Tori Amos @ Manchester Apollo, 6th sept

Tori Amos’ stage entrance is typical of everything you’d associate with the flame haired poster girl of idiosyncratic, sexually scathing, choir-girl rock. Sashaying out before the audience to the first strains of current album opener Give, she takes a humbled bow reminiscent of a middle-eastern priestess and writhes majestically before her piano. The performance sets a high precedent for the rest of the gig – the piece is terse and teasingly restrained, but alarmingly powerful nonetheless.

Straddling her piano (which, for the record, she plays with the intimacy of caressing an old lover – personifying the instrument in a manner which can be deliriously witnessed in a number of equally baffling interviews with the performer), she is torn into a near Christ-like disfigurement when she also reaches behind herself to play the synth at the same time, looking like a woman in the midst of a ménage-a-trois.

The opening of the set is quite spectacular in fact, with Caught a Little Sneeze and fan pleaser Cornflake Girl pared down into grimy and intimate dalliances of raw, intuitive passion – the likes of which Amos is celebrated for.

Sadly, the set grows weaker from here on in. There’s an unsettling arrogance to Amos at times which sees her grimacing at the audience with what appears to be a sinister sneer of delight, and she has a habit of addressing the end of a truly amazing song with a jester-like wave of her hands that smugly begs for more adoration than is particularly necessary.

Some songs, particularly those off Boys For Pele, which are undoubtably some of the best of her career, get lost in a meandering middle-of-the road monotony which endanger the middle of the set with a samey-lack-lustre quality – for a woman famed for her talent of the provocative and the damning, it’s a shame that she ends up wearing the same job-worthy expression of a woman darning a pair of socks. Even worse is when she attempts to overcome this mediocrity by grinding her crotch at the audience in the middle of a song and looks far too rewarded by the onslaught of wolf whistles that inevitably follow.

However, she does bring it back, with what is truly a heart-achingly brilliant version of Putting The Damage On, in which breathlessly repeats "Boy, you’re still pretty…" and manipulates her lean, red dress Jessica Rabbit figure to full effect for the cheekily suggestive The Power Of Orange Knickers.

But it’s Precious Things that truly saves the day. A veracious, heavy-as-fuck rendition of an already hard-hitting, bitter edged song – it’s as dramatic, enlivening and angry as it deserves to be heard and serves to demonstrate everything there is to love about Amos that was sadly missing for most of her performance tonight.