praise to their talent during their lifetime. It also seems to have become a general agreed that now that we're all omniscient internet-users with an infinite capacity to document and judge everything, this is no longer the case. But we beg to disagree (if that makes sense). Tori may be a relatively niche popular music act (as niche as someone who can fill the Royal Albert Hall can be) but we feel, deep down in our waters (oo-er) that once a lot of chart guff and politics has fallen away and all that is left is artistry, Tori will be remembered as the unwaveringly brilliant human being that a handful of hysterical gays and ginger women in velvet corsets see her as now. And these intimate, deluxe, concerts, documented on the cameras of a hundred smartphones, will offer proof. (Picture via here).

02/11/11 - Royal Albert Hall

1. "Shattering Sea"
2. "Scarborough Fair"
3. "Suede"
4. "Velvet Revolution"
5. "Nautical Twilight"
6. "Leather"
7. "Beauty Queen/Horses"
8. "Marianne"
9. "Mr. Zebra"
10. "Fearlessness"
11. "Cloud On My Tongue"
12. "Star Whisperer"
13. "Silent All These Years"
14. "Bells for Her"
15. "Way Down"
16. "Hey Jupiter"
17. "Your Ghost"
18. "Precious Things"
19. "Cruel"
20. [Encore 1]
    
21. "A Multitude of Shades"
22. "Winter"
23. [Encore 2]
    
24. "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
25. "Siren"
26. "Big Wheel"

04/11/11 - Manchester Apollo

1. "Shattering Sea"
   
2. "Scarborough Fair"
3. "Suede"
4. "Velvet Revolution"
   
5. "Leather"
6. "Fearlessness"
7. "Doughnut Song"
   
8. "Take Me with You"
   
9. "Mr. Zebra"
   
10. "Your Ghost"
11. "Winter"
12. "Star Whisperer"
13. "Lovesong"
    
14. "Carnival"
15. "Apollo's Frock"
16. [Improv]
    
17. "Cloud on My Tongue"
18. "Hey Jupiter"
19. "Siren"
20. "Cruel"
21. [Encore 1]
22. "A Multitude of Shades"
    
23. "Precious Things"
24. [Encore 2]
    
25. "Carry"
26. "Spark"
27. "Big Wheel"