Tori Amos
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Tori Amos skips the traditional blandishments about how great it is to be in Ireland at her sold‑out show at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Sunday night and instead asks the audience for their help in pronouncing “Lughnasa”.
This occurs halfway through the singer-songwriter’s mesmerising concert, as she explains that the ancient Irish god Lugh played a signature role in the recording of her new album, In Times of Dragons.
The record is a sort of fairy‑tale take on unfolding global events. Its political nature is spelt out by the lead single, Shush, which Amos performs early in the night; it’s about an evil billionaire who “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible”.
The LP is a return to form for an artist whose 1990s output applied an esoteric gloss to songs about feminism and the patriarchy. Call it Grand Guignol girl power. It’s also a return to Ireland, with which she has history. She credits a sacrificial offering to Lugh – her husband’s good whiskey – with getting the album over the line.
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“He helped me write this record,” she says before plunging into Crazy, a proggy meditation from 2002 about emotional suffering and the kindness of strangers (in this instance, an ancient Irish deity and metaphysical patron of the arts).
Amos doesn’t do greatest-hits shows. But fans nonetheless hang on every vocal and keening piano note during this plunge into her back catalogue. She has brought along a backing trio of female singers who contribute a molten melodrama to an evening that opens with the gothic power ballad Fire to Your Plain.
The set is framed in fiery red and purple lighting – a literal play on the title In Times of Dragons. She leans even further into the fantastical element during Shush, as the outline of a giant fire‑breathing lizard appears in the centre of a raised circle, the Game of Thrones vibe adding a sense of the epic to Amos’s stark warning about tyrants in our midst.
The singer’s relationship with Ireland is rich and deep. She kept a house in the picturesque Co Cork coastal town of Kinsale for many years, and recorded much of Boys for Pele, her 1996 masterpiece, in a church in Delgany, in Co Wicklow.
At that point she was regarded as one of the “big three” of singular female artists, alongside Björk and PJ Harvey. She rewinds to the period with Pele’s fabulously menacing opening track, Beauty Queen/Horses, which here features intense piano runs and a vocal so fierce it almost drags the air from your lungs.
Amos is especially brilliant at simultaneously deconstructing and elevating tunes she has performed from the start of her career, as she demonstrates by reworking her early hit Crucify into a haunting odyssey of many parts. It’s lush and jazzy one moment, ethereal and stripped down the next, its chorus given a rocket boost by her backing vocalists.
The encore finishes with Amos’s best‑known song, Cornflake Girl, a rollercoaster fever dream that she cranks up a level by launching herself on the piano. It brings down the curtain with a satisfying whiff of brimstone, confirming that this mother of dragons still knows how to roar.
