Tori Amos Talk about Gabriel...and many more

Goddess, passionate artist, attack survivor, mother, lover, Tori Amos has been many things during her career. Paul Dalgarno tries to track down the person behind the many personas of this enigmatic entertainer

“The way faith has panned out today in America would have Jesus running for the hills”

...On advice from Peter Gabriel in 1995, the lioness gradually took more control of her music, shifting 15 million records and becoming one of only a handful of women to secure five or more US Top 10 albums in the process. The fighting spirit saw her enroll as the youngest ever music scholar at Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Conservatory, aged five, before being asked to leave at 11 for her wayward approach to sheet music.

She has owned Martian Studios in Cornwall with Hawley since 1997, where she hires the engineers, owns the master tapes and protects her integrity fiercely. It's an achievement she clearly appreciates. Little Earthquakes was the result of a four-year battle with record label Atlantic, who wanted to promote her as as a rock chic and replace her trademark Bösendorfer piano with heavy guitars.

Her contract with the label ended with the delivery of her remastered hits package, Tales Of A Librarian, in 2003. "Peter Gabriel didn't say this, but checkmate motherf*cker," she says now. In her struggle, she acknowledges something of the Calvinist. "People don't ask me what I got from the Scottish side and, you know, with all my mother's mysticism, there's a tenacity that my father gave me, a discipline. I got the fire and the tomahawk to stand up to the corporate music business from my mother, but it was also about having the ability and the patience to wage the war."...