A man in a pub recently told me that Tori Amos is every bit as good as Kate Bush, but people can’t see it because they “don’t actually like her very much”. Perhaps he was on to something. If Bush admitted on Woman’s Hour, as Amos did last week, that she likes to dress up in thigh-high boots and a faux-fur gilet and stand among the cows in the rural Cornish idyll she shares with her husband and child, it would be in-keeping with everything that makes her so attractive. But it made poor old Tori sound like a kook, and not for the first time. For many she does not inspire romantic awe like Bush, but rather the kind of cool feeling we have towards Yoko Ono. Looking at the tiny woman on stage tonight in the turquoise pant suit and specs, a superfan tells me: “Every year she goes somewhere in the Amazon and sees this real shaman and takes all this LSD. She is a proper free spirit!” My first thought is: groo. But I wouldn’t think groo if Joni Mitchell did it, would I?

Amos is performing her new album Gold Dust at the Albert Hall, a classical re-working of her songs with the Dutch Metropole Orchestra and two pianos. On this hallowed stage 43 years ago Deep Purple premiered their bombastic Concerto For Group And Orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic. Rick Wakeman and fellow prog giant Keith Emerson have also swivelled here over the years, reaching between multiple keyboards, the latter – like Amos – thrusting his hips out in gestures of neo-classical confidence. Tori may not stick knives in her piano but she does have a habit of punching it triumphantly as each song ends – and shedding her long sheet music with a flourish, letting each page tumble on to the floor like the scarves of Scheherazade. I don’t know when I last saw this kind of behaviour from a “popstar” – though she’s not the only one to have reworked her songs with an orchestra recently; Peter Gabriel and Antony Hegarty have done the same. Like them, Amos strikes you as a bit of a “cold fish” – musical ambition on this scale is intimidating in the pop world, and hard to warm to. It shouldn’t really be so – she grins broadly tonight; she even starts the first piece, 1992’s Flying Dutchman, in a different key to the orchestra and realises after a minute or a so with a great big “fuck! I fucked it up again!”