Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 01:54:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: SCOHN1@vaxc.hofstra.edu
Subject: Hot Press interview Part 1
Mime-Version: 1.0


The Hurt Inside

Tori Amos smiles mischievously and whispers "dare me to go under
that table to get it back!"  I do.  And she does, without asking
permission of our fellow diners in a plush London restaurant.
They smile nervously as she resurfaces mumbling something about
having lost her bottle top.  Still staring as she fastens the cap 
back onto the bottle of mineral water, they are clearly thinking
'that woman is weird.'
	Commentators who are prone to similarly superficial character
analysisin the world of rock'n'roll have also slapped much the same
label on Tori Amos since she first burst into the charts nearly
two years ago, singing what Vox described at the time as "loony
tunes."  Q headlined its first feature on the woman "Weird Chick",
a doubly insulting concept that has since been pushed by most
music papers who persist in presenting Tori as a person who has 
obviously lost more than her bottle top.
	Indeed this simple-minded perception has become so predominant
that the press release accompanying Tori's latest album, Under the Pink,
opens witht the quote: "I don't see myself as weird, I just see myself
as honest.  That's just the way I am.  I find the truth endlessly 
interesting."  This, too, is how I see Tori, having spent at least
ten hours in her company for this and my original Hot Press interview
with her in 1991, and having talked with her in an out-of-interview 
context on the telphone many times since then.  She is, without any
doubt, one of the most honest, self-analytical, truth-seeking women
I have ever known.
	"Let me just talk to you at first, tell you what's really
been happening to me, then we can begin," she says, subverting the
interviewprocess neatly at the outset.  Later, she agrees that many
of those original disclosures should form part of the interview.
	Equally, there are bound to be those who will stil insist that 
Tori Amos is a "weird" and "disturbed" woman endlessly rambling on
about all manner of taboo subjects-including masturbation, sexual 
fantasies about Christ and rape-rather than endlessly seeking truth.
Such claims strike me as not only irredeemably reductive but profoundly
insulting also, reflecting a fundamental misunderstanding of the 
nature of self-expression in the 20th century, particularly among
women and specifically in relation to art.
	Forget the superficial, stylistic similarities between Tori's
work and that of Kate Bush: her oragnic style of self-expression can be 
traced back through the post-punk rage of Patti Smith, and the similarly
"disturbed" songpoetry of Dory Previn to the kind of demons that 
drove Sylvia Plath to her death.
	During a time which is defined by the ways in which women are
wrenching from patriarchal power-structures the right to fully express
themselves, she is the personification of that force, and has even
written what could be an anthem for the age: "Silent All These Years",
from her second album, Little Earthquakes.  Her first album was an 
illfated, semi-heavy metal release, Y Kant Tori Read.
	Tori Amos was born in North Carolina, the daughter of a Methodist
preacher, and has been playing piano since the age of two
and a half.  Between the ages of five and eleven she was trained at the 
prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and grew up with the music
of Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.  On one of 
the singles of Cornflake Girl she includes her version of Hendrix's
"If Six Were Nine", playing her piano through a Marshall amp.  She also
sings Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" and Billie Holiday's "Strange
Fruit".  Why those songs?
	"To show that all things are possible, and permissible, for me,
as a singer-songwriter," she explains.  "They're my roots.  Joni was part
of my life from the moment I heard her.  And on the single I want to 
move from the Keith Jarret jazz plus reggae undertones in "Conrflake Girl"
into Joni's "A Case of You" and make it a seduction, heightening the 
undertone that was always there, when a woman sings to a man "I could drink 
a case of you!"(laughs)  And what JImi Hendrix represented to me was
'be all that you are'.  I had idolised Jesus Christ and then it was
Hendrix.  There's no differnce in terms of the force of the feeling.  And
"Strange Fruit" is there because that is the South, where I was born and
raised and here I directly experienced that kind of racism myself.  As a
white woman in the South I experienced many forms of raial hatred, deeply,
and my grandfather did, because of his Cherokee background.  I understand
the energy of those racial tensions so well and that's what I tapped into
for "Strange Fruit" which I recorded on morning at 5:30 am, having been
called out of bed by the forces, to do so."
	Tori knows that this talk about being summoned by "the forces"
will indeed seem "weird" to those who do not believe in the power of 
the spirit, particularly as defined within Native American culture.
However, her allegiance to this side of her family history is so 
strong that when I tell her about the Native American singer-songwriter
Bill Miller she immediately makes a note to try to get him to support
her on her forthcoming American tour (which she subsequently does).
	"It's so fitting that you should tell me that you first saw him
when he was singing "Home on the Range", in Nashville becasue I've jsut
recorded that song for release on a future single," she says before
crossing her room to play a powerful, bitterly ironic version of that
song on her hi-fi system.
	"I really don't worry about people not understanding what I 
said to you about being called by 'the forces'" she says, sitting
back down on her sofa. "When he'd talk about the blacks and the whites
fighting one another my papa would always paraphrase that Indian saying,
by telling me "they can't understand each other because you never to,
until you walk in another man's moccasins'.  If people can't see things
from the other side that's not my problem, it's theirs.  And that really
applies to racial tensions in America-still.  The deepest psychic 
wound in our country is the genocide perpetrated on Native Americans.
The deepest root of our country is being denied and we are a people 
dislocated from ourselves, our past.  We can never be whole until there
is re-intergration at that level."
	From James Joyce through Schoenberg and Picasso to U2 the theme
of the dislocated self in search of re-intergration has been a defining
factor in art this century.  This, claims Tori, is also the central 
theme of her new album Under the Pink.
	"This record is about the search for wholeness and clearly
focuses on divisions, even in "Cornflake Girl" which is about 
Cornflake girs and raisin girls and they represent two different ways
of thinking: narrow-mindedness and openmindedness and how narrow-minded
women betray the rest of us.  That division is even there between women, 
which is something I've really had to come to terms with.  It is often
women who say I shouldn't express myself as I do and in that sense, 
women let each other down, not men."
	How does Tori respond when she sees those reviews of her new 
album which dismiss her as a "weird chick" or reduce her to a sex
object?
	"It's a classic case of control, don't you think?," she says. 
"In the States I'm presented as a sex object and questions in interviews\
usually focus on that na din Britain I'm 'weird'.  Either description
is a copout  and an easy way of avoiding having to face what I'm really
talking about in ym songs or really want to talk about during my
interviews.  And, again, it is harder for me to deal with women do it.
And they do it a lot, particularly in America, just write about my being
a 'sex symbol' whatever that is."
	A sex symbol is usually a celbrity whom fans want to fuck, to 
put it bluntly.  How does Tori deal with it when she is confronted by
such fans?
	"I understand that they don't want to fuck me, they want to 
fuck themselves.  Let's take it to its most naked form here.  They see
an energy that they want to be a part of.  Forget about the journalists, 
they have another agenda.  But the people in my audience really do, I 
believe, want to tap intot he energy force I've awakened in themselves
and they feel a oneness at that level, which is something higher than
simply sex."
	"I've wanted to fuck guys who had a primative energy on stage but
once I meet thme and talk with them I realise I don't really want to 
fuck them but I want to get close to where they're coming from.  I
talkked about this to a wise woman in the desert and she said "you 
want to suck his energy, isn't that what you want?" and that's what
it's all about to me."
	What would Tori say to those who might respond that fucking is
indeed just about the physical pleasure involved, particularly a fan's 
fantasy of fucking her, or his, hero?
	"To me that's a whole different thing, like someone needing
to own, to possess someione else's energy, to fulfil something in 
themselves that is empty.  Why do we have heroes in the first place?
To compensate for what we lack in ourselves.  It shouldn't come down to 
the act of fucking.
	"To tell you the truth I can't deal with the fact that some fans 
would just perceive me that way.  They don't have a clue about all
my problems that are involved, in terms of my sexuality.  If they did,
perhaps they'd change their minds!"

(That is part one of what I think I will type out over three days
(Please forgive me for any Spelling/Punctuation errors
(interview by Joe Jackson as it appeared in Hot Press Feb 23,94)