Tori Amos interview in Vox, May 1994.  By Steve Malins.  Photos by
barry Marsden.

Typed into Netland by Mike Harlock. (harlock@rahul.net)

Title in huge print: "I'm very selective about what goes into my mouth."

Caption: "bearing the scars of sexual and religious repression,
   Tori Amos claims she spits out anything she doesn't like the
   taste of.  Is her new album, _Under the Pink,_ an excorcism of the
   soul or merely the babblings of an L.A. Fruitcake?


   "The whole Christian theology is that god came down to experience life
through his son.  Well, how's he experiencing life if he doesn't get laid?
Give me a break.  And why would he not get laid, as he created the
apparatus in the first place?  Of course he soiled his little dinky," Grins
Tori Amos, still-at 30- the impish, rebellious daoughter of a Southern
Methodist Preacher.
   Amos's first hand experience of sexual repression, prejudice and violence
shapes her opinions, her emotionally charged music and the way she likes
to present herself.  it's her idea to stage the photo shoot as a mock-up of
Kate Moss's advertising campaign for Calvin Klein underwear, replacing
the model's waifish androgynous physique with her own five-foot-threee inches
frame.  "I don't want to look like a virgin," she laughs. "I'm a grown woman.
I've earned my experiences, my scars."
   Tori's willful escape from her oppresive religious background in North
Carolina is described in vivid, often disturbing detail on her two solo
albums, 1991's _Little Earthquakes_ (which has sold 1.5 million copies
worldwide to date) and this year's _Under the Pink._  Both have touched a
cord with women, who write to her about their own sexual tramas, and
with men who want to find out more about their girlfriends, sisters and
mothers.    
   Perhaps they also see in Tori a michevous soulmate.  Seated in a cafe'
in London's Kensington, she affects a laddish bravado, closer in spirit
to her infamous '80s "Rock Chick" alter-ego than the dreamy singer-songwriter
person of more recent aquaintence.  '"When I'm hanging out with the guys,
a babe can walk into the room and I can totally understand why they're in
love," she drawls through a wide, sassy grin.  "I'm like:'Yea, if I had one
of those things that guys have, I'd totally be rising right now.'"
  While her labelmates Tracy Chapman and Tanita Tikaram were unable to match
the sales and impact of their respective debut albums, Tori's recent follow-up
album debuted at Number One in the UK charts.  Her continued sucess is
partly indebted to the size and fanaticism of her following, although her
large blue-grey eyes are still fired with a determination to reach out to
new converts.  on her current mammoth world tour, she pours out over an hour
and a half of her soul-baring material to her vouyeristic audiences. 
Seventeen years as a working pianist has left her with a stamina and
professional guile which belies her New Age hippy looks.

   Despite the growing scale of her business operation, the songwriter 
retains a potent and unusually open relationship with her devotees.
Leaning forward with a fixed stare, she explains the awkward vunerability
she senses in fans of both sexes.  "I'm the Queen f the nerds.  I love
nerds- by which I mean, not a cool, bitchin' person.  I guess I was a cool
nerd.  I wasn't shuffling my feet in the corner of the playground, I was the
homecoming queen, but then, all the nerds voted for me."
   Among her more famous fans is Trent Reznor from Nine-Inch-Nails, who
joined her in the 150-yaer old Hacienda in new Mexico she rented for the
recording-to sing a duet on the new album.  Reznor's armor-plated Industrial
music and self-abusing stage persona are transparent to Tori, who can still
detect the little boy inside.  "There are a lot of hidden nerds.  I'm aware
of the exciting man in Trent The Nine Inch, but I can see the nerd in him,
too.  People who become the frontrunners often used to be outcasts or
loners."  She's less sure about the attentions of "the ones with glasses,
who read their books and pick their nose.  They're a little more difficult,
but I love them, too.  They're so heavy on the mental side that they're cut 
off from the emotional.  Usually, the hidden ones come to my shows, but
when the nerdy nerds show up, I observe them because they're so very
uncomfortable with their physical selves."
   Tori's wariness of these self-absorbed figures is well rounded.
  her open-legged stance at the piano on stage has attracted a few
genuine voyers, but most of her male fans restrict themselves to wishful
thinking, or letters tinged with adolescent pathos about their sex lives.
However, some correspondants are more threatening.  "I'm aware that I'm
calling up a lot of emotional things," she says, demurely leaving back in
her chair.  "I communicate 

               "PIANOS ARE FEMALE TO ME.  SOMETIMES THEY'RE DYKES, AND
   (caption     THEY'RE ALWAYS GOOD FUN."
 
obsessives.  "There are certain people whom you cannot communicate with," she
says sadly. "I"ve been face-to-face with people like that at gigs.  There
was the Avon Lady in the states, and I felt horrible because I couldn't
remember her name, and she threw a tantrum.  She was screaming and we
had to escort her out, because, well, what do you say?"  She adds: "It
hurts me when a woman doesn't come through for me, more than a man. 
I've had this ideal of women that of course we're able to work things through
and understand each-other.  but aot of _Under the Pink_ is actually about
emotional violence between women, rather than between the sexes.  There's
a definite pecking order, which men usually don't see."
   nevertheless, her intimate exploration of rape ('Me And My Gun' from
_Little Earthquakes_) and sexual taboos, coupled with her rakish good humor,
has inspired more rewarding encounters.  She often finds that her own
experiences are mirrored by those of her audience:"Although I've only done
eight shows so far, I've already met several girls backstage who tell me
they can't get intimate because there's a part of them that they cut off.
They can only fuck a man by pretending to be someone else."
  Tori spent years detaching herself frmo emotional involvment by imagining
she was being paid for sex.  "if you fantasize about yourself as a whore, 
that's about control.  I felt judged by men.  but I've always been very
selective about the men I go with.  I might talk a good game, but I'm
very selective about what goes into my mouth.  I spit out food I don't like,
so just imagine," she grins slyly.

   Tori's fantasies wre another attempt to burn away her dry Methodist roots.
As a child, she was surrounded by "women who hadn't been wet between their
legs for 20 years", and who didn't take kindly to her dreams about being
Jesus' lover.  "I had a really big crush on Jesus.  I used to think I would
have been a really good girlfriend for him.  I got into big trouble for that."
if the had known what else the inquisitive Myra Ellen (she changed her name
to Tori later) had been up to, they may have been even more severe.  A new
track, 'Icicle', pays homage to the joyys of masturbation, and includes the
nostalgic line, "Get off, get off, while they're all downstairs saying their
prayers."
   Twenty years on, Tori still feels biterness towards her domineering
grandmother, who set out to instill the fear of god in "this young,
brown haired runt."  her mother was more sympathetic, although often
equally constricted by her prudish moral values.  
   Tori vividly recalls her distress and anger when, with blood running
down her leg, she experienced her first period in a school playground at
the age of ten.  "My mother hand't told me anything about it.  I thought
I was going to die.  I was like: 'give me a break, mother, we look at
_playgirl_ magazines at the weekend at Emily's inbetween playing The Who
and Led Zepplin.  I'm old enough to know about this.' I got into trouble
then for yelling."

(picture, tori in concert, caption: "I wanna sell you a Tori: Ms Amos
finds the piano's G-spot"

   These days, their relationship has improved, although it's based on
some unexpected common ground.  Sometimes I feel like I'm the older sister.
My mother's a southern lady, a sweetheart.   She's definitly the minister's
wife on one hand, and then, on the other, she's a witch.  She's a little
wicked.  She loves being with musicians.  She has no judgement when she
sees the earrings and the five studs on the tongue.  When she heard Trent
Reznor's vocal on my song 'Past The Mission', she said:'Well, I do see,
women are gonna be after him, he just sounds so smooth.'  And I said: 'Mother,
they already are,' and she goes:'well, there'll be more now, I promise you
that."
   According to Tori, they also respect each-other's "visions" and their
dreams of past lives, a talkent which she claims has been handed down
through their Cherokee blood-line.  The singer gleefully recollects exotic
past lives as a "fat little cook, chopping up food for my rough, tough
knights.", and her Icelandic warrior incarnation, Sven the Viking. "You know,
if a 'gorgeous' man walks into a bar, I look; I turn my head and check out
Brutus, right," she smirks. "But if Sven walked in, he'd get way more chicks
than this idiot."  She slips into first person, as she re-lives some
of her berzerker conquests.  "I think I was a good guy, you know.  Maybe
I flayed some nuns and stuff and made some carpets in the old days, and that
was kinda gross, but we've had some violent times, I know that."
   The media image of Tori as a "kooky" New Age singer is founded on such
offbeat, fantastical stories, but she's unrepentant. "This is a very
functional civilization that wakes up, takes a shit, goes to work, eats, comes
home, maby gets it once or twice a week, (if they're really lucky), shits
(if they're regular), and goes to bed again.  Dull, press the eject."

   As a four-year-old child prodigy, Tori discovered that the creative
freedom she experienced on the Piano was met with simple, narrow minded
resistance.  At weekends, her father took her to the prestegious Peabody
Conservatory in Baltimore, where her taste for self-expression and rock
music led to her expultion at the age of 11.  "I'm an emotional player,"
she says.  "I've never felt anything that moves me as much as my piano.
I don't really like people. I prefer my piano to people.  it's totally
reliable and it's alive.  I can hear what it's saying.  For the most part,
pianos are female to me.  Sometimes they're dykes, and they're always
good fun." she adds, with a typical flash of humor. 
   Her early retirement from classical music was followed by years of
playing Gershwin standards in a gay piano bar in Washington D.C: "I learned
so much about real respectability from gay waiters.  I used to play there
when I was 13, wearing my sister's polyester pants and all made up to look
older.  I was happy.  The men there were moe interested in my father, who
was in his clerical coller at the back."  She then left home and worked as
a jobbing pianist, performing to indifferent diners at nightclubs and hotels
across america.  Despire her usually inattentive audiences, her role as a
"piano girl" finally liberated her sex life.  "I've never gotten a guy
without the piano.  It's almost like I became justified as a person when
people heard me play.  Before that, men would never talk or hang out with me.
   In the 80's she attempted to turn men's heads by ditching her favorite
instrument and turning herself into a "whoring" L.A. Rock chick.  "It's hard
not to notice a girl with two-foot hair and plastic snakeskin boots up to
her thighs, unfortunately.  That's what my band, Y Kant Tori Read, was all
about.  I left home at 21 and I was off to the races."
   She released one flop album on Altlantic Records and was described as
a "Bimbo" by Billboard.  "My lowest career point," she confesses.  Hurt
by the criticism, she made the decision to return to her piano to write
the songs which would eventually become _Little Earthquakes_.  Atlantic
was so confused by this sudeden change in direction that it decided to
pack her off to it's UK distributor, Eastwest Records, to see what they
could make of it all.  In a West-London flat, Tori performed a private
candelite set to Eastwest executive Max Hole, a devouted Kate Bush fan.
He signed her on the spot.

caption:  "IF YOU FANTASIZE ABOUT YOURSELF
           BEING A WHORE, THAT'S ABOUT CONTROL."

   Aged 27, Tori was finally able express herself fully through her music,
in the process of opening the door on her darkest, most traumatic experience
as the victim of a rape in her early 20's.  "It's not something where you
just go: 'Well, get over it.' Or: 'Believe in love and peace, my child,
and it'll all be over.'  Well, fuck you-That isn't the answer.  It's a great
thought, OK, but you can go and stick the crystals up your butt and lets
get on with it.  I'm all for love and peace, but that's not the side I work
on.  I work on the part before you get into the kitchen, right, before you
make a blueberry pie, sit down and drink a herbal tea and watch the Sunset.
First of all, you've got to pass me in the basement with the rats."


Picture: Tori Amos with flannel clothing, caption: "Y Kant Tori shop?"


   For a long time after the attack, Tori avoided "any man who looked like
him.  If somebody would taak about it-or worse, joke about it-I would be
ready to kill.  That's not healing.  It was a very long time after that before
I was with anyone again.  And it has never been the same as it was before."

caption: "IT'S NOT HARD TO NOTICE A GIRL WITH TWO-FOOT HAIR AND PLASTIC
          SNAKESKIN BOOTS UP TO HER THIGHS."

Picture of tori, caption: "Amos and dandy, the Viking of Rock and Roll"

   After failing to work out her problems through several previous
relationships, she's found more dynamic support in the form of her current
boyfriend Eric Rosse, who co-produced _Under The Pink_. "Eric was a big change.
He's been a major thing in my life, mainly because he's been helping me work
through this violent attack.  The way that he deals with it with me has changed
my whole view of men. "  She also reveals: "I'm going to throw away my pills
on this tour, in some city, I haven't decided where yet.  At 30, I feel ready
to have a child, although I don't intend to stop my career.  I just don't
want to do another major tour like this."
   Tori's habit of leaning across the table when she's about to confide
something becomes more pronounced as she continues: "I'm a better person
when I'm around Eric.  he has a little Irish maiden in him.  not a fair
battle against my Sven, it's true, but he doesn't mind being conquered.
There's a bit of 'do with me what you will' in him.  He was raised by hippie
russian parents, and I sensed that he had none of those Chrisitian hangups,
and he knew that I had them.  He was turned on by the hidden filth scene
with me.  You know, the revenge of the good girl.  The little librarian
with a tale to tell."  VOX