Suzanne at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

Two nights, two divas from America that I love so much but who couldn't have been more different.

Whereas Tori was all sound and fury, Suzanne was exactly how you would expect her to be in a live setting. Smallish intimate auditorium with quiet, civilised fans. She herself is cool, relaxed, chatty and funny - charming the audience with little stories of how she came to write the new songs on her album.

Her set was, unfortunately, a lot more predictable than Tori's. She performed the new songs from "Beauty and Crime", and then stuck with tried and tested classics like "Small Blue Thing" and "Luka" throughout with the same arrangements I had heard for two decades now. Don't get me wrong - stock standard Suzanne Vega is still brilliant. And after all these years, her voice still draws you in with that strange mix of intimacy and detachment, a sort of conspiratory tone really. Still, she managed to pull some surprises. I had never heard someone sing with just a bass guitar accompanying her, and this breathed new life into "Left of Center" and "Blood Makes Noise". And her last encore ("Penitent" and "Rosemary") gave a hint of just how powerful these hidden songs in her back catalogue are that never really get played live.

13 years after I watched these women in 1994, I got a rare chance to see them again in London. Tonight (with news of a death of a colleague and a colleague's grandfather in the same day) I wondered again when my next encounter with either of them will be. And suddenly, I felt the fleetingness of life - how Tori, Suzanne, myself, E., K.L. and all the people dear to me are just here now altogether and we don't have many chances really to get it right and make it work.

"Rosemary"
Suzanne Vega

Do you remember how you walked with me
down the street into the square?
How the women selling rosemary
pressed the branches to your chest,
promised luck and all the rest,
and put their fingers in your hair?

I had met you just the day before,
like an accident of fate,
in the window there behind your door.
How I wanted to break in
to that room beneath your skin,
but all that would have to wait.

In the Carmen of the Martyrs,
with the statues in the courtyard
whose heads and hands were taken,
in the burden of the sun;
I had come to meet you
with a question in my footsteps.
I was going up the hillside
and the journey just begun.

My sister says she never dreams at night
there are days when I know why;
those possibilities within her sight,
with no way of coming true.
Some things just don't get through
into this world , although they try.

In the Carmen of the Martyrs
with the statues in the courtyard
whose heads and hands were taken,
in the burden of the sun;
I had come to meet you
with a question in my footsteps.
I was going up the hillside
and the journey just begun.

All I know of you
is in my memory
All I ask is you
Remember me.

Tori at the Hammersmith Apollo

Ok, before I start, I need to blog about something really freaky. So I'm in London again, and on top of there being a bomb scare within an hour of my landing at Heathrow, HAIL fell from the sky today. At the very height of summer no less. I'm so freaked out I've resolved to help save the planet by raising my aircon temperature by 1 degree Celsius.

Now back to the topic of my post. Which is another music-related one. (Why nearly every single post on this blog is now music-related is the subject of another blog entry another day. It has to do with the fact that too many people have the address. Which when you think about it, IS one of the defining characteristics of success of a blog. Which of course means that my blog isn't being used by me for the right purpose.

Anyway. Back to the subject of this posting - the divine, incomparable Tori Amos.

I just returned from watching her at the Hammersmith Apollo, and she is now only the second artist I have watched live three times (the other is Everything But The Girl). I wasn't expecting much really, since her music has taken a turn in the past few years in a direction I cannot identify with anymore. Maybe she grew up, or I grew up. All I know was that after days of watching resale ticket prices on eBay, I decided to just go with standing tickets right at the back of the auditorium. If I get bored, it would be easier to get a drink from the bar, I thought.

Boy was I wrong. I last watched Tori in 1994, and before that in 1992. Nothing quite prepares you for the beauty of her voice when you hear it live. Even with her irritating tendency to mispronounce words ("because I'm emoting so much I can't even say the words right"), her voice rings out so clear and (yes!) emotes so much you only need to hear the words you know so well in your heart, not clear out loud. And she was clearly in the mood to entertain tonight - pulling out old favourites from her 2nd and 3rd albums mostly, adding clever and cunning variations to the arrangements. Plus she lost weight and she looks absolutely fabulous and insane in her different American Doll Posse outfits ("look I'm Tori, no I'm Isabel! No I'm Clyde!"). How to dislike her when halfway through "Black Dove", she stops singing and declares "I am totally fucking up this band" after forgetting the chords, and then launches into an impromptu made up children's song called "I think I've had a brain fart"?

The thing is, Tori's been one of those artists that has constantly been part of my life. I discovered her when I bought her first single "Me And A Gun" from Steve's Sounds in Leicester Square (it's still there!) and since then, so many of her songs have been the soundtrack to my life. She, of course, has like 500 songs and as she traversed her catalogue to pick out gems, there is that feeling of being transported back and forth through time. As she played her two saddest break-up songs tonight ("Putting The Damage On" and "Hey Jupiter"), I remembered how sorry I felt for her when the album they were on was released, and how sorry I felt for myself when my own break-up happened almost 7 years later.

But you know, things have a way of coming around in waves. And with her new album and tonight's performance, Tori Amos is becoming relevant to me all over again. Her finale for tonight was "Tear In Your Hand", one of her oldest and most familiar songs, which also happens to be E.'s favourite Tori song. E. is the only person I know that really shares my love for Tori and when she played that song, I just wanted so much for him to be there to hear it. Uselessly, I tried to record a snippet on my mobile phone, but I was too far away from the stage, and Tori at the piano was reduced to just a blur of pixelated bright light. I found myself praying that in this world where things can really change very quickly, that I would be able to see her a fourth time, and that E. and I would be there to see her together. For the world these days isn't so much about hearing Tori play the old songs, but having them cast in a different light.