BYLINE: Andrew Eaton
Tori Amos: Strange Little Girls
East West
WHILE her big brother was out running with a gang, Tori has plundered his
record collection. The result is this concept album ... no hang on, it's
really quite good: 12 songs performed by men, from the Stranglers to Slayer,
rammed into her own personal juicer and re-interpreted.
She has always surprised with her covers, once stripping down Nirvana's
Smells Like Teen Spirit to side-saddle piano. Here, second song in, she
takes on Eminem's wife-murder ballad 97 Bonnie & Clyde. Backed by stabbing
strings, she sings in a whisper, in the character of the dead woman, and
somehow manages to make a diabolical act seem like devotion.
That's the newest number; the oldest is the Velvet Underground's Loaded.
Elsewhere, there's 10cc's I'm Not In Love shorn of its school-disco smoocher
tune; again she almost breathes the words .
Violence is a recurrent theme. The Beatles' Happiness Is A Warm Gun begins
with reportage of the killing of John Lennon and a (male) voice of doom
intoning the Second Amendment about the right to "keep and bear arms."
Again, it's almost unrecognisable from the original. Not all the reworkings
work, but none could be called kookie, and for an Amos album that must be a
first. She even includes songs by such monumentally unhip acts as the
Boomtown Rats. In her hands I Don't Like Mondays quivers and throbs. It's
sexy - something you never said about Bob Geldof. -AS
