Gig review: Tori Amos

Published on Wednesday 9 September 2009 19:07

TORI AMOS *** GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

IT'S 15 years since second album Under the Pink launched Tori Amos into the upper echelon of piano-playing female singer-songwriters. Since then, the world has witnessed a respectable Kate Bush comeback, the rise of Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer as a poster girl for those of a gothic sensibility, and now the emergent popularity of Florence Welch and her Machine. Amos no longer seems like the figurehead of a once sparsely populated style.

She is, however, a masterful and powerful live act, backed here by a guitarist and drummer. Although there remain Kate Bush-isms in her voice, Amos's performance defies comparison with almost anyone else out there. Her piano-playing is highly skilled, too, and blessed with a strong theatrical flourish.

Yet in truth, bar a striking crescendo during Pretty Good Year and the wheeling-on of a Hammond organ for Fast Horse and then Precious Things near the end, her performance here might be best described as one-note – though that note is acknowledged to be one of the sharpest, clearest, most spine-tingling notes you'll ever hear.

There was familiarity in Cornflake Girl and stark, emotive drama in the solo Taxi Ride and Etienne ("maybe I'm a witch", she sang, to a spike of applause, "running through the fields of Scotland"). But rarely was there variety.