Tori Amos @ The Opera House,7/05/2005

Mon 9th May, 2005 in Gig Reviews

Without doubt you have to approach Tori Amos, live, prepared for an experience, prepared to experience. From the aura that surrounds her to the extremely passionate way people love her and devour her music, you get the impression anything could happen.

So with this in mind I climbed the steps of the Opera House to get to the Concert Hall on a beautifully clear Saturday with the glittering backdrop of the CBD behind me, lit up like Christmas.

Announced on stage under a striking beam of white light, thick plumes of smoke floating mysteriously about her, and framed by a shock of fiery red hair, Tori arrived to rapturous applause. There was an anxious murmur about the crowd as they awaited the first notes to drop from her piano.

As the majority of her songs did, Original Sinsuality began with Tori flinging herself wildly at the keys, launching herself into the song. Right from the outset it was obvious there were other forces at work here.

What was immediately evident was the power of her voice: the primal tones that pulsed beneath each lyric she sang. Her words, while poetic and beautiful, almost seemed at times superfluous when compared with the emotion-filled delivery, the soaring highs and guttural tones of angst and sorrow.

Blood Roses and Take To The Sky were filled with moments of overwhelming physicality. The purple light that lurched across the stage, the stagnant smoke, Tori’s jerking body in an almost trance-like state, thrusting, her head tossed back with abandon, as it seemed she was conjuring up a spell.

The strong sense of something powerful and magical underlined every piano utterance played, and really hit home hard on the songs played on the organ, like Jamaica Inn. The overtly religious tones it leant to her performance were not hard to miss, and this tension fused the performance together. This constant battle between morality and righteous, and how Tori relates her own experiences to the more traditional views of these concepts felt throughout the night a cohesive force.

At times singing without any shame of the frustration and tiredness her voice and lyrics bore, Tori also drifted into moments seemingly more content with themselves. Cool On Your Island had an almost lullaby quality to it were it not for the fact that it masks a song about deep passion and desire.

Defying her own self-applied label of being “not the warm and fuzzy type” Tori broke from the norm to play a couple of requests, which lightened the mood, no end. A rousing and rambunctious version of AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long and a version of Madonna’s Like A Prayer sung with no sense of irony or sarcasm she did purely because it was “irresistible”. ‘Tori’s Piano Bar’ was open for business, proving there’s a lighter side to someone who seems to spend so much of their time lost in deep and heavy thoughts.

Bright neon shapes rippled over the interior of the concert hall as Tori clung to her piano during Barons of Suburbia. At different times throughout the night the piano takes on different forms for Tori: her anchor; her antagonist; her lover. She beats it, grips onto it for dear life but while playing her hands are light, dancing over the keys, with such devastating delicacy that the slightest played note carries the fullest form, the deepest resonance.

On Horses Tori really unleashed her voice, a quivering throughout the song constantly on the edge but never quite falling over. Silent All These Years and The Beekeeper seemed together on the outside but underneath a storm was brewing.

Throughout the night Tori flung herself manically between her organ and piano, a conduit being used to release something primal and essential. The audience were feverish with two encores including Leather and Crazy before Tori ended the night with Cooling. Was a third encore hoped for? Of course, but I got the feeling Tori had given all she could and what ever possesses her at these times had spent itself utterly tonight.