Below is a two-page foretaste of my chat with Tori Amos for Record Collector May 2026. And talking of Tori, today I had what must be the kind of sensation those door-to-door religious proselytisers get when they secure a convert. Actually, better than that, when they bring someone who’s strayed back into the fold. A dear friend, a lovely, talented poet and writer, had been telling me how he was an early part of the Tori flock, seeing her live before she drew big crowds, but that he’d lost touch with the music after Boys For Pele. He’s not on streaming or DL platforms, so I lent him Choirgirl, Venus and Scarlet. And the album that’s brought him back into a state of wondrous rapture? Scarlet! So much so, in fact, that he’s returned my copy and got one of his own on eBay (apparently the seller was advertising it bundled withScarlet’s Hidden Treasures, which has confused me slightly because I thought that Hidden Treasures was, at least in physical form, DVD-only, although I’m aware it’s on streaming now). In any case, I felt rather a glow at having helped reignite his love of this most extraordinary music. Like me, he has great affection for all the 1970s singer/songwriters and many of the groups, so I’m not surprised he responded so warmly to the album, which has so many echoes of that period, without ever being crassly derivative of it. Next up, I’ll pass him Beekeeper and Doll Posse and we’ll see what happens.
One thing I never anticipated about disability (ultra-quick recap: in 2012 I broke feet, ankles, back and one arm in a fall) is that good things no longer arrive intact. They come split. A friend asks me to the cinema: good. Also bad. The sitting will hurt. The journey will hurt. At some point, I’ll feel as though something inside me is being quietly finished off. Life is now an inversion of the expression “every cloud has a silver lining”. There is almost nothing that can be wholly good. I didn’t think about this as much until life got busier. I met a lovely woman in 2019 who lives a few streets away and who turned out to have a magazine background like me. We got chatting and within a few weeks I had over a year of copy editing/sub-editing for Vogue (their website – specifically the Suzy Menkes pieces that used to appear there). It gave me my confidence back, or at least a version of it. The local friend was so kind. I’d been out of the loop since the days of Quark Express and she gave me an InDesign crash course and I was off. And one thing led to another and life got busier (still not remotely busy by most people’s standards – but when you get two good hours a day, it takes very, very little for you to feel frantically busy). And then, inevitably, the other side asserted itself. The more I do, the more violently I collide with the stark reality of what I can’t do. That collision is always waiting for me. And as these collisions mount up, the effect on me is cumulative – it’s been well over 10 years. I’m absolutely done in. And I’ve seen the look – I don’t quite get it – often enough to know that explaining isn’t always worth it. Silence, at least, spares you unsolicited advice. Instead, I talk about it here. Strange that saying it into a void like this should feel safer than telling a confidante.
I got another round of being forcibly acquainted with my limitations when I did the Tori piece. One of the things I do to try to make an undertaking feasible is to start much earlier than someone else might. So I plugged away at trying to set this up well in advance, because it’s not good for me to work close to a deadline. I can only sit upright and get on with things with the help of an array of meds, including pregablin. And the last thing I want is to have to take more of it, which is what happens if I don’t spread tasks out over a broad span of time. And as much as I try to politely push to get myself that extra time, I tend not to explain why. I shudder at the thought of strutting about (figuratively – my actual strutting days are over) expecting the world to bend itself to accommodate my problems. Everyone has problems, and I’m not comfortable with the idea that mine deserve more help than anyone else’s. On this occasion, I wasn’t able to secure any of mitigations that make these jobs easier for me (lots of time; face to face; getting it out arranged early so that nothing need be done in a rush) and just had to make the best of it. But I’m not in that good a way at the moment. The latest interventions (including a spinal implant) have only left me worse – in more pain, more sluggish, more loss of libido (not strictly in the sexual sense – but in the ‘life force’ sense), more anxious. I’m not fond of the sensation of feeling like I’m gripping on to the world the way someone in a film grips onto a window ledge for dear life, as their legs swing in the wind and a terrible plummet, already being rehearsed in their mind, awaits them. Oh to feel solid ground beneath me.
That moaning aside, it’s been nothing short of joy going back through the Tori catalogue, rediscovering the utter beauty that is her music… something about it seems to have an ennobling effect on the human spirit, helping me keep a firm grip on that imaginary window ledge.
One final note (to self as much as anyone): I have a Tori Amos interview from around 2022 or thereabouts. It used to be on here until I lost content during an update. And it’s through-written, which is more my comfort zone, rather than Q&A format. I must set myself the task of excavating it from whatever box, draw or under-bed space it’s hiding in, scanning it and re-uploading it.
