Tori Amos, Boys for Pele
OK, I’ve been rubbish of late. Working too hard and sleeping too little. Onto good old Tori Amos, or, as I read Eminem called her once, Torrid and Aimless. I rather like that, even though I sort of disagree, sort of. She’s the Queen of breathing, this lady, as Veronica and I once agreed. Where what she doesn’t sing, and the tailing-off of each note as it disappears into her body is beautiful too.

Tori Amos (along with Bjork and Gabrielle and other female singers) appeared in a Spitting Image video/sketch I remember well from my teenage years, all about eccentric female performers, and how they sang about boring things in increasingly “weird” styles. I think it was called “We’re singing bjollocks” or similar. I did laugh (and to be honest was very tired of seeing the video for “Big Time Sensuality”), but increasingly, I’ve realised that if male performers were doing the equivalent, they’d be greeted by cries of “genius!” Quite a few people at Uni assumed I’d be into Tori Amos, and while I heard and appreciated what I heard, I never felt the urge to acquire any and get really into it, until I hit Edinburgh.

It’s amazing what this woman does with just a piano and her voice – I’m guilty of over-layering songs to death…but then I’ve got quite a Baroque sense of arrangement, thanks to good old Steve in York. Her piano playing is rhythmic and chunky in places, but the lines are still there. The lyrics are very sexual and her voice weaves and winds in those feminine ways (is it true that “female” songs tend to do that more than “male” songs where every syllable fits a note? Italian vs. German?)

Oh God, and Father Lucifer. This is the song on this album that kills me more than anything else she’s ever done. I don’t know if it’s the tune, the words (How’re the Lizzies? How’s your Jesus Christ been hanging?), the trumpet that arrives like a
Cathedral in the middle section, the many voices tumbling over each other…the fact that it’s so short and you want it to carry on and on? Some dizzying combination makes this one of the songs I dream and sing around the house and wish I could sing live, but without the other three mini-me cohorts I currently crave, it’s frankly impossible. All those Catholic notions of guilt and paternalism hit me particularly hard and make me bury my face in my hands and spin me back to a bus-stop in Edinburgh near the hospital where, as I remember, Gordon brown’s baby child died one January when I was walking to work in the rain and the darkness, and the buses sigh and growl their way past traffic lights and walking through those Edinburgh meadows near all the steps and the whalebone arch that I never knew existed until a blossom-bound May.
And then a harpsichord begins a heavy sleaze of professional widow, which I knew better as the dance version (which I know is coming up afterwards) which, in turn, puts me back in GCSE art class with Holly, Suzanne, Helen and Laura, drawing sailboats, dragons and teddy bear faces, weaving silk, making paper, hearing about the Dunblane massacre on the radio and wondering what 6th form college we’d all end up going to.

So, a remix…how a mix or arrangement can totally change the whole song. I think that was one of the great lessons that this song (and quite a lot by Bjork) successfully taught me. And how weird that, at the time I looked down my nose at this song, only realising when I heard the original “acoustic” version how they were related…isn’t that terrible? Says something about the calibre of a producer/dj that they could hear the original and imagine something like this. Tori Amos has now changed from a wounded and articulate lady at the keys to a bizarre malfunctioning robot in the centre of some dancefloor.

Interesting that now she repeatedly asks you to “bring it close to my lips” and insisting that “It’s gotta be big”, rather than the huge discourse on Judas, peaches and cream, suicide and the running of Congress. I’m sure it shows all the reading about feminist analysis I’ve been doing recently but (sorry) how fucking typical that a man encounters a woman singing these mind-blowing poems and has to turn her into what he does…as if the only way a woman can be comfortable with her sexuality (and for a man to be comfortable about this) is to be a slut. The lyrics are sexual enough in the original version…while musically I really like the remix, you do have to wonder about the way he zoned in on and repeated only the nudge-nudge sections. It’s empowering to be slutty, apparently.

Mr Zebra; this delicious brass band arrangement…the only time I dig brass bands. God, this is why I did this exercise – two songs now (Marianne and Caught a Lite Sneeze) that I know because they’ve been on, suddenly present themselves as important and perfect as the ones I already know…beautiful and original and embodying (as far as anything can) an ideal I look for of outspoken and halting. I’ll have to take a stop in listening to this (need to eat and ready myself for a helpline shift) but I can finish listening to this when walking there and back.

I listen more walking to and from Uni in the drizzle on a Monday. It’s difficult to hear the man in the post office telling me how much the envelope weighs when I send off form my new passport, but even more difficult to take the earphones out of my ears. However, on the way up to Uni, I feel saturated, both by rain and weaving and hesitant lines…where’s the detail? Where are the riffs? Plenty trouble for you – thinking about the Joycean ideal of a woman; all wavy lines and circuitry, expanse and horizontal landscapes. Then realising that after a while, all landscapes look the same… too many Constables spoiling the broth and where are the trees amidst all the light and colour? As soon as I’m done thinking this (and certainly understanding Eminem’s criticism of her as Aimless) something amazing happens and the threads are tied together again. Completion is the new love? She does go on a wee bit…