Mike Gray reports that the March 2005 issue of Q magazine in the U.K. includes a 3-star review of The Beekeeper and a very interesting short interview with Tori where she talks about what she is currently watching and reading. Click the link to read both the review and the interview!
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Tori interview appears in Q Magazine's "Home entertainment" section:
Tori Amos - Quirk In Progress
Morning:I get up at 6:30 to get my daughter Tash ready for school. It's always mayhem, so she usually watches DVDs while I'm running around. She's obsessed with Harry Potter although I caught her watching Bridget Jones's Diary from her dad's collection the other day, which is a bit naughty for a four year old.
Noon: I don't listen to music when I'm working on an album so I don't accidentally end up stealing the ideas. At the moment I'm reading Prospect, the political essay magazine. I'm going to be doing a lot of interviews in America, so I need to bone up on Europe's view of America. Plus I commute from my home in Cornwall to New York a lot and I need to know if New York is still there.
Night: We get a lot of movies from Amazon. We just watched The 51st State with Samuel L Jackson. I thought it was cute, but my husband just ended up falling asleep. But if Arsenal are playing, we have to watch Match Of The Day. I never realised what it would mean to marry an English football fan, but I do now...
Here is the Beekeeper Review:
Kooky Monster : Buckle Up For Another Tuneful Flight Of Fancy
Tori Amos : The Beekeeper - Sony BMG (***) - 3 STARS
Inspired, naturally enough, by the realisation "that she has an organ" (a typically nonsensical Amos quote), The Beekeeper is perhaps Tori Amos's most florid album to date. The North Carolinian who first filled Kate Bush's shoes with her 1992 debut, Little Earthquakes, has since gone on to follow her own increasingly wayward path, covering Nirvana anthems and suckling piglets along the way, and now, aged 41, she sounds as ripe as a vineyard at harvest, her music verging on the succulent.
At 19 tracks long, it outstays its welcome by a good half hour, and for every riveting set piece (Barons of Suburbia's climax sounds like it was sung in church and directed at the Devil) there are meandering nonentities such as the title track, the seven minutes of which pass with interminable inactivity. But Amos remains thrillingly individual, and each song comes sung, appropriately enough for someone whose interview tecnique suggests schizophrenia, by a different persona with conflicting temperaments. And so we get the easy-listening sway of Ireland ("Driving in my Saab on the way to Ireland", she croons while backing singers sha-la-la behind her) alongside the gospel tones of Witness, while on Hoochie Woman she is lust, purring "bring home the bacon" the same way phone sex operators intone the word "suspenders."
Mercifully her Bushisms (Kate, not George) are kept mostly in check, which is wise because she is best when understated. Ribbons Undone is the album's quietest track. It is also the loveliest.
Subtlety rarely looms large in the work of Tori Amos and here she flaunts the grandeur of a 19th century novel with the confusing lyrical belatings of a spiritual kook, but her efforts ultimately pay off. She is bizarre, certainly, but she can also be rather beguiling.
Nick Duerden
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Rip It : Ribbons Undone
Further Listening:
Hounds Of Love - Kate Bush - EMI, 1985, ****
Kristin Hersch - Hips & Makers - 4AD, 1994, ***
There are some other Tori sightings in this issue according to
Annemarie (Mentia). The first is from a one-page article on page 60 called "AIRSHIP AHOY!: Celebrity fans choose the ultimate Led Zep playlist". The 10th person mentioned is Tori who says the following about "Stairway to Heaven":
'I had a key to the church. I was 13. My friends needed a safe place to smoke a jazz Woodbine. I would take four or five friends at a time up the stairs, through the wooden hatch in the ceiling, up the ladder through the hole, to the top of the steeple. Smoke rises, you know...'
The second is from an interview with Nick Cave..Tori is mentioned on page 53.
Interviewer: 'What about Tori Amos. You said the "twinkling cunt" line in Green Eyes [also on The Boatman's Call] was about her sewing sequins into her pubic hair. I bet she wasn't flattered by that.'
Nick: 'That's simply not true. It keeps getting repeated in the press, but it's not true.'
Interviewer: 'It's here in this music magazine from 1997. The journalist asks, "You have first-hand experience of this?' and you say, "Yes."'
Nick: 'I lied. I start to lie when things get really tedious. Anyway, I met Tori in the lobby of a hotel once afterwards. She seemed a lovely girl. She didn't send any letters of complaint. I think even if it were true it's kind of flattering. I mean, how sweet. What a sweet thing to do...to sit there and sew sequins into your pubic hair.'
