Tori Amos, George Byrne @ TheBrisbane Convention Centre, 22/09/2007

Tue 2nd Oct, 2007 in Gig Reviews

It feels as though thousands of Tori Amos fans are clustering around the convention centre merch desk, all speculating wildly about which American Doll Posse alter-ego Amos will emerge as when she hits the stage. Inside the hall itself, though, Melbournian songster George Byrne is already in full flow, plying his talents with the guitar to a sparse and largely disinterested crowd.

Plonked over on the far left-hand side of stage – dwarfed by Amos’s imposing Bösendorfer grand piano that hulks centre-stage – Byrne entertains the early comers with a solid set set of tunes from the softly styled singer-songwriter genre. An early tune full of intricate plucked guitar offers immediate promise, but much of the set is characterised by gently strummed chords. As a result, the songs blend into one another after a while, and even the backing of a rhythm cannot seem to lift things. A flash of harmonica on Everybody offers brief interest, and Desolation Road near the end also lifts itself above the pack, but mostly Byrne isn’t quite grabbing the attention tonight.

Amos takes the stage to the rampant adoration of her cheering and whistling – if stubbornly seated – fans. Her platinum-blond Santa persona laps it up as if it’s nothing less than her due, and the American chanteuse oozes sultry yet unattainable promise under the stage-lights as she and her backing band open up with the swanky beats of Body and Soul. And as Amos runs through half-a-dozen Santa tracks from American Doll Posse – finally concluding the first act with the equally vixenish You Can Bring Your Dog – there’s more than a touch of the rock cabaret vibe in the way her guitar-bass-drums ensemble plays around her lush vocals.

A quick costume change allows the a-boggle crowd to gather its collective breath. Professional Widow pipes out over the speakers until, finally, Amos returns as herself. She throws out a smashing version of country-inflected single Big Wheel before delving into the back-catalogue. And if it’s here that we’re visually stunned by the sight of her gyrating mid-song between pianos on the introduction to Honey, it’s also where the arrangements begin to lack some verve. The piano on Crucify is stunning, but Cornflake Girl and General Joy come out flattened and the vocals feel submerged under some rather ordinary drums and guitar.

An interlude with the Bösendorfer piano more than compensates, though. Homo-spirituality – a wonderful piece of improvisation prompted by a question from Amos’s daughter – is full of artless charm and garners some of the biggest cheers of the night, while Silent all These Years and Cooling (complete with the rarely played Brambles bridge) vividly illustrate how sublime Amos is in solo mode. From there, it’s a brief skip to set closer Code Red – the dark piano chords meshing fabulously with the screaming guitar and outdoing the album version ten-fold and more for intensity. It’s so good that the encore threatens to be an anti-climax, but Precious Things and Hey Jupiter stand up to be counted, proving that – old and new – Amos can still bring the house down.