Tori Amos, Albert Hall - review - Music - Arts

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At her first Albert Hall show since 1998 she did exactly that, aided only by an intermittently deployed string quartet and her trusty Bösendorfer.

Now 48 and having the off-kilter aura of Sarah Miles, Amos attired herself in a shapeless cape and the sort of skyscraper heels universally eschewed by pianists since wacky-era Elton John.

Yet beneath the silly veneer (wisely she kept her own counsel) and the tendency to meander which has stymied her career, when she attacked her piano on the haunting Beauty Queen and the atypically angular Cruel, she was a whirlwind of fingers, lost in music.

Selections from 1992's Little Earthquakes (especially a reupholstered Silent All These Years and a tingling, rawly emotional Winter) were a reminder of when it felt like Amos might be great instead of merely good, while a rare airing of her epic trawl through Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit showed her understanding of the song runs more deeply than Kurt Cobain.

After the pre-encores closer Cruel the hitherto stationary audience - which included her 11-year-old daughter Natashya - hurtled stagewards with the catharsis of those who had held their breath for 90 minutes. Tori Amos is a strange one to be sure, although perhaps entirely in the way she imagines ...

HMV Hammersmith Apollo tonight (0845 401 5045, hmvtickets.com)

Tori Amos