Tori Amos at the London Palladium

Tori Amos, who has had an active career for over 40 years and started making her own music aged three, embarks on her first tour since 2017 to promote her new Ocean to Ocean album. Performing a mix of songs from her new album and popular hits from her oeuvre, Amos’s show is a delight for die-hard fans – and has the potential to appeal to younger generations. 

This is a visually stunning performance, with stage lighting and moving projections working seamlessly together to create a vibrant multisensory experience. Tori Amos has synaesthesia and experiences music as structures of light and colour. In this performance, the audience gets to see a snapshot of what she might see in her own music. 

The background of the singer songwriter’s famous Cornflake Girl song is an alluring pink, blue and orange medley of moving streaks, whilst the lighting creates a pale radiance surrounding Amos and flickering through the audience. Spies’ is accompanied by moving, red, cell-like eyes, which eventually blink into darkness. The visual design is versatile and continues to change to fit each song: at one point, the stage lights look like smoky boat flumes that shrink and enlarge against a rich red background. In another, the background is a Mars-like rusty sphere with moving craters. The scene changes aren’t busy enough to distract from the music, but create an enchanting experience without overwhelming the audience.

Amos is a confident, worldly performer, who gives her crowd the side-eye and clearly has a lot of fun with her songs, moving along with the beats and turning back and forth to play the three different types of piano and keyboards she has on stage. During an intimate moment under a simple spotlight, the artist performs a cover of Tom Watt’s Time, which she says she chose to reflect the current state of the world, aptly summing it up with: “So, the world’s gone mad huh?”.

Tori Amos’s show is thoroughly enjoyed by her fans, many of whom shout words of encouragement throughout, but it is also enjoyable for those with little experience of her work.

Sophia Moss
Photos: Virginie Viche

For further information and future events visit Tori Amos’s website here.

Watch the video for the single Ocean to Ocean here: